It was 1950, and the world was in flames: In Vietnam, Iran, Madagascar, Algeria, West Africa, South Africa, Tunisia, Malaya, Burma, and Cuba, wars of counterinsurgency were being waged against colonial powers that refused to leave. Women, with weapons in their hands and the courage to hide soldiers, grow food for the frontlines, and pass messages across their battlefronts, took part in fighting these wars for independence. At the same time, they sought peace, freedom, and women’s rights.

On March 8, International Women’s Day, they erupted in protests to demand an end to imperialism—the starting point for imagining decolonization as a global culture.

Today, corporate sponsors have sought to commodify International Women’s Day and turn it into women’s access to rule like capitalists. But this 1950 fight for decolonization built a culture that—if you look closely—still fuels the revolutionary spirit, and promise, of the day.

International Women’s Day began as a way to join working-class women’s struggles for basic rights to livelihood with middle-class women’s fight for the vote. At the International Socialist Women’s Congress, held in Copenhagen in 1910, German activist Clara Zetkin proposed holding an international women’s day in March. These meetings and demonstrations incited protests, including the Russian Revolution in 1917. From 1922 onward, the day was mostly celebrated as a holiday in the USSR and socialist countries to honor women’s rights gained under socialism.

The need for a decolonial agenda around International Women’s Day arose from the Global South, during the anti-imperialist Asian Women’s Conference held in Beijing, China, in December 1949. There, attendees found solidarity and carried that spirit back home in countless manifestations of anticolonial feminist activism. During those 12 days in Beijing, women from across Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and South America forged a movement for all women to fight against colonialism and demand equal rights with full sovereignty. Many women from colonized countries had already joined their countries’ battles to crush colonial occupation. They had their own slogans: Bury the corpse of colonialism! If anyone is oppressed, no one is free! And they demanded that women from colonizing countries dismantle their countries’ war machines.

Women at the conference gathered at the National Art Academy tables. Courtesy of Sophia Smith Archives, Smith College.

Attendees took that charge with them when they got back home. Just two weeks after returning from Beijing, for instance, Jeanette Vermeersch, a parliamentarian and member of the French Communist Party, addressed the French parliament to call for the withdrawal of France from Vietnam: “The Vietnamese people are fighting a just war,” she said, “a war in the defense of your aggression. You are fighting an unjust war, a colonial war, a war of aggression.”

Through networks of anti-imperialist and socialist women’s groups, the message of the Asian Women’s Conference traveled around the world. It would be a global, coordinated refusal of imperialism. The conference resolution spread: Celebrate International Women’s Day, a day for working-class women’s struggles, like never before.

When International Women’s Day arrived, it joined together women from all around the world in the anticolonial struggle for their full emancipation, as women from colonizing countries like France and the Netherlands demanded an end to imperialism in solidarity with women from Vietnam, Indonesia, Tunisia, and beyond. This included the demand that women hold equal rights to fully enfranchised men, not the truncated rights of colonized men with negligible rights to vote, apartheid rules of unfree movement, fettered access to jobs, and stolen lands.

The day punctuated ongoing insurgencies by people who were geographically far from each other, but were bound by common occupiers of colonial nations.

In Mar del Plata, Argentina, leftist women’s groups—such as the Union of Argentine Women and the Women’s Cultural Group—held the Congress for Peace in dozens of cities around the country to evade the authorities (who had banned their activities) and fight for a decent standard of living and political rights. In Brazil, women chose to protest the high-level U.S. economic delegation visiting Rio de Janeiro. They printed 100,000 leaflets and covered the city with 20,000 posters under the name “Protect Brazilian Petrol” to condemn the economic treaty signed with the United States. Their slogans sought peace and an end to U.S. interference in the Brazilian economy—its own form of neoimperialism—and protested the high cost of living.

Across the world, in Damascus, the Union of Syrian Women led a demonstration of women and children to the parliament to condemn war. Their protests were not without cost. Amine Aref Kassab Hasan, who had recently returned from the Beijing conference, was beaten and arrested, along with two other women and a 5-year-old girl. In Homs, another delegate of the Asian Women’s Conference, Salma Boummi, along with five other women and girls were arrested for a similar protest for peace. But in the face of the Syrian government’s violent response, 13 Syrian women’s organizations presented a memorandum to the Constituent Assembly to demand women’s equal rights, particularly equal pay for equal work. Though they were beaten back, the movement pressed onward.

Anticolonial leaders of the women’s movement, like Celestine Ouezzin Coulibaly (familiarly known as Macoucou) and Baya Allouchiche, took the lead in organizing working-class women in their countries, but also in their regions of North Africa and West Africa, respectively.

