admin

Lise Meitner – Nobel Prize Denied

In December of 1938, Lise Meitner received a letter from colleagues in Germany explaining their latest experimental results and questioning what these results could mean. For almost 30 years Lise had worked with Otto Hahn, and later Fritz Strassman, performing experiments related to radioactivity. Although she had begun as Hahn’s assistant without pay, their relationship had evolved to the point where she was the recognized expert in matters related to physics; Hahn was a chemist.

Lise’s nephew Otto Frisch was visiting for the holidays and together they discussed the letter she received. Researchers working on radioactivity had known for some time that one element could change into another, such as radium to polonium in Marie Curie’s experiments. But recently several researchers, when bombarding uranium with neutrons, had been finding elements with smaller atomic weights, almost half the atomic weight of uranium. At the time no one believed that the nucleus of an atom could be split. Hahn and Strassman’s research repeated this result. Meitner realized that this was exactly what was happening and that the power that would result from a chain reaction would be immense. Together she and Frisch worked out the mathematics and she conveyed the information to Neils Bohr who was on his way to the United States for a conference. And the rest as they say is history.

I knew this basic scenario when I began to read about Lise Meitner, but as usual there is more to the story. Lise Meitner was born in Vienna in 1878, the third of eight children born to Philipp and Hedwig Meitner. Philipp, a freethinker and humanist, was one of the first to become a lawyer in Vienna after the professions were opened up to Jews. Hedwig was an accomplished pianist. Their home was filled with music and interesting people. When asked about her childhood Lise remembered all “the unusual goodness of my parents, and the extraordinarily stimulating intellectual atmosphere in which my brothers and sisters and I grew up.”

The educational opportunities available to Lise were similar to those available to Emmy Noether in Germany; they consisted primarily of training that would enable a girl to become a good wife and mother. Public education ended for girls at age 14 and they were not admitted to the universities, so there were no secondary preparatory schools for girls. Lise wanted to study physics and her father agreed to pay for tutors if she would complete a teacher training course first. There were few employment opportunities for men or women in physics, and since Lise had shown little interest in marrying this would give her a way to support herself.

307px-Lise_Meitner12 — Lise Meitner in 1906

Lise studied constantly and by 1901 when Vienna allowed women to enter the university she was able to pass the entrance examinations at the age of 23. Over the next six years, she completed her doctorate in physics and published several papers related primarily to radioactivity. She also spent a year practice teaching French in a girl’s school to ensure a backup means of support. She was fortunate to study under Ludwig Boltzmann in Vienna. He was an inspiring lecturer and a proponent of atomic theory when it was still controversial. Unfortunately, he died in 1906, but he had inspired Lise to continue studying physics if at all possible.

Looking for a direction to go in her study, Lise applied to work with Marie Curie, but was rejected. In 1907, Max Planck in Berlin agreed to allow her to audit his lectures. Although Planck’s experiences with women in the sciences had been good, he wasn’t really in favor of it. He did, however, welcome Lise into his home where he had twin daughters her age. Here she would find friendship and music during her stay in Germany. One of the friends she made through Planck was Otto Hahn. Hahn was a chemist working on radiochemistry at Emil Fischer’s Chemistry Institute. He needed a physicist to work with and proposed this idea to Lise; she accepted and they began what would be a very productive working relationship.

Under conditions that will sound familiar if you’ve read my previous posts, Lise began working without pay as Hahn’s assistant at the Fischer Institute. The catch – Fischer didn’t allow women in his facility. (One reason was that he had the idea that women’s hair styles were a fire hazard.) He did “compromise” and let her work in a basement room which had been a carpentry shop and had an outside entrance; she was not allowed upstairs and had to use a toilet down the street. This meant that she couldn’t attend lectures or observe Hahn’s experiments. In spite of this, they published several papers together. In 1908, German universities were opened to women and she was finally allowed to enter the building (and they installed a toilet for women!)

183px-Otto_Hahn_und_Lise_Meitner — Meitner and Hahn in their laboratory

Hahn and Meitner worked well together. At first she was deferential to him, but over time she became the recognized leader of their partnership, in the area of physics. In 1912, they moved to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, a facility funded by German industrialists. She was still unpaid, but Planck was able to get her an assistant position grading papers at the University with a small salary. Because she was developing a good reputation, the University of Prague offered her a position of associate professor with the possibility for advancement. As a result the Institute finally decided to give her a salary, although at the time still less than Hahn, so she decided to remain in Germany. Finally in 1917, Meitner became the head of her own department of radiophysics at the Institute.

The 1920s and 30s were a “golden era” in physics and Meitner was a prominent part of that. Einstein referred to her as “our Madame Curie” and Wolfgang Paul, a 1989 Nobel Prize winner considered her “a really great scientist” and the superior of Hahn. During this time she and Hahn primarily worked apart, but in 1934, she began experiments that required the expertise of a chemist and Hahn agreed to collaborate again. A number of scientists, including Meitner and Hahn, Enrico Fermi, and Irene Joliot-Curie, began their experimentation with uranium.

800px-Solvay1933Large — Solvay Conference in 1933. Lise Meitner is the second from the right, seated. The other two women in the photo are Irene Joliot-Curie, seated second from the left, and Marie Curie, seated in the center.

Unfortunately, Lise wasn’t competing only with other physicists. In 1933, Jews such as Emmy Noether were expelled from university positions. Although Jewish, Meitner had been baptized a protestant and had an Austrian passport. This, and the fact that the Wilhelm Institute was not a government facility, gave her some protection. This ended however, when Hitler invaded Austria and the Institute was under increasing pressure even from within by Nazi-sympathizers. She now found herself with an invalid passport and a tenuous job. Friends abroad worked feverishly to find her a position and finally in 1938, she slipped over the border into the Netherlands with only a few possessions and moved on to take a position in Sweden.

Hahn and Meitner continued consulting via letter with one secret meeting in Copenhagen in November to plan experiments. These experiments resulted in the letter of December 1938, which she discussed with Otto Frisch. In the letter, Hahn does not draw conclusions and in fact questions the results. Meitner trusted Hahn’s results, he was an excellent chemist, and accepted the obvious conclusion, and that the atom had split. Hahn published his experimental results without drawing conclusions and without crediting Meitner, a move which she understood; he couldn’t officially collaborate with a Jew. She and Frisch published their conclusions soon after along with corroborating experimental results by Frisch. In their paper they coined the term fission to describe what had happened.

Meitner’s recognition of the principle of fission was momentous. When Frisch described the theory to Bohr, he slapped his head and said “Oh what idiots we’ve been.” Understanding the experimental results and knowing that the German’s had the information prompted action within the physics community and then the Allied governments. Meitner was eventually offered a position with the Manhattan Project, which she refused having no desire to work on a bomb.

Everyone in the physics community recognized what Lise had done. Although she wasn’t there for the final experimental results, she had originated the project, gathered the team, worked on it for almost 4 years, and interpreted the final results. Nevertheless, only months after publication Hahn began denying that Meitner had been an important part of the discovery at all. Then in 1944, the Nobel Committee voted secretly to give the Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Hahn, and Hahn alone, for the discovery of nuclear fission. No one disputed that Hahn deserved it, but everyone in the physics community knew that Meitner deserved a Nobel Prize as well.

