Tag Archives: women’s suffrage

Dispatches from the Writing Life #19: When Biographical Subjects (Nearly, Maybe) Collide

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Over the last half of this past week, I had to swap my writing time for interview prep time. There is a documentary in progress on Dr. Mary Walker, Medal-of-Honor-winning Civil War physician and relentless women’s rights activist, and I was asked to talk—in front of a camera—about her life and the book I wrote about it.

I’ve given many presentations about Walker, but most of them focused on her Civil War experiences that led to the Medal of Honor. So, I was especially delighted with the opportunity to talk about her commitment to dress reform and women’s suffrage, plus a variety of other women’s rights issues.

On October 23, 1915, when Dr. Walker was in her early 80s, she turned up in New York City for a women’s suffrage parade. The event kicked off at Washington Square at 3:00 on a chilly but sunny afternoon and continued about three miles along Fifth Avenue to Fifty-ninth Street. Participants (just over 25,000, including 2500 men, according to The New York Times) represented the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the Women’s Political Union, the Women’s Trades Union League, and other groups.  

It was a huge event; to that date, the largest suffrage parade held in the city. Crowd estimates ranged from tens of thousands, to a hundred thousand, to two hundred thousand.

(Suffrage parade, October 23, 1915. Library of Congress. George Grantham Bain Collection.)

I like to imagine Jane Grant somewhere in that crowd of observers. If she was working that Saturday, she may have slipped away from her desk at The New York Times late in the afternoon to watch. Maybe she caught sight of Mary Walker—though it’s hard to believe that the elderly doctor marched for very long. I think about that overlap, two very determined women in the same place at the same time but knowing nothing of each other. Jane, young and at the beginning of her career, not yet realizing how important women’s rights would become in her life. Dr. Walker, near the end of her life, motivated for decades by a deep belief in gender equality.

These kinds of what-if, almost, maybe historical encounters always intrigue me. But now I’m back to those Jane Grant revisions, and who knows what will spark my imagination next.

What I’m Reading

I’m a couple of chapters into Jayne Anne Phillips’s memoir, Small Town Girls, and am finding the writing just lovely. Still reading and admiring historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist Megan Kate Nelson’s The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier.

I’ve started The Librarians, a mystery by Sherry Thomas, which is intriguing so far.

I finished and enjoyed two novels: Virginia Pye’s Marriage and Other Monuments and Ann Patchett’s Whistler. I read Elizabeth Strout’s Things We Never Say in two sittings and have lots of opinions about it.

What I’m Watching

In the current watch rotation are season 2 of The Agency (Paramount+), Waking the Dead (BritBox), Lawmen: Bass Reeves and Mindfully Murder (both on Netflix).

I’m on the final season of A Place to Call Home (Prime). Deep Space Nine (Paramount+) has taken a backseat to this Australian drama.

Finished The Other Bennet Sister (BritBox), The Boroughs (Netflix), Legends (Netflix), and The Pembrokeshire Murders (BritBox), Spider Noir (Prime), and St. Denis Medical (Netflix).

The Other Bennet Sister was pleasant but irritatingly divided into 30-minute episodes. The Boroughs had its solid cast and good premise weakened by an anemic plot. Legends and The Pembrokeshire Murders were both well done. I really fell for the noir vibe of Spider Noir, which was the perfect vehicle for Nicholas Cage. And I’m looking forward to another season of St. Denis Medical.

What Else Is Happening

Weekly bowling had its usual highs (a sparrow) and lows (gutter balls and impossible splits), but it’s still fun.

And here at Southfork, we are cat sitting for three weeks, an elderly brother-sister feline duo. We are entertained.

Thanks, as always, for reading. See you next time.

Five Best Books (and other news)

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A new website for readers called Shepherd (“Like browsing the best bookstore in the world.”) asked me to contribute to its best books series. Authors get to recommend their favorites on a particular subject, and to keep my recommendations down to five, I had to come up with a very narrow topic!

I titled mine “The best books on 19th-century women’s rights activists who weren’t Susan B. Anthony.” https://shepherd.com/best-books/19th-century-womens-rights-activists

The list highlights works on lesser-known women like Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone who were devoted to a variety of gender equality issues, including suffrage. I’ve also included one of my all-time favorites, historian Nell Irvin Painter’s brilliant biography of Sojourner Truth.

Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol

If you have the time, take a look through the other recommendation lists on the Shepherd site–it’s a great resource for nonfiction readers.

In other news, my forthcoming biography of singer and actor Dale Evans (the first one ever written about this mega-celebrity of the 20th century), Queen of the West: The Life and Times of Dale Evans, has just gone through the copyedit stage. Next come the page proofs, when I get to see how the manuscript actually looks as a printed book. The cover design, which is quite snappy already, is still undergoing a bit of tweaking, but I’ll debut it here when it’s officially finalized. So far, the book is due to be released in March 2022.