The Mongolian delegation at the conference. Courtesy of Sophia Smith Archives, Smith College.

In Ivory Coast, Coulibaly toured Sudan, Upper Volta, and Ivory Coast to spread the word after attending the Beijing conference. She described the solidarity of women she witnessed, and she told of the success won by communist women in the People’s Republic of China, who drove out an army that had far greater armaments supplied by the Americans. After touring the region, Coulibaly led demonstrations of thousands of women on International Women’s Day in Grand Bassam, the French colonial capital of Ivory Coast, in protest of police repression and the murder of women who, in December 1949, had demanded the release of political prisoners who fought for independence from French colonial rule.

Like Coulibaly, after Allouchiche returned from the Asian Women’s Conference, she galvanized women in Algeria to join the anticolonial struggle. She toured Algeria and Morocco, spending 12 days in the radical province of Oran, where women were not yet organized. She described a world of solidarity among women, one that refused to buckle under the yoke of colonialism nor the yoke of patriarchy. She dared them to imagine: “the sun that has risen in Beijing will shine for us too!” Her speeches held in the month of February tipped the balance toward solidarity and a wage strike among dockworkers. Only a week before International Women’s Day 1950, over 300 Algerian women joined the strike on the docks of Oran to protest poor working conditions and to refuse to load ships with soldiers and supplies for the colonial counterinsurgency frontlines of Vietnam.

Global anticolonial solidarity required resistance in colonial centers. Delegates from the Netherlands, the United States, France, and England who attended the conference in Beijing took direction and brought colonized women’s struggle home. On the same day as the protests in Syria, Lebanon, Ivory Coast, Argentina, Brazil, and Algeria, Dutch women supported dock workers who refused to load ships with American armaments bound for the Dutch occupation of Indonesia by laying in the road and blocking the trucks from reaching the docks. In Enshede, Dutch women connected Dutch peoples’ high cost of living to the priority given in the national budget for military purposes over the needs of the working population of the Netherlands. Bread not Barracks, they shouted.

Formal colonialism fell in the decades after the 1949 Asian Women’s Conference. But economic colonialism continues today. Economic blockades have human rights consequences and debt packages dictate national policies. But women’s struggles for decolonization, peace, and equal rights hasn’t ebbed. If we turn our heads to Latin America, one memorable slogan from strikes held on International Women’s Day—“What they call love, we call unpaid work!”—draws the connections between the debt bondage and the need for women to provide structural networks of care. Femicide, drug trafficking, border policing, and U.S. intervention in Central America and Mexican economies have fueled endemic murders of women and girls. We see inspiration, too, from women in Mexico reacting to this, to join their internationalist call against systemic femicide, for “Ni Una Mas!” (Not One More).

International Women’s Day in 1950 revived the fight for anticolonial, anti-imperialist solidarity on the terms of the people most oppressed. Our regional and national women’s struggles are still global, still marked by economic and political colonialism in new forms. Survival for many is still precarious—we have a strong tradition in International Women’s Day to imagine an alternative future without inequity.

The post Decolonization Is Women’s Work appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The pandemic has changed the way women dress; we’re purchasing fewer shoes, dress pants, and makeup, and trading underwire bras for loose bralettes or sport bras, or even choosing to forgo them completely. Yet, as businesses around the country get ready to call their workers back to the office, this life of loungewear might be coming to an end. And as women contemplate their return to formal wear, the return of the bra might be one of the most dreaded aspects of post-pandemic normalcy.

This struggle is not new. Women have long connected clothing with ideas of freedom, and there is a long and strong relation between women’s demand for sartorial comfort and feminist ideas. Indeed, for many women, both in the past and today, discarding bras is not just an act of personal choice but an act of feminist rebellion.

The association of bras, and similar undergarments like corsets, with discomfort, oppression, and distress, goes back to the 19th century. Then, members of the nascent feminist movement sought simultaneously to free themselves from oppressive legal and social systems—and from tight corsets and trailing skirts. “Something of the nature of the American costume … must take the place of our present style of dress, before the higher life—moral, intellectual, political, social or domestic—can ever begin for women,” feminist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps argued in 1873. Phelps called women to burn up their corsets, arguing that by freeing themselves from discomfort they could truly experience emancipation.

And in the second half of the 20th century, burning bras (or corsets)—whether as a real act or as a metaphor—would become one of the most popular images representing a new generation of feminists. Arguing that “the personal is political,” these feminists sought equality in all realms of life, from the home to the workplace, demanding control over their uteruses as well as their clothing choices. No bras were burned in the famous “No More Miss America Protest” of 1968—though some were thrown into a trash can along with lipstick and high heels. But the media was quick to associate bra burning with the radical feminists who protested oppressive beauty standards.