Lise Meitner continued to work in Sweden until her retirement, when she moved to England to be near her relatives. In spite of the hurt of Hahn’s betrayal, and Lise’s intense criticism of the scientists who had collaborated with the Nazis, they remained friends. Her family didn’t inform her of Otto Hahn’s death in July of 1968 because of her frail condition, and she died later that year in October. Although denied the Nobel Prize, she led a very fruitful life with recognition from her peers and the love of family and friends. Her nephew Otto Frisch had her tombstone inscribed with the statement, “Lise Meitner: a physicist who never lost her humanity.”

Resources
Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics by Ruth Lewin Sime
Nobel Prize Women in Science by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking by William H. Cropper

Read about other Famous Women Mathematicians and Scientists.

Eleanor Roosevelt – A Late Bloomer

There are many biographies about her, multi-volume biographies, as well as biographies about her husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt which of necessity include her. I am certainly not an expert on her and there are people out there who are; people who have a better understanding of what motivated her to achieve the things she did. And she did achieve amazing things. But part of what I wanted to do when I started this blog was to write about women who inspire me. That doesn’t mean I always agree with them, but that I see something in their lives that I believe is of value and worth talking about. With Eleanor Roosevelt, I happen to agree with much of what she did and stood for.

Eleanor Roosevelt inspires me in many ways, and there are many lessons that we can learn from her life I’m sure, but one thing that I love about her is that she in some respects was a late bloomer, coming into her own power if you will after marriage and motherhood. She was a shy child born to parents who were a hit in society and the talk of the town. Her mother was a celebrated beauty and her father was the life of the party, but she wasn’t either of these things.

Eleanor’s father, Elliot Bulloch Roosevelt, was the younger brother of President Theodore Roosevelt. Both Roosevelt brothers, as well as their oldest sister, had health problems when they were young. Theodore is famous for pushing himself to overcome his problems, but Elliot’s were not as easily understood. He suffered from spells when the blood would rush to his head and he would have incredible pain; he also took “nerve medication.” These spells seemed to be worse when he was under stress and better when he was away from the family, or school, traveling. Despite his problems, the family was a loving one, full of fun and joy. Elliot embodied this with the force of his charming personality.

Eleanor’s mother, Anna Hall, was from a very different type of family. Her father was very religious and had little respect for his wife intellectually. He required submission and restricted the activities of the women, even to the point of having dresses brought to the house for them to try rather than allowing them to go out to buy their own clothes. He died when the children were all still at home, leaving Anna’s mother ill-equipped to deal with much in her life. Anna received little in the way of education that was not necessary for her to be successful in society. She was the oldest of six children and a celebrated beauty, but was reserved and somewhat cold.

At a young age Eleanor was aware that her mother was beautiful and that she was not. (Although, I think she is very pretty in the photo above.) She also believed that her mother tried so hard to instill in her good manners to compensate for her lack of beauty. A serious, shy, insecure girl, her mother called her “granny” because she said Eleanor was “old fashioned.” Her father on the other hand, was the light of her life. Unfortunately, he was away a good bit, either on alcoholic binges or in a sanitarium. This wasn’t the only grief in her life. Her mother died when Eleanor was eight and her father died when she was ten. She and her brother Hall went to live with their grandmother Hall and her aunts who were still at home. They were a family of society belles and Eleanor didn’t fit in well there either.

Elliott_Roosevelt_and_Children — Elliot Roosevelt with Eleanor and her two brothers Hall and Elliot Jr. Elliot Jr. died in 1893.

Eleanor’s life began to change at age 15 when she went abroad to the Allenswood Academy run by Marie Souvestre, a noted feminist who taught her charges to think independently. Allenswood was a finishing school and Eleanor gained confidence, but I think this is also where she began to learn lessons that would serve her later in life about her own worth and ability. When she returned she “came out” with all the society parties that coming out entailed, and soon met Franklin. He was charismatic and outgoing, the life of the party in a way similar to her father.

Franklin brought with him, however, a mother with very fixed ideas about things. Sara Delano Roosevelt was a second wife, born the same year as Franklin’s older half brother. When Franklin’s father died, he was all Sara had left and she invested all her energies in him. She was not in favor of the marriage, but Franklin had his way and he and Eleanor married when she was 20 and he 23. But to give you a taste of how it would be, while they were in Europe on their honeymoon, Sara bought them a house. It was a townhouse in New York City and might not have been so bad except that she owned the one next to it and there were sliding doors on every floor connecting the two.

Eleanor_roosevelt_&_sara_delano_roosevelt_1908 — Eleanor and Sara 1908

The relationship between Sara and Eleanor is complicated and debated among historians. Eleanor had six children between 1906 and 1916, and had little experience with children or running a household so in many ways Sara was a tremendous help to Eleanor, but it must have reinforced her feelings of inadequacy.

There are several things that helped Eleanor begin her transformation. In 1910, Franklin was elected to the New York State Senate. This took them to Albany away from Sara, and exposed Eleanor to more of the political life that she would later be so involved in. The second thing, in 1918, Eleanor discovered letters written to Franklin by Lucy Mercer, her personal secretary, exposing an ongoing affair between Lucy and Franklin. Although Eleanor had probably never had the emotionally intimate relationship she wanted with Franklin, this was devastating. She gave him the choice of a divorce, or ending the affair for good. He chose to stay in the marriage, but what intimacy they had in their marriage was gone.

Women so often just do what has to be done. They find the strength within themselves to go on. Eleanor did this after the affair and I’m sure there were many reasons for it – for the sake of the children, Franklin’s career, etc. But what I think inspires me the most is that she didn’t just carry on the status quo. When Franklin was stricken with polio in 1921 (although there is doubt now that it was polio), Eleanor rose to the occasion in a way that was truly above and beyond the call of duty. As might be expected she stood by him as he dealt with the disease both in the initial stages and over the years as he searched for a cure. But more than that, she worked tirelessly to keep his name in front of the public. Louis Howe, the man that had coached Franklin in the ways of politics, took on Eleanor and together they refused to let him be forgotten. She began to speak publicly and get involved in Democratic women’s organizations. She began to write and network. And it worked. Although Franklin remained marginally involved, he didn’t fully enter politics again until he was elected Governor of New York in 1929. And the rest as they say, is history.

In doing this work for Franklin, Eleanor came into her own. From this point on she would be involved in many ways, both as a helper to Franklin and in the name of causes which had become important to her over the years. She may have been a late bloomer, but she truly became a force to be reckoned with.

Many of you may know more about Eleanor than I do, or have a different perspective on her life. Please comment. I would love to hear your thoughts on this remarkable woman.

Resources
Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Private Papers by Joseph P. Lash
TR: The Last Romantic by H. W. Brands
Presidential Wives: An Anecdotal History by Paul F. Boller Jr.

Emmy Noether – Original in More Ways Than One

“Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.” ~ Albert Einstein

If you ask anyone to name a famous woman mathematician, the names that come to mind will usually be Hypatia, Ada Lovelace, Emilie du Chatelet, or Maria Agnesi, if they can name any at all. I must admit that these women were the ones who attracted my attention as well when I started reading the history of mathematics. Each of these has something that attracts us apart from mathematics: Hypatia’s brutal death, Ada’s famous father, Emilie’s famous lover, or Maria’s piety. Yet with each of these women there are debates about how much original work they actually did and how much was primarily building on the work of others. There is no doubt that they were all brilliant and deserve to be remembered, but there is one who undoubtedly did work that was so original that it changed the way we do mathematics and is virtually unknown outside of specialist circles: Emmy Noether.