Now that the Dale Evans book is essentially done, it’s time to move on to a new project. After a couple of conversations (one very long, the other pretty short) with my agent, we settled on one of the several ideas I pitched. It’s at the very, very beginning of the proposal process and much too soon to reveal particulars, but I can share that it’s in keeping with my penchant for writing about scrappy women in American history. 

Until my next post, happy reading!

 

Dr. Mary Walker, the Civil War, and Thanksgiving

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Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman to receive the Medal of Honor, was born on this day, November 26, in 1832. This year, 2020, the anniversary of her birth falls on Thanksgiving, a holiday in the United States that has ties to the Civil War.

Raised as a free thinker by parents who valued education for both boys and girls, Walker graduated from the Syracuse Medical College in 1855 and went into private practice.

Mary Walker
(National Museum of American History)

A few months after the Civil War started in 1861, Dr. Walker closed her practice and went to Washington, D.C. seeking a commission as a surgeon in the United States Army. She was denied that commission because she was a woman. So she volunteered in military hospitals, both in the capital and in the field.

As historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote in a recent installment of her “Letters From an American” series, “We celebrate Thanksgiving because of the Civil War.”* To mark recent victories in the war that would end slavery and to keep up morale–assuring people their sacrifices were not being made in vain–President Abraham Lincoln designated August 6, 1863 as a national day of thanksgiving. Magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale encouraged him to do so. Two months later, he issued a proclamation identifying the last Thursday in November for the 1864 observance. Lincoln assumed Americans would have as much to be thankful for then. The president wrote:

“In the midst of a civil war of unequalled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict; while that theatre has been greatly contracted by the advancing armies and navies of the Union. Needful diversions of wealth and of strength from the fields of peaceful industry to the national defence, have not arrested the plough, the shuttle or the ship; the axe has enlarged the borders of our settlements, and the mines, as well of iron and coal as of the precious metals, have yielded even more abundantly than heretofore. Population has steadily increased, notwithstanding the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field; and the country, rejoicing in the consciousness of augmented strength and vigor, is permitted to expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom.”

Dr. Mary Walker admired President Lincoln and she likely approved of his Thanksgiving plans. But she was too busy to mark holiday celebrations. The summer of 1863 found her first in Pennsylvania, providing medical care in the wake of the battle at Gettysburg. Then she and Dr. Hettie Painter traveled together through parts of Virginia, stopping at makeshift hospitals to offer their services. In November 1864, Dr. Walker was in Louisville, Kentucky, hired by the U.S. Army as the head of the medical department of the Female Military Prison there. She had already survived a stint in a Confederate military prison in Richmond, Virginia, but refused to stop working for the army until the war ended.

According to Richardson, “Lincoln established our national Thanksgiving to celebrate the survival of our democratic government.” Dr. Mary Walker would go on to honor that survival by working to secure women’s voting rights and bring the adult female population into a fuller participation in that democracy.

*This historical information about Lincoln and Thanksgiving comes from Richardson’s November 25, 2020 letter. For the full text of Lincoln’s proclamation, see http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/thanks.htm.

Dr. Mary Walker Wednesday: Finale

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It has been wonderful spending these past Wednesdays introducing you to Mary Walker. I hope you found the teasers enticing enough to read the book.

Epilogue: The Medal of Honor Restored

A somebody in her lifetime, Mary Walker was not forgotten after she died.

Photo of Dr. Mary Edwards Walker wearing her Medal of Honor

(public domain)

Though Mary Walker was stripped of her Medal of Honor (along with many others), she refused to acknowledge that and continued to wear the decoration throughout her life. Not long after she died, a quiet campaign began to have the medal restored. In the Epilogue, I show how timing was instrumental to that success.

I’ll resume this blog feature for my forthcoming biography of Dale Evans. It will re-emerge as Queen of the West Wednesdays. (I’ll let you know when it’s time to saddle up!)

Until then, I’ll continue posting about other interesting women in American history and about my reading adventures.

Stay safe and stay well.

 

Dr. Mary Walker Wednesday #10

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We’ve reached the penultimate chapter of Dr. Mary Walker’s Civil War. The book launches on Monday, June 1, and that is the day I will post the first line of the final chapter. Wednesday, June 3 will be the last Walker Wednesday, and it will cover the Epilogue.

Chapter Ten: Outcast and Erased

In the great divide of the women’s suffrage movement, Mary Walker took her own path.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony published The Revolution, a weekly women’s rights newspaper, from 1868-1872. Mary Walker did not always get along with the two women, but she certainly agreed with their paper’s slogan: “Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.”

Stay safe and stay healthy.