Yet before women’s fraught relationship with their undergarments became a symbol of radical feminists, women sought to liberate themselves through attire. There was, in fact, a similar push a century ago—in the shadow of another global pandemic and the realignment of world order after World War I. Emboldened by the right to vote and the social changes it brought, young women in the U.S. and elsewhere began to reevaluate their position in society as well as their appearance. Funny enough, in doing so they popularized the now-reviled bra.

Pre-World War I, in response to women’s growing involvement in sports and leisure, the fashion industry began marketing lighter, less restrictive corsets and more flexible girdles in an attempt to maintain their profits. Into this atmosphere, a relatively new undergarment emerged as a corset substitute: the brassiere. Although its origins are somewhat unknown, in the U.S., socialite Caresse Crosby patented her brassiere design in 1913.

A Maidenform bra advertisement. Courtesy of Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Women’s growing mobilization into the workforce and social reform during the 1910s only increased the demand for sartorial change. The U.S. entry to the war in 1917 and the influenza pandemic in 1918 also affected changes in fashion. By the 1920s, young women shortened their skirts and hair and discarded their corsets, often in favor of a bra, insisting on wearing comfortable clothing that suited their active lifestyles and to celebrate their sexuality without being reprimanded for it.

“’Let Go’ is the law of the new corset and the corsetless figure,” exclaimed Eleanor Chalmers, fashion editor of the women’s magazine Delineator, in 1922. These new fashions became identified with the image of the modern flapper. But they also became both a visual and symbolic statement of a new feminine presence in the public sphere. By forgoing their corsets, women were also forgoing the ideas that were attached to them: confinement, passivity, and oppression. The corsetless figure became the epitome of women’s social and political freedom and mobility, forging a new beauty ideal that was younger and slenderer.

Some of the first widely marketed bras of the 1920s had a flattening effect that fitted the straight, rectangular silhouette of the flapper ideal. But unlike boned corsets, these bras gave only minimal support, functioning more as an extra layer beneath clothes than a means to mold a woman’s torso.

Taken together, the new flapper dresses and the bras beneath them became a means for women to assert their power as consumers and their rights. “They demanded independence, and they got it … when they went shopping they asked for what they wanted, instead of what they saw,” explained fashion consultant Margery Wells in 1928 as she looked back at the shift in Women’s Wear Daily. Instead of being followers of fashion, women began to actively voice their preference.

The ideal silhouette evolved alongside undergarments—and social reform. Women’s Wear Daily.

By the end of the 1920s, with the coming of the Great Depression, the youthful, leisurely flapper ideal seemed out of touch. Instead, a more mature and curvier silhouette gained popularity. Bras became undergarments responsible for enhancing and uplifting the breasts and creating a more structured shape, similar to the function we chafe against today. Yet the emphasis on comfort, whether imagined or real, continued to be part of the selling message for women.

Over the next four decades, the bra progressed slowly from an item associated with women’s liberation and self-dependency to another confining and restrictive garment associated with women’s oppression. Indeed, it was the meanings that women gave their bras in the postwar, post-pandemic 1920s, more than the design itself, that offered women a sense of liberation. And it was the meanings, not the design, that feminists in the 1970s found so abhorrent.

In the 1920s, fashion was where women turned to convey their new reality. And today, amidst a pandemic, bras once again become a symbol of the limitations on women’s experience in the labor force. As women reevaluate their social position, the sound of rebellion is getting louder. Even if COVID will not bring a wave of bra abandonment, women today are already making fashion choices that will impact our future. And if history is a lesson, we are in for an interesting ride.

The post Bringing Down the Bra appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the title question posed, on International Women’s Day, to two Arizona State University experts on women’s leadership at a Zócalo/ASU Center on the Future of War event.

“In a nutshell, I would say yes,” said Pardis Mahdavi, the dean of social sciences in Arizona State University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and an anthropologist whose scholarship covers gendered labor, migration, sexuality, human rights, transnational feminism, and public health. She said that transnational feminist movements—from #MeToo to #BringBackOurGirls in Nigeria—are having “a moment” now after many years of organizing.

“Feminist organizers have been working in the underground, they’ve been planting those seeds, they’re the tillers of the soil, if you will,” said Mahdavi. However, she cautioned, “we have to create an ecosystem where this change can take root.”

What differentiates feminist organizing from other types of movements, asked Mi-Ai Parrish, managing director of ASU Media Enterprise, and the moderator of the event, which was co-sponsored by the ASU Global Human Rights Hub.