Emmy Noether made groundbreaking contributions to theoretical physics and abstract algebra. She developed several formulations to support Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, in fact he wrote to David Hilbert, “You know that Frl. Noether is continually advising me in my projects and that it is really through her that I have become competent in the subject.” The principle behind Noether’s Theorem is foundational to quantum physics proving that the laws of physics are independent of time and space. And yes you can even blame her for “New Math,” her approach, just very, very, watered down. In spite of all of this, she worked almost her entire life without pay because she was a woman.

The facts of Emmy’s childhood are pretty normal for the time. She was born Amalie Emmy Noether on March 23, 1882, in Erlangen, Bavaria, the oldest of four children in a well-to-do Jewish family. Her mother, Ida Amalie Kaufmann, came from a wealthy family and her father was a well-respected Mathematics professor at the university in Erlangen. Emmy was the only girl and while her three brothers followed the traditional educational track for boys, she was schooled in music, religious instruction, language, child care, household management, etc. Girls were not admitted to universities in Germany, so there were no college-preparatory schools for them. When Emmy completed her instruction around age 15, she entered a teacher training program with the idea of teaching French and English. She did very well, except in her practical teaching skills.

Emmy was very likeable and easy to get along with. She was interested in mathematics, showed a definite aptitude for it, and was certainly exposed to it. One of her brothers went on to be a math professor and a good family friend Paul Gordon would be a very important mentor to Emmy in her early professional life. Her father was supportive and spent time with her teaching her mathematics even though it wasn’t part of her course of instruction. So why the teacher training? As a child Emmy was clever, friendly, and sociable, but she was also considered plain and ordinary. She spoke with a slight lisp, was near-sighted, and later in life would be described as loud and “heavy of build.” Emmy said herself that she didn’t have the patience to be a wife or mother, and she seemed to have little interest in clothes. Her mother may have expected Emmy to have to support herself, so she encouraged the teaching career.

Emmy passed her examinations to teach, but when she finished her course of instruction some of the university rules were being relaxed and she decided she wanted to study mathematics. Women still couldn’t officially enroll, but they could audit with the permission of the professor, so with the support of her father and Paul Gordon, she took classes over the next two years and prepared to take the university entrance exams. In 1903, she passed these exams and even though she still couldn’t officially enroll, she went to Göttingen to study mathematics. Göttingen had the leading math department in Germany led by Felix Klein, who was a proponent of admitting women to higher education. While there she met David Hilbert and was exposed to his work in abstract algebra. Hilbert is considered by some to be the greatest mathematician since Gauss, and he would later have a great impact on Emmy and her work.

Hilbert, considered by some to be the greatest mathematician since Gauss, was a proponent of admitting women to the university.

Emmy only spent one semester at Göttingen and returned home, possibly due to illness. During this time, the University at Erlangen had decided to admit women and Emmy officially enrolled as a student. Working closely with Paul Gordon, she completed her dissertation and in 1907 at the age of 25 was awarded highest honors. Over the next seven years, she worked at the university, writing papers, speaking abroad, and filling in for her father as his health declined, all without pay. The money wasn’t important to Emmy as long as she could do mathematics.

Emmy’s dissertation and Gordon’s style of work was very dense, full of many equations and calculations. Although, Emmy thought very highly of Gordon, she was not entirely happy with this approach, and she began to apply Hilbert’s abstract approach to algebra. She had written some very important papers already in her career, but this is where she would make her greatest contribution. In 1915, with the help of her father, she arranged to go back to Göttingen to study with Felix Klein and David Hilbert. It wasn’t long before Klein and Hilbert both felt that Emmy deserved a teaching position. They met with a lot of resistance. It wasn’t until 1919 that she was allowed to teach classes on her own, but it had to be as Hilbert’s assistant. The classes would be registered under Hilbert’s name, but Emmy would be the professor, and she still wouldn’t be paid. Fortunately, her mother’s brothers had set up a small trust fund for her, so she had some income. By 1923, she had gained more recognition and was granted a position with a small stipend.

Emmy had a unique teaching style. She had little patience with presenting established concepts, rather she would often work out her own research with the class. Needless to say many weren’t able to follow her, but the students who stuck with her were very loyal and were sometimes referred to as “Noether’s boys.” They would come to her house to discuss math and even when school was officially out, she would meet them at a local café for discussions. Gordon had often continued teaching during what he called “math walks” and Emmy adopted this style as well. One of her students from her time at Byrn Mawr in the 1930s said that they had to watch to keep her out of the streets or from running into things, because she would get so involved in talking about math. She had an enthusiastic style, often ending up disheveled by the end of class with her hair coming out of its pins.

Throughout the 1920s, Emmy established herself as one of the leading mathematicians in the new field of abstract algebra. At the same time, she contributed greatly to the work of others. There seemed to be no jealousy or resentment in her at all. In 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power, many Jews lost their positions at German universities. Emmy was one of the first six to be dismissed from Göttingen. Yet she continued to hold clandestine classes in her home for the students who would come. One of her favorite students Ernst Witt would come to her home in his Brownshirt uniform. As far as the university was concerned she had three strikes against her; she was a Jew, a liberal pacifist, and she was a woman. But for Emmy, it was all about the math, nothing else mattered. If someone wanted to learn or work with her she would do it.

After her dismissal from the university, her friends began to try to find her a position out of Germany. She initially wanted to go to Oxford, or Russia where her brother went, but finally ended up at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania in the United States. This also gave her the opportunity to lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton as well where Einstein was working. At the age of 51, she had her first real salary as a professor of mathematics. Her time here was good, but it was short. In 1935, Emmy went into the hospital for surgery to remove an ovarian cyst. The surgery appeared to go well, but four days later, her fever spiked and she lost consciousness. Emmy Noether died on April 14, 1935.

At her memorial, her close friend Hermann Weyl had the following to say about her:

“It was too easy for those who met her for the first time, or had no feeling for her creative power, to consider her queer and to make fun at her expense. She was heavy of build and loud of voice, and it was often not easy for one to get the floor in competitions with her. . . But she was a one-sided human being who was thrown out of balance by the over-weight of her mathematical talent . . . The memory of her work in science and of her personality among her fellows will not soon pass away. She was a great mathematician, the greatest, I firmly believe, that her sex has ever produced and a great woman.”

320px-Entrance_Bryn_Mawr — The entrance to Bryn Mawr, where Emmy spent the last year and half of her life.

Resources
Nobel Prize Women in Science by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
(Note: There is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics. Noether is included in this book because she contributed significantly to the mathematics involved in Einstein’s theories.)
Notable Women in Mathematics edited by Charlene Morrow and Teri Perl
Women in Mathematics by Lynn Osen
Women in Science: Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century by Marilyn Bailey Ogilivie

Dame is a Four Letter Word – an audio recording about the life of Ada Lovelace and Emmy Noether.

Read about other Famous Women Mathematicians and Scientists.

Lucy Stone (1818 – 1893) – Abolitionist and Suffragist

Lucy Stone c. 1850, Library of Congress (source)

Common causes often draw people together, but it’s not always sufficient to keep them together. Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony are often called the “triumvirate” of the women’s suffrage movement. All three were ardent abolitionists, and all three began speaking for women’s suffrage early in the movement. In many ways that’s where the similarities end.

