Celebrating Easter Under an Enemy Occupation

Posted on by

3

After Japanese forces occupied the Philippines in early 1942, American civilians and other Allied nationals were forced into internment camps. The camps had a plethora of rules, including a ban on “commingling”–an enforced separation between adult men and women, including husbands and wives–and rules on what women could and could not wear.

Camp commandants demanded that women be “decently” attired at all times with discreet necklines and long skirts, just like proper Japanese women. But because of the almost unrelenting heat of the Philippines, American women tried to get away with as few articles of clothing as possible while remaining seemly by their own standards.

In the Santo Tomas internment camp in Manila, women were particularly forbidden to wear shorts of any length. The camp’s civilian Executive Committee, run by men of the Allied countries, approved of the ban no matter how much the women resisted, believing they were saving their women from the possibility of sexual assault by the Japanese. However, by the end of 1943, clothing was in such short supply that the Japanese agreed to relax the ban. Women could wear shorts that were no more than four inches above the knee.

To take control of their appearance and to reassert American traditions, the women in the Baguio internment camp celebrated Easter of 1942 by attending a sunrise service with their families, then staging a parade during the Sunday night socializing hour.

Almost every adult woman created a new Easter hat, long an American tradition, and joined the parade. Missionary Fern Harrington recalled that “shrieks of hilarity punctuated the afternoon as the women fashioned their hats.” She covered a strawberry basket with a variety of flowers she had picked the day before. Harrington declared that the “smartest” hat was the one made from a roll of toilet paper tied to a woman’s head with a ribbon. Another woman wore a branch on her head adorned with a paper bird. Yet another hung onions from her ears as earrings and arranged long green sprouts on her head.

The parade was a big success. The internees laughed as they thoroughly enjoyed themselves, that is, until the Japanese guards heard the commotion and moved in to break up the event. It had been one of a few bright spots in what would stretch into three years of life under an enemy occupation.

Want to know more about American women’s experiences under internment? Read Prisoners in Paradise: American Women in the Wartime South Pacific.

 

Mabel Vernon: suffragist, pacifist

Posted on by

One of the most notable and important members of the National Woman’s Party, Delaware native Mabel Vernon gave up a stable, respectable teaching position to work on the campaign to secure a constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage.

Originally involved with the National American Woman Suffrage Association, Vernon joined Alice Paul’s Congressional Union in 1913 as an organizer and fundraiser. She was one of five suffragists who held up a banner asking, “Mr. President, What Will You Do for Woman Suffrage?” at Woodrow Wilson’s December 1914 address to Congress.

When Alice Paul created the National Woman’s Party out of the Congressional Union in 1916, Mabel Vernon became its secretary. She was instrumental in organizing the Silent Sentinels–the suffragists who picketed the White House beginning in 1917. Like many of those women, Vernon was arrested on charges of obstructing traffic, refused to pay the fine, and spent time in jail. Until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, she worked tirelessly for the cause, traveling state to state giving speeches and launching a major letter-writing campaign.

During the 1920s Mabel Vernon continued to work for the National Woman’s Party and its goal of securing the Equal Rights Amendment. She supported women who ran for public office, especially congressional seats. By 1930, though, Vernon had become more interested in pacifist issues. She joined the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, working for decades to prevent war through disarmament and diplomacy.

 

 

Louise Bryant: writer, suffragist, revolutionary

Posted on by

Louise Bryant chafed under the confines of middle-class respectability in Portland, Oregon in the first years of the twentieth century. A college graduate, she worked as the society editor for a local magazine and married a dentist. She detested housework and fell out of love with her husband. Poet Sara Bard Field encouraged Bryant to consider the contributions she could make to society, nudging her to get involved in the suffrage movement, one of the biggest political causes of the era.

In 1914, Louise Bryant met journalist Jack Reed. Captivated by his politics and his personality, she moved to New York to be with him. She settled in Greenwich Village and began writing for The Masses. In 1917, Bryant went to France as a foreign correspondent to report on the Great War.

When she finished her work on the western front, she and Jack Reed headed off to Russia to report on the revolution there. Bryant published Six Red Months in Russia in 1918. The following year she was on the picket line with Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party, urging Congress to pass the women’s suffrage amendment. She was arrested and spent three days in jail.

Want to know more about Louise Bryant?

 

Olympia Brown: Universalist minister, suffragist

Posted on by

In 1863, Olympia Brown became the first woman in the United States to graduate from a theological school and become an ordained minister. Three years earlier, she had graduated from Antioch College in Ohio, where she began preaching. When Brown applied to a Unitarian theology school in Pennsylvania, she was told the trustees “thought it would be too great an experiment” to enroll a woman. The Universalist Divinity School at St. Lawrence University opened its doors to her, though, and after she graduated she was offered a full-time minister’s position in Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts in 1864.

Olympia Brown

Olympia Brown became active in the women’s rights movement after meeting Susan B. Anthony in Massachusetts. In 1867, Brown was recruited by Anthony, Lucy Stone, and Henry Blackwell to be part of the great Kansas campaign to secure women’s voting rights in that state.

Brown took a leave of absence from her church and spent four months traveling through Kansas giving some 300 speeches, often times before hostile crowds. The Kansas campaign failed, but Brown never gave up her support for the suffrage cause.

When she married John Henry Willis in 1873, Olympia Brown, like Lucy Stone, kept her maiden name. She resigned her ministry in 1874, after the birth of her first child, but after a couple of years was anxious to get back to work. She accepted a position with a Universalist church in Racine, Wisconsin.

Olympia Brown stayed with that church for about nine years until she decided to work full time as a women’s suffrage organizer for both the Wisconsin Suffrage Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association. During the 1910s, Brown joined Alice Paul’s Woman’s Party and stood with the pickets at the White House.

When at long last her decades of hard work paid off, Olympia Brown cast her first presidential ballot in 1920. She was 85 years old.

 

 

 

Clara Bewick Colby, suffragist and editor

Posted on by

Born in England in 1846, Clara Bewick immigrated to the United States as a child; her family settled in Wisconsin. She originally planned on teaching school, but when she was nineteen she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1869. She taught history and Latin there while taking graduate classes, but resigned over a pay equity issue.

After marrying Leonard Wright Colby in 1871, the couple moved to Beatrice, Nebraska. During the 1870s, the state of Nebraska was debating giving women the right to vote. As the editor of the woman’s column in the Beatrice newspaper, Colby followed this issue closely. In 1878 she invited the famous women’s rights activist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to Nebraska to speak on behalf of woman suffrage. Colby threw herself into the cause as well. She helped organize the Women’s State Suffrage Association in Nebraska in 1881 and served as president from 1885-1898. Colby started publishing a national suffrage newspaper, Woman’s Tribune, in 1883. After the collapse of her marriage, Colby moved to Oregon in 1904, where she continued to work for the suffrage cause. She died in 1916, four years before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.