“Feminist organizers,” Mahdavi replied. “they do their homework, they know what the lived experience is about, and they also know you need multiple disciplinary perspectives, multiple trainings. You’ve got to bring different people to the table to solve world’s most pressing problems.”

Transnational feminist movements aren’t limited to women-centric issues, like reproductive rights, she said. For example, Black Lives Matter was founded by three Black women in response to police violence against Black men. Or take feminist groups in Iran who have pushed back pushed back against morality police, Mahdavi added.

“What all these movement have in common is they’re all part of justice feminism,” said Mahdavi, defining justice feminism as “a uniting call that brings all these movements together” whether they’re about health justice, social justice or climate justice.

Mahdavi said that she finds hope in the greater intergenerational collaboration she sees in justice feminism. “Women from across generations and across borders and boundaries are coming together to push back against enemies that even some of the most powerful militaries can’t combat,” she said.

Today, Mahdavi said, she’s also heartened to see how different undergrounds are starting to unite to create larger change. As an example, Mahdavi cited the #BringBackOurGirls campaign in Nigeria, which was able to bring worldwide attention to the fates of 276 schoolgirls who had been kidnapped by the terrorist group Boko Maram. She also shared a lesser-known example from some of her own work on trafficking relating to women in Madagascar, also known as Malagasy women.

“These feminist networks organized from Kuwait to Switzerland to South Africa to get all the Malagasy women who had been incarcerated in Kuwait with their babies, they got them all home,” said Mahdavi. The story, which she documented in her 2016 book, Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives, did not get prominent media attention, she said. “It wasn’t on Twitter or social media but it was a great example of these transnational feminists coming together, sharing their undergrounds to get women and their children, in this case, home safely.”

Its epilogue was equally important, she continued; these same women, Mahdavi said, were able to change the policies in their home countries to make migration safer for other women.

In response to a question from Parrish, Mahdavi said that transnational feminist movements have momentum today for a confluence of reasons. “Success begets success,” she said, and feminists are watching movements around the world and borrowing strategies from one another.

While doing field work in Dubai, she recalled being heartened by seeing feminists—women and men—come together and share strategies of how to combat oppression. “That hadn’t been happening because people first of all weren’t as mobile before as they are now,” she said. They also weren’t as networked, she added.

“Look at us,” she said, referring to the event’s broadcast on Youtube, “we’ve got people coming in from all around the world listening to us which is wonderful—but this obviously couldn’t have happened three decades ago. So there’s momentum, which we’ve got to capitalize on. The case has been made. Now we’ve got to make the change.”

Parrish asked what that change would look like, and invited Mahdavi to imagine “a fully scaled transnational feminist movement.”

“It’s a world where justice is really at the heart of everything we do,” Mahdavi said. In other words, having policies both foreign and domestic that consider questions of justice at the forefront.

Transnational women’s movements have combined progress and backlash, Parrish pointed out. “There’s been a pull and a push in a negative way against these movements. Do you think people are starting to see the benefit to all?”

Mahdavi replied: “It depends what part of the world that we’re talking about. I think here in the United States we’re finally starting to see it.” She also suggested that the “triple pandemic”—the viral pandemic of COVID, the social pandemic of racism, and the climate emergency pandemic—is forcing people to rethink the paradigm we’re in.

“We need new models of leadership to get us out of this situation, and we need new ways of knowing,” she said.

Audience questions piled in for the panelists throughout the discussion. One asked which countries are at the forefront of transnational feminist movements today.

“I wish I had a crystal ball,” said Mahdavi, but if she had to guess, she would list India, South Korea, Iran and different parts of the Middle East, Nigeria, Canada, and Mexico.

Several audience members wanted to know what men can do to be better allies to women and these movements.

“Listen,” said Mahdavi. As men begin to practice “being self-reflective and saying here’s my positionality” will make a big difference.

Nearing the end of the conversation, Parrish pointed out that it’s human nature that when you rise up, you step on who’s behind you. How, she asked, can feminist movements be better at lifting up others as they rise?

“That intentionality has to be there,” said Mahdavi. “We have to remember we have to lift as we climb,” she said circling back to a point she’d made earlier in the evening about feminist leadership. “True feminist leaders, male or female or nonbinary leaders, are not going to step on people on their way up. We are going to lift as we climb.”

The post Women’s Movements Can Save the World—by Learning From Each Other appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The price of the kosher meat that she and most of the half million or so Jewish homemakers on Manhattan’s Lower East Side fed their families had risen 50 percent over the previous few months, from 12 to 18 cents a pound. That suddenly put this staple out of the reach of most Russian and Eastern European immigrant Jewish families, whose breadwinners took home only about $10 a week in 1902.