Lucy Stone was born in 1818, the eighth of nine children to Francis and Hannah Matthews Stone. Unlike Stanton, she was not born into a family of means. Francis Stone owned a small farm in Massachusetts where everyone in the family had to contribute to survive. The boys fished and hunted; the girls made cheese and did piecework to help make ends meet. Francis was also a drinking man and one that believed firmly in a “woman’s place.” He was physically and verbally abusive and Hannah often had to beg him for money to get things for the girls. Where Stanton’s father wished she were a boy because he wanted a boy, Lucy’s mother wished she and her sisters were boys because “a woman’s life is so hard.”

Around the age of twelve Lucy took on much of the housework because of her mother’s ill health, yet she still managed to do well in school. In 1837, at the age of 16, she started to teach. Her dream was to go to Oberlin College. Her father paid for the boys to go to boarding school and then college, but he didn’t believe it was necessary for a woman. At this point, Lucy had probably begun to be a trial for her father. She saw her mother’s position as a trap in which she didn’t want to be caught. They were members of their local Congregationalist church which reinforced many of her father’s ideas. In 1838, the officials of the church condemned the use of the pulpit for abolitionist speeches particularly by women. The Grimke sisters from South Carolina and Abby Kelley had begun to speak against slavery to mixed groups of men and women. The church viewed this as a violation of what they saw as the Bible’s prohibition against women teaching men. Lucy decided two things then: that she would study Greek and Hebrew to better understand the Biblical passages and that if she ever had anything to speak about in public that she would do it.

Between 1838 and 1843, she continued to teach and study when she could. Two of her sisters died during this time and she helped with the children, supporting her mother. One thing that she did learn from her family was her hatred for slavery. She kept up with the fight by reading The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery newspaper, with particular interest in the divisions in the American Anti-Slavery Society caused by women speaking out. She wrote to her brother that some in the Society wanted to “crush Garrison and the women. While it pretends to endeavor to remove the yoke of bondage on account of color, it is actually summoning all its energies to rivet more and more firmly the chains that have always been fastened upon the neck of woman.” Later when she began to speak publicly for the abolitionist cause, she was criticized for injecting women’s rights issues into her speeches.

In 1843, Lucy had finally saved enough money for her first year at Oberlin. She continued to work and study and was able to graduate in 1847 with honors. (Her father also insisted that she compensate him for the money that she was denying the household by being away at college, which she did.) Although Oberlin was ahead of it’s time in many ways (they admitted both African American students and women), they were still constrained by the society in others. The student body selected Lucy to write a speech for the graduation ceremony. The catch was that she would not be able to deliver the speech because she was a woman and the audience would contain both men and women. After much thought, although she had decided to pursue a career as a public speaker, she chose not to write the speech rather than compromise her principles.

One thing that helped Lucy make her decision to pursue public speaking was her experience in a debate club that she founded while at school. During her time there, she met Antoinette Brown, a young woman who was studying to be a minister. While studying rhetoric, they were not allowed to debate in the class, you guessed it, because they were women and the class contained men. They were expected to watch the men debate and keep silent. So they started their own debate club off campus. Then in October of 1847, Lucy gave her first public speech called The Province of Women and her career began.

In 1848, Lucy was hired by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Philips as a lecturer and organizer for the Boston Anti-Slavery Society. In 1850, she worked with Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis and others to organize a national convention on women’s rights. At the convention her speech met with wide acclaim. She continued her speaking engagements and organizing activities for the next ten years, until the start of the Civil War when most of the women put their activities on hold to assist in the war effort.

Henry Blackwell c. 1850, Blackwell Family Paper at the Library of Congress (source)

Like Susan B. Anthony, Lucy had decided early in her life that she didn’t want to submit herself to the constraints of marriage. Unlike Anthony, she changed her mind. Henry Blackwell noticed Lucy during one of her speeches. He was immediately smitten and began to woo her, a process which took several years. If anyone could have won Lucy over it was Henry. He was raised in a family which strongly supported both the abolition of slavery and women’s rights. His one brother Samuel Blackwell had married Antoinette Brown, Lucy’s friend, who had become a minister as well as a prominent abolitionist and suffragist in her own right, and Henry’s five sisters had all opted to remain single and pursue careers of their own, the most prominent being Elizabeth Blackwell the first female doctor in the United States. Lucy and Henry were married in 1855. As part of the ceremony they read a “Marriage Protest” where they protested the laws which gave a husband control over a wife’s person and sole control and guardianship of the children. Needless to say the word “obey” was left out of the ceremony. Lucy continued her career as a speaker and continued to use her maiden name. She did take time off the lecture circuit when she gave birth to Alice Stone Blackwell in 1857 and throughout the years of the war.

Lucy with her daughter Alice, Library of Congress (source)

After the war, the differences between some of the primary leaders within the women’s movement began to emerge. The issues are multi-faceted and I may write a future post on them, but for now, there was a split within the movement in 1869. The argument arose primarily over whether or not to fight for suffrage for black men and women at the same time within one amendment, or to work toward the vote for all men and once that was achieved return to the issue of suffrage for women. The 15^th Amendment had passed in Congress in February ensuring that no citizen could be denied the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Stanton was incensed that it didn’t include the word sex and resorted to racist language that alienated many in the group. She refused to support ratification whereas the majority wanted to support ratification and propose an additional amendment for the suffrage of women. The final result was Stanton and Anthony’s withdrawal and formation of the National Woman Suffrage Association. Lucy Stone responded by creating another organization – the American Woman Suffrage Association.

Over the next 20 years Lucy and the AWSA continued to work for women’s suffrage focusing primarily on individual states. In 1870, she founded the Woman’s Journal, a newspaper that she would write for and publish for the rest of her life. At some point she realized that she was not going to see the women’s vote become a reality in her lifetime, but she had raised Alice to have the same values and knew that she would carry on the fight. She also spent time with Carrie Chapman Catt for the same purpose, preparing her to take up the mantle.

In 1890, the NWSA and the AWSA were finally reconciled, and in 1892, Lucy spoke before the House Judiciary Committee with Stanton and Anthony in support of women’s suffrage. Her last speech was in 1893 at the World’s Congress of Representative Women in Chicago where women from over 27 countries spoke to an audience of over 150,000 people in favor of women’s rights. She died later that year.

When Stanton and Anthony began their History of Woman Suffrage, Lucy was still in disagreement with them and chose not to send a biographical sketch for inclusion. For this reason she is not represented to the degree that she probably should be. But in recent years, her tremendous contributions to the advancement of women’s rights have received more attention. She was truly one of the founders of the women’s rights movement in the United States.

Resources
History of Woman Suffrage by Elizabeth Cady Stanton et. al. (6 volume work)
Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists by Jean H. Baker
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 – 1902)
Susan B. Anthony (1820 – 1906)

Ada Byron Lovelace – “Enchantress of Numbers”

Ada Lovelace by Alfred Edward Chalon (source)

Often women in the 18^th and 19^th centuries overcame significant odds to study mathematics or science, but as with every rule there is the exception. Ada Byron Lovelace is one of those exceptions. In Ada’s case, not only did she have a parent who approved of her interest, but one who pushed her to develop that interest; and it wasn’t her father who pushed her, but her mother.

