Tag Archives: Women’s History Month

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.

 

 

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.

 

Charlotte Forten Grimke

Posted on by

A member of a prominent African American family in Philadelphia, Charlotte Forten was born in 1837, as the abolitionist movement was growing in the northern states. She was named for her grandmother, who just four years earlier had helped found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Charlotte Vandine Forten had enlisted the help of her three daughters–Margaretta, Harriet, and Sarah–to organize this rare bi-racial group dedicated to the emancipation of slaves.

Charlotte Forten was a young girl when her mother died, and she was mostly raised by her Aunt Harriet.

Charlotte Forten Grimke

Educated alongside white students in Massachusetts, Charlotte pursued a career as a school teacher in the 1850s. Illness forced an early end to that, and she took to writing poetry and essays that were published in abolitionist magazines. During the Civil War, though, Charlotte started teaching again, this time in the newly-liberated Sea Islands of South Carolina. She published an account of those experiences in The Atlantic Monthly.

In 1878, Charlotte married James Grimke, a minister, former slave, and the nephew of the famous abolitionists, Sarah and Angelina Grimke. In her last decades, Charlotte supported the women’s suffrage movement.

Want to know more?

Mary Rowlandson and Her Captivity

Posted on by

Mary White Rowlandson, born in England, traveled with her parents and siblings to Massachusetts Bay when she was a child. In 1656, when she was about twenty, she married Joseph Rowlandson, the Puritan minister of the frontier town of Lancaster. Ten years later, the town was caught up in the brutal conflict known as King Philip’s war when a group of Narragansett Indians attacked Lancaster. Joseph Rowlandson was away at the time in Boston, ironically seeking assistance to keep his town safe.

Mary Rowlandson and her three children survived the attack only to be taken prisoner. Her six-year-old daughter Sarah, badly wounded in the attack, lived for another week. For the next eleven weeks, Rowlandson lived by her wits, trying to figure out what her captors wanted, trying to negotiate their culture. Politically savvy, Rowlandson knew her value as a hostage and helped negotiate her release and that of her two surviving children.

Rowlandson wrote a book about her experiences, which was popular in the colonies for generations.

Want to know more?