Augusta Ada Byron, born December 10, 1815, was the daughter of Annabella Milbanke and the poet Lord Byron. The marriage was short-lived and Ada never got to know her father. Only a few weeks after her birth, Lord Byron left England and went to the continent, her mother made the separation official and took custody of Ada, something that was unusual for the time. Annabella was well-educated with a particular interest in mathematics and was determined that her daughter would be as well. (Lord Byron referred to Annabella as “princess of parallelograms” and later as the “Mathematical Medea,” which may give us a feel for her expertise in math, but also their relationship.) She researched the best education techniques and obtained the best tutors for Ada. Because they were of the aristocracy (in 1856, Annabella became Baroness Wentworth in her own right,) Ada also had access to some of the best intellectual minds of the time; including Mary Somerville, Augustus De Morgan., Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens, William Frend, Charles Wheatstone, and Woronzow Greig.

Annabella was a domineering mother. Some say that she wanted to suppress any tendency that Ada might have toward the mental instability of her father, so she insisted on strict lessons focused on rational pursuits and the avoidance of any romantic subjects such as poetry. (One anecdote says that Annabella fired a tutor for giving her daughter too much geography and not enough math.) Although Ada’s mother may have pushed her, Ada did have the talent for mathematics. Even though she was often ill as a child, suffering from blinding headaches and a period of paralysis, she worked hard to achieve the goals her mother set for her. De Morgan once wrote to Annabella that Ada had the capacity to become “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence.” Of course, he proceeded this by saying “if she were a man entering university.”

In 1833, Ada entered London society and was introduced at court to King William IV and Queen Adelaide. During one of the many social events they attended during the year, Ada and her mother were introduced to Charles Babbage, a noted mathematician and inventor of the Difference Machine. During that time astronomical tables were created by giving the calculations to two people (often women) and then comparing the results for discrepancies. Once when going over some of these calculations with Sir William Herschel, the astronomer, and finding many mistakes, he declared that he wished the calculations could be done “by steam,” meaning by machine. Babbage went on to design such a machine which he called the Difference Machine, so when Ada and her mother met him they were both very interested in learning more about it. They arranged to go see a prototype that Babbage had built and Ada asked to see the blueprints. For whatever reason, Babbage agreed to show this teenaged girl and her mother his plans, and a life-long friendship and collaboration was born.

Ada Lovelace by Margaret Sarah Carpenter (source)

As much as she enjoyed it, mathematics didn’t interfere with Ada’s social life and in 1835 she married William King who would become the Earl of Lovelace in 1838. They had several large homes, lived well, some might say too well, and had three children: Byron (1836), Anne Isabella (1837), and Ralph Gordon (1839). Ada doesn’t seem to have had much to do with her children; in fact her mother seems to have had more to do with their upbringing than she did. Certainly after Ada became sick and died, her mother directed the education of the children. King was supportive of Ada’s continued work in mathematics and from the time she met Babbage in 1833 until around 1842, she continued studying mathematics and corresponding with the best mathematicians of the day, including Babbage.

Analyzing the personality of a historical person is difficult and a number of different things have been said of Ada; that she was a hard drinking gambler; she inherited her father’s mental instability; and that she led a rather boring life, except of course for the rather long horseback rides with a man from a neighboring estate! What does seem clear from her letters is that she had fluctuating moods and that she did go to the horse races. However, over the course of William’s life he sold off many of his estates and by the end of his life was borrowing money. Considering he lived much longer than Ada, it seems likely that he was the primary source of the gambling debt, although Ada may have contributed to it. I’m not sure about the drinking, but Ada died of what is believed to have been uterine cancer, so for the last several years of her life she surely would have been prescribed laudanum (an opiate) for pain.

Babbage meanwhile, received financial support for building his Difference Machine, but had instead designed a more complex machine, the Analytical Engine. Where the Difference Machine could only perform basic addition and subtraction, the Analytical Engine could perform many more calculations, basically the equivalent of a modern day calculator. It is the earliest design of its kind that we are aware of and quite remarkable for its time. In 1842, Babbage was persuaded to give a lecture on the Analytical Engine at the University of Turin. One of the attendees, Luigi Menabrea, an engineer and the future prime minister of Italy, wrote a paper on the Engine and published it in a Swiss Journal, in French of course.

After Menabrea’s paper was published, Babbage asked Ada to translate it into English. At Babbage’s suggestion, Ada added notes to the paper explaining the concepts in more detail and adding information. The resulting paper was three times as long as the original and was well received. Included in the notes is an algorithm, a sequence of steps, which would allow the engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers, a series of numbers used in various branches of mathematics. Today we would call this a computer program, which is why Ada is often called the world’s first computer programmer. There is some controversy surrounding this, however. Many people believe that Ada was not the originator of the algorithm; that Babbage, in fact, wrote all the mathematics contained within the paper. She and Babbage were close friends and corresponded on a regular basis often multiple times during the day, so it is sometimes difficult to determine. He seems to have thought highly of her and referred to her as an “enchantress of numbers.”

Ada did contribute something that is significant and was acknowledged by Babbage to be her idea. She envisioned the machine being used to produce music. She was familiar with the Jacquard loom, which used punch cards similar to the Analytical Engine to produce complex patterns in weaving. Ada reasoned that if numbers could represent other things such as frequencies, that the engine could be programmed to produce frequencies in a particular way and produce music. This idea of using numbers to represent other things or as symbols was ahead of her time and prophetic of our present day computers.

Unfortunately, the paper on the Analytical Engine would be Ada’s crowning achievement. She died on November 27, 1852 at the age of 36 from what seems to have been a type of uterine cancer. Her mother came to take charge preventing any of her friends from seeing her in the last months of her life, including Charles Babbage. At her request, she was buried beside her father. Many mathematicians do their best work at an early age, but Mary Somerville, one of Ada’s mentors, began doing her best work in her 40s, so who knows what Ada might have achieved had she lived.

Learn about other Famous Women in Mathematics and Science.

Resources
Notable Women in Mathematics edited by Charlene Morrow and Teri Perl
Women in Science: Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century by Marilyn Bailey Ogilivie
Pictures of Babbage’s Difference Machine at the Computer History Museum in CA and a short NPR piece.

BBC show “In Our Time” – Melvyn Bragg with Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor at Clare College, Cambridge; Doron Swade, Visiting Professor in the History of Computing at Portsmouth University; John Fuegi, Visiting Professor in Biography at Kingston University.

Dame is a Four Letter Word – an audio recording about the life of Ada Lovelace

Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage by L. F. Menabrea – this is the translation of Menebrea’s paper with Ada’s notes.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary – Blazing the Trail for Women

Mary Ann Shadd, National Archives of Canada (source)

Not very many people accomplish as much as Mary Ann Shadd Cary did in her life, much less blaze a trail to do it. She has many “firsts” to her credit: first African American woman publisher in North America, first woman publisher in Canada, first woman to enroll in Howard University, first woman to graduate from Howard with a law degree (sort of, more to come) and only the second African American woman to practice law in the United States, at 60 years old no less! She was even commissioned by the governor of Indiana to recruit black soldiers to the Union army, the only woman to hold this position.

Mary Ann Shadd was born free in Delaware on October 9, 1823, to Abraham and Harriet Parnell Shadd, the oldest of their 13 children. Her father was a prosperous boot manufacturer and her mother a woman who wanted her children to be educated. Delaware was a slave state and it was illegal to educate black children, so when Mary was 10, the family moved to West Chester, Pennsylvania where she enrolled in a Quaker school. After graduating at 16, Mary began a career in teaching. For ten years, she taught in schools in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and amazingly returned to Wilmington Delaware to open a school for black children. It was partly through her efforts that Wilmington began to make provisions for educating free black children in 1844.

During her childhood, her parents were actively involved with many prominent abolitionists. In the 1830s and 40s, her father helped lead a series of conventions led by black leaders, and when the time came they were also involved in the Underground Railroad. This was risky enough, but when the Fugitive Slave Law passed in 1850, it became even more dangerous. Even the northern non-slave states were no longer safe, and, it wasn’t only escaped slaves who were at risk. Freed slaves and free-born blacks were at risk as well. In a time where civil rights were non-existent for African-Americans, the law wasn’t much help, so many free blacks as well as escaped slaves moved to the safety of Canada. Mary Ann Shadd was one of these.

In 1851, Mary and one of her brothers moved to Windsor, Ontario, after meeting Henry Bibb and his wife at the Convention of Colored Freeman in Toronto. In Windsor, she opened a school for fugitive slaves with assistance from the American Missionary Association and eventually brought the rest of her family to join them. Mary became active in the community and began to write and promote Canada to other blacks in the United States, both slave and free. Her first published pamphlet was Notes on Canada West, and it described the virtues of Canadian living. Canada had abolished slavery in 1833 and had no agreement with the United States to extradite escaped slaves. In her book Homespun Heroines, Hallie Brown recounts an incident where a young boy, pursued by slave hunters, was captured and about to be carried off when Mary “tore the boy from the slave hunters, ran to the court-house and had the bell rung so violently that the whole town was soon aroused. Mrs. Cary with her commanding form, piercing eyes, and stirring voice soon had the people as indignant as herself–denouncing in no uncertain terms the outrage perpetrated under the British flag and demanded that these man-hunters be driven from their midst.”

She definitely was not shy. In fact, she had substantial disagreements with some of the other residents of Windsor, in particular Henry Bibb, the publisher of a newspaper called The Voice of the Fugitive. When Mary moved to Windsor, she established a racially integrated school. She believed that blacks must fight for equality and integration into society, and that self-segregation would hinder the fight. Not everyone agreed, and she came under attack by Henry Bibb in his newspaper. Rather than just defending herself, she started her own newspaper, The Provincial Freeman. She had the help of Samuel Ringgold Ward, a newspaper man in his own right, who agreed to be the editor, but it seems likely that he was editor primarily in name only and that Mary was the driving force and primary writer and editor for the paper. The Provincial Freeman gave Mary a way to get her message out about the advantages of moving to Canada, but also about other causes important to her such as women’s rights.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary House in Washington DC (source)

Financing was difficult, and they published the paper off and on between 1853 and 1859. Mary spent a good deal of time traveling back in the United States, distributing her pamphlets, extolling the virtues of Canada, and raising money to keep the paper going. This was a challenge, because in 1856 she married Thomas Cary. Thomas was a barber with three children, but it seemed to work well for them even though she was often away. She and Thomas were both still very involved in the abolitionist cause and in 1858 attended John Brown’s Constitutional Convention. They were friends with Osborne Perry Anderson, the only surviving African-American member of the raiding party, and Mary later helped him prepare his memoir, A Voice From Harper’s Ferry, for publication in 1861.

Mary and Thomas had two children Sarah and Linton, but Thomas died while Mary was pregnant with Linton and she found herself in a position of having to support two young children and three teenagers. She continued teaching, but wanting to be of service to the war effort, she returned to the United States. In 1863, President Lincoln called for volunteers and Mary as always wanted to be of service, so she was commissioned by Levi P. Morton, the governor of Indiana, to recruit black soldiers for the Union army.

At the end of the war, Mary had a decision to make. Although she considered life in Canada a good option, she decided to remain in the United States to help in the assimilation of the newly freed slaves. A strong believer in self-determination, and believing in the importance of education for this purpose, she obtained a US teacher’s certificate and relocated in 1868 to Washington, D. C. She eventually became a principal in the D.C. public schools and enrolled in Howard University.

There seem to be different accounts of her graduation and acceptance to the District of Columbia Bar, one stating that she was the first black woman to become a lawyer in the US and others say she was the second. Mary Ann Shadd Cary is on the roles of the senior class of 1870 at Howard; however, it appears that she was refused her law degree because she was a woman. In the meantime, Charlotte E. Ray graduated in 1872 and was admitted to the bar in Washington D.C. under the name C. E. Ray. (I’m sure the assumption was that C. E. Ray was a man!) So Charlotte Ray became the first black woman lawyer in the US and Mary was awarded her law degree in 1883.

Mary was a strong believer in self-determination whether black or white, male or female. So while her primary work was as an abolitionist and in education, she was also involved in the suffrage movement. During her years in Washington D. C. she continued writing, joined the National Woman Suffrage Association, working with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. She also founded the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise in 1880 to work toward equal rights for women.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary continued to speak and write as long as she was able. She died on June 5, 1893, having blazed a trail for women both black and white. As a teacher, writer, publisher, speaker, in the cause of abolition and equal rights for women she was truly an amazing woman!

Resources
Mary Anne Shadd Cary: Abolitionist by Adrienne Shadd
Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction ed. Hallie O. Brown

Elizabeth Cady Stanton – Suffragist and Women’s Rights Activist

In many ways, Elizabeth Cady Stanton provided the philosophical bedrock for the women’s movement in the United States. She is known for fighting for women’s suffrage, but she never lost sight of the bigger picture of women’s rights or other reform issues. Throughout her long life she would concern herself with such things as the abolition of slavery, the right for married women to own property, birth control, custody for mothers, education for girls, and relief for suffering families after the Civil War. Her overriding concern was that all individuals have the right of self-determination and should be allowed to have all the tools necessary to do this.

Elizabeth, born on November 12, 1815, was the eighth of eleven children born to Daniel Cady and Margaret Livingston Cady. Only she and four sisters survived well into adulthood. After years of miscarriages and exhausted by childbirth, Margaret retreated to her bed in ill health, possibly to avoid any more attempts at having a boy. After menopause, she recovered her health to a degree that Elizabeth’s children remember their grandmother as fun and affectionate. In the meantime, Elizabeth was often cared for by her older sister Tryphena and her husband Edward Bayard.

It’s not uncommon for a daughter to fill the place of a son when there aren’t any boys in the family. Elizabeth Cady had the interests and mental capability to be like a son to her father, to share his intellectual interests and pastimes. She was an accomplished horsewoman, and excelled in mathematics, Latin and Greek and could play chess. She once took a young man who came to read law with her father on a 10 miles ride that left him exhausted. But in Elizabeth’s father’s eyes it wasn’t enough. At the age of eleven when her only brother (Eleazar, aged 20) died, she climbed into her father’s lap to comfort him and he said, “Oh daughter, I wish you were a boy.” As hard as she tried, she always felt inadequate simply because she was a girl and unable to take Eleazar’s place.

Elizabeth's father the Hon. Daniel Cady c. 1835 (source) — Elizabeth’s father the Hon. Daniel Cady c. 1835 (source)

Elizabeth’s father was a prominent attorney who served one term in Congress and later became a judge. As a young girl, Elizabeth would often sit quietly in her father’s office and listen to the women who came seeking help in legal matters. She became aware at an early age of the great disadvantage of women in the legal system. Her brother-in-law, Edward who studied with her father, would tease her by reading the most egregious laws and Bible passages pertaining to women. At that time, women had virtually no legal rights; they couldn’t own property, in fact any property they inherited became the property of their husbands when they married to do with as he saw fit; wages they earned became the property of their husbands; they had no custody rights; in fact they were the property of their husbands. This struck Elizabeth as unfair, in fact as a young girl she marked the worst passages in her father’s law books and planned to cut them out, but a friend revealed her plan and her father explained to her that it wouldn’t make any difference, the laws would still exist.

Growing up Elizabeth attended Johnstown academy. Working to earn her father’s love she excelled and received many honors, often out performing the boys in her classes. In spite of this, when it was time for the boys to go on to Union College, she couldn’t. They didn’t admit women. Once again, the system seemed unfair to Elizabeth. Although her father considered the subjects she excelled at unfeminine, she was encouraged intellectually by a neighbor, the Rev. Simon Hosack and at Edward’s urging, Judge Cady did agree to send her to the Troy Female Seminary where she learned subjects more “appropriate” for a young woman, such as music, dancing and French. This did little to instill in her a liking for these subjects. In fact, she particularly disliked sewing, calling the needle “that one-eyed demon of destruction that slays thousands annually; that evil genius of our sex, which, in spite of all our devotion, will never make us healthy, wealthy, or wise.”

After graduating from school, Elizabeth spent time in the Bayard’s home and that of her cousin Gerrit Smith a prominent abolitionist. There she made the acquaintance of Henry Brewster Stanton a young attorney who also supported the abolitionist cause. Over the years Edward’s teasing had become affection, but Elizabeth had no desire to betray her sister, so when Henry Stanton proposed marriage to her, she accepted. Edward tried to intervene by disparaging Stanton to Elizabeth’s father who was not a staunch abolitionist, and she was convinced to break off the engagement. But, Henry was persistent.

In 1840, Henry was planning to go to England to attend the first world slavery convention. He told Elizabeth that he would be gone for 8 months and asked her again to marry him. She accepted and within a few days they were married and on their way to England. Their experiences there would set the stage for the beginnings of the suffrage movement in America.

Elizabeth and Henry arrived in London with some of the most well-known abolitionists in the United States: James and Lucretia Mott, Wendell Phillips, and William Lloyd Garrison. When they reached the convention they were told that women were not allowed to participate; even though Lucretia was an official delegate, the women couldn’t speak or vote. In fact, they had to sit in a partitioned off space away from the men. They were outraged. William Lloyd Garrison was so incensed that he refused to participate and sat with the women. In spite of this, the situation gave Elizabeth the opportunity to get to know Lucretia Mott who would be an important mentor to her in her reform activities.

Stanton with sons Daniel and Henry c. 1848 (source)

Once Elizabeth and Henry returned from England they moved in with the Cady’s for a time while Henry read law with Judge Cady. They then moved to Boston. In Boston, Elizabeth thrived in the social and intellectual climate, but that changed when they moved to Seneca Falls in 1847. It wasn’t long before she began to feel an intense “mental hunger.” Elizabeth was an excellent mother and housekeeper. In a time when the infant mortality rate was around 50%, she raised seven children to adulthood, having her children with midwives rather than doctors, using homeopathic medicines and sticking to a strict healthy diet. But, this wasn’t enough for her, so when she met with Lucretia Mott and three other women in the summer of 1848, she was ready to campaign for a cause – women’s rights.

In July of 1848, at the Seneca Falls Woman’s Convention, 100 of the 300 attendees signed the Declaration of Sentiments which had been written by Stanton: 68 women and 32 men. Among these were Daniel Anthony, his wife Lucy and his daughter Mary. His daughter Susan B. Anthony was away at college, but would make the acquaintance of Elizabeth soon after the convention, beginning a friendship and partnership that would last for the rest of their lives.

Initially, Susan and Elizabeth worked in the temperance movement together, but soon women’s rights and suffrage in particular took up most of their time. Their skills complemented each other. Elizabeth took speaking engagements, but was more restricted to the homefront, while Susan, who remained single, had the freedom to travel. Elizabeth was the better writer and wrote many of Susan’s speeches, where Susan, as Elizabeth said, “was the better critic. She supplies facts and statistics, I the philosophy and rhetoric.” Together they worked on the expansion of the 1848 Women’s Property Act, giving women more legal rights, and when the Civil War began, as many women did, they set their political concerns aside to found the Loyal League for the purpose of relieving the suffering of families whose men were fighting.

Stanton with Susan B. Anthony c. 1900, Library of Congress digital ID cph.3a02558 (source)

Elizabeth worked hard with all the abolitionists toward passage of the 13^th Amendment gathering signatures and campaigning to ensure its passage in 1865, but when discussion of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments began there were disagreements. The question was whether to fight for suffrage for African-American men first and then for women, or to fight for both at the same time. With Andrew Johnson in the White House, the situation for freed slaves was desperate in many ways. Southern states were passing laws making life very difficult, such as the law that would require the arrest of any black man without a job. In one incident in Memphis TN, in May of 1866, when former black Union soldiers were discharged and ordered to turn in their arms, former confederate soldiers attacked a large community targeting hospitals and schools run by the Freedmen’s Bureau. The riot which lasted for 2 days before federal troops could arrive resulted in the deaths of 46 black men, women, and children, 285 maimed, and over $100,000 worth of damage to property owned by African-Americans. There were no deaths or injuries of white people, and no one was arrested.

Elizabeth and Susan wanted suffrage for black men, but they wanted it for women at the same time. They wanted the removal of the word male in the amendments, making them applicable to all citizens, but many of the prominent men and some women were afraid that the inclusion of women in the right to vote would result in the defeat of the amendments. The 14^th Amendment was presented and passed with the word male included. When work began on the 15^th Amendment, the disagreement caused a major split among women and their supporters resulting in the formation of two separate organizations: the National Woman Suffrage Association founded by Stanton and Anthony, joined by Sojourner Truth and Matilda Joslyn Gage, and the American Woman Suffrage Association which included Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Julia Ward Howe, among others.

Over the next 20 years, Elizabeth and Susan would work together publishing a weekly paper, Revolution, with articles covering a wide range of women’s issues. They would tour the country speaking, work toward suffrage in various states, and write. When it was proposed that the two Women’s Suffrage organizations merge in 1890, Stanton was opposed. Many of the more conservative and religious women had distanced themselves from her over the years. In spite of this she was elected the first president of the new National American Woman Suffrage Association.

In many ways Elizabeth became even more radical over the years, supporting divorce rights, birth control, employment rights, and even interracial marriage, issues that more religiously conservative women didn’t want to get involved in. She also created intense controversy when she wrote The Woman’s Bible, a reinterpretation of the Bible from a feminist perspective. This and the fact that Anthony actively mentored younger women in the movement, may have contributed to the fact that Susan B. Anthony came to be seen as the founder of the movement. In recent years though, Elizabeth Cady Stanton has been recognized more and has reemerged in many ways as the Mother of the Suffrage movement.

Stanton, Carrie Chapman Catt and Lucretia Mott on a 1948 stamp commemorating 100 years since the Seneca Falls Convention (source)

After her death on October 26, 1902, Susan B. Anthony was asked about their relationship and the movement.

“Through the early days, when the world was against us, we stood together. Mrs. Stanton was always a courageous woman, a leader of thought and new movements. I always called her the philosopher and statesman of our movement.”

Some of her writings include
History of Woman Suffrage; Volumes 1–3 (written with Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage; vol 4–6 completed by other authors, including Anthony, Gage, and Ida Harper) (1881–1922)
The Woman’s Bible (1895, 1898)
Eighty Years & More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (1898)
Solitude of Self – originally delivered as a speech and considered by some to be the best thing she wrote.

Read Solitude of Self

Resources
Along with Stanton’s own works, you might be interested in these.
New York Times Obituary for Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull by Barbara Goldsmith

Ship Commanders, Nuns, and Boxers

I recently posted about Molly Kool, the first North American female sea captain. Today the BBC News announced that Sarah West will become the Royal Navy’s first woman warship commander with the HMS Portland in Scotland. In addition, Royal Navy Commander Sue Moore recently became the first woman to command a squadron of minor war vessels, the First Patrol Boat Squadron. Women first went to sea with the Royal Navy in 1990 and will join men in submarines in 2013.

More “first” women in the News

Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century German, was the first woman to be recognized as a prophetess by the Roman Catholic Church. Hildegard has inspired both church leaders and feminists for years. Although, she has been considered a saint for centuries, she has now been officially recognized as a saint by Pope Benedict XVI.

Kateri Tekakwitha (1656 – 1680) was the first Native American to be venerated by the Roman Catholic Church and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980. Pope Benedict XVI has set Oct, 21 as the date to make her a saint along with Mother Marianne Cope who cared for leprosy patients in Hawaii for many years.

The Aligarh Muslim University in India, has elected S Chandni Bi, assistant professor of history, to the executive council of the AMUTA (Aligarh Muslim Unversity Teachers Association). She is the first woman elected to this position and her election was unopposed.

When Marlen Esparza defeated Luu Thi Duyen of Vietnam in the Women’s World Championships on May 15, she became the first female boxer to qualify for the US Olympic boxing team. “It’s a big step — not really just for boxing, but for women in general,” Esparza told 713News, ” it’s just an honor, first of all, to represent your country. It’s an even bigger honor to be the first in that position and also being female.”

Women are still making history! Do you know of other women who are first in their field? Please comment and let us know.

Molly Kool – First Certified North American Female Sea Captain

Myrtle ‘Molly’ Kool (February 23, 1916 – February 25, 2009), a Canadian and North America’s First Certified Female Sea Captain.

Molly’s boat collided with another ship in the dense fog. Falling overboard, she grabbed a piece of floating timber to keep afloat. Passengers from the boat began to throw life preservers at her. Her response? “Stop throwing useless things at me, send a boat!” This is a story often told about Molly Kool to demonstrate her courage and presence of mind. Sometimes described as “frivolous and pretty” on land, she earned the respect of her crew, doing any and every job necessary from repairing engines to sewing canvas and splicing rope

Myrtle Kool, known as Molly, was the second of five children born to Myrtle Anderson and Paul Kool, at Alma, New Brunswick in 1916. Paul Kool was a Dutch sea captain who sailed his scow the Jean K between ships anchored at sea and the shore from Alma on Fundy Bay as far south as Boston. Although, his boat was named after his oldest daughter, Molly was the one who took to the sea spending as much time on board with her father as she could.

Wanting to make her career on the sea, she applied to the Merchant Marine school in St. John, New Brunswick. She was turned down, but persevered and in 1937 earned a mate’s certificate. Two years later in 1939, she earned a Coastal Master’s Certificate at the Merchant Marine Institute in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, making her the first woman in North America to become a certified Captain. (They had to amend the Canadian Shipping Act to include the word “she.”) Molly was also only the second woman in the world to achieve this standing, the first being Anna Shchetinina of the Soviet Union just a few years earlier.

Molly’s father turned the Jean K over to her and for five years she sailed some of the roughest seas in the world. In addition to the rough tides at Fundy Bay, she navigated through drift ice, snow, fog, and gale force winds to carry her cargo, most often paper and pulp products.

In 1944, while waiting on repairs after a gas explosion, Molly married Ray Blaisdell and decided to retire from the sea. She and Blaisdell lived in Maine for the next 20 years before Blaisdell’s death, where she sold Singer sewing machines and sailed for pleasure rather than profit. At some point in the 1960s, she married John Carney.

Molly Kool died of pneumonia on February 25, 2009 at the age of 93. She lived a long life, but in 2003 when the “Molly Kool”, named in her honor, was launched she was still able to give the captain instructions on sailing the boat. A monument to her accomplishments has been erected near the wharf at Alma.

Can you think of other female “firsts.” Let us know.

Anti-suffrage Cartoons

Once the suffrage movement got going, it met with fierce resistance in some circles. These women were ridiculed and reviled, portrayed as neglecting their homes, as “unsexed” bitter women, or just simply ridiculous. Here are a few cartoons meant to convince people that if women won the right to vote, it would be a disaster.

“It is time that the women who are opposed to the concession of the parliamentary franchise to women should make themselves fully and widely heard. The matter is urgent. Unless those who hold that the success of the women’s suffrage movement would bring disaster upon England are prepared to take immediate and effective action, judgement may go by default and our country drift towards a momentous revolution, both social and political, before it has realised the dangers involved.” Manifesto of the Anti-Suffrage League 1908

Surely, women couldn’t keep up with their housework AND vote!

The argument that empowering women automatically meant dis-empowering men.

I guess marriage would have “tamed” them.

Considering several prominent suffragists were involved in the free love movement, this doesn’t really hold water.

Women such as Fanny Wright and Anna Dickinson were eloquent and gifted speakers.

Being pro-woman doesn’t mean being anti-man, although some people would like you to think that.

Regardless of what many people want, time moves on and we will never be crammed back into our “grandmother’s pattern.”

The Anti’s Alphabet

The Woman’s Protest, an anti-suffrage newspaper, published this “Anti’s Alphabet” in August, 1912.

A is for Antis with Banner afloat;
B is for Battle against woman’s vote.
C is for Children we fight to protect;
D is for Duties we never neglect.
E is for Energy strengthened by hope.
F is for Folly with which we must cope.
G is the germ of unrest in the brain.
H is for Home, which we mean to maintain.
I is Insurgency now in the air;
J is calm Judgement we’re bringing to bear.
K is for Knights, our American men;
L, Loyal Service far out of our ken.
M is for Might in our cause to prevail;
N, Noble standards that naught can assail.
O, Obligations we cannot ignore;
P is for Principle marching before.
Q is the Quibble which we must combat;
R is for Reason that answers it pat.
S is Sound Sense, which we have on our side;
T is for Truths that cannot be denied.
U is for Union, whose aid we entreat;
V, Votes for women, we’re sworn to defeat.
W is wages the suffragettes claim;
X is for Xanthic, the color and fame.
Y is for Yankee, of Red, White and Blue;
Z is the Zeal to protect them for you.

What are your thoughts? Does any of this sound familiar? Let us know.