Non-kosher meat was cheaper, of course, and widely available. But it was simply not an option for observant families like Sarah’s, duty-bound by history, culture, and religion to honor the exacting Jewish laws specifying which foods were permitted and how and by whom they had to be slaughtered and prepared. Nor was this 50-year-old mother of six, a resident of America for 34 years, willing to face a future of meatless meals.

Wholesale prices began to climb steeply for the several hundred kosher butchers in the Jewish quarter—then the most densely populated neighborhood in the nation—at the very beginning of 1902. Their patrons, mostly women, had fully supported the butchers when, on May 10, they staged a shutdown to pressure their local slaughterhouses into lowering rates. But although they were able to extract some modest concessions, they made no progress on the central issue, the price of meat. When the butchers reopened on May 14 and the women discovered that despite the givebacks they were being charged even more than before, they accused their butchers of price gouging and became enraged.

That same day, Sarah Edelson called a meeting at her family’s Monroe Street saloon to discuss the matter. She expected 50 fellow homemakers. When more than 500 showed up, the talk turned to activism. It was her neighbor, 35-year-old Fanny Levy, who summed up the mood in the room. “This is their strike?” she noted sarcastically of the butchers’ shutdown. “Let the women make a strike; then there will be a strike!”

And a women’s strike there was—or, rather, a boycott. By the wee hours of the next morning, some 3,000 housewives had assembled in squads of five on every block on the Lower East Side with a kosher butcher shop. When the businesses opened at 7 a.m., the pickets waved off all customers, imploring people to do without kosher meat until the butchers brought prices back down.

Crowd gather in front of a butcher shop. Courtesy of the Library of Congress/George Grantham Bain Collection.

What was supposed to be a nonviolent effort did not remain so for long. Those who insisted on entering the shops were heckled and, on their departure, assaulted. Their parcels of meat were confiscated, hurled into the gutters and sometimes doused with kerosene. Butchers were goaded into closing, and those who refused were attacked. Their inventory was destroyed and in many cases their windows and fixtures were smashed. Brutal blows from police nightsticks sent demonstrators to local hospitals and to court, but neither flesh wounds nor stiff fines deterred them.

The street protests ceased temporarily on Saturday, May 17, the Jewish Sabbath, but it was hardly a day of rest for the women. They used the respite to visit neighborhood synagogues and prayer halls in pairs. They challenged ancient traditions by interrupting worship services and mounting the platforms from which the Torah was read—normally off-limits to females—to solicit support from the mostly male worshippers. And although on one or two occasions they were greeted with hostility for this impropriety, for the most part their message was well-received, and the vast majority of congregants pledged to support the boycott.

After the Sabbath, they returned to the streets to make certain no meat was being sold. Their retail butchers laid the blame on higher wholesale prices being charged by the local abattoirs. But the real culprits—those responsible for most of the problem—were actually hundreds of miles away.

This was the era of the trusts—combinations of companies that banded together to control markets. And a “beef trust” had emerged, not unlike the trusts in steel, oil, and railroads. The cartel of Chicago-based meat packers, with names like Swift and Armour, had struck a secret pact to divide territory, control supply, and fix prices. These corrupt efforts were behind the big price increases in New York and elsewhere. The Justice Department of “trust-buster” President Theodore Roosevelt had taken note, and on May 10, the very day the kosher butchers had first shut down, took the packers to court to force them to cease their illegal practices.

Of course, not only kosher meat was affected. Prices rose for everyone. But the Jews were the first to feel the heat because kosher meat was more expensive. Prices had to reflect not only the wages of slaughterers and religious supervisors, but also the cost of transporting live cattle to New York. Because kosher meat had to be salted and soaked in the home within 72 hours of slaughter, it could not, like the non-kosher variety, be killed in Chicago and shipped more cheaply as a carcass.

Against this backdrop, the boycotters formed the Ladies’ Anti-Beef Trust Association and named Caroline Schatzberg, a well-spoken, 50-year-old Romanian-born widow, president. “It will be a question of endurance between us,” Schatzberg predicted. “If the retailers can afford to pay rent and do no business, I guess we can afford to do without meat. We can stand it as long as they can.”

And so the boycott grew. Committees were formed to distribute circulars throughout the tenements; seek support from benevolent societies, lodges, and trade unions; collect money to reimburse those arrested for fines paid; and reach out to other communities. In less than a week, Jewish homemakers in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem, and Long Island City had taken to the streets in solidarity and shared frustration.

Discussing the price of meat during the boycott. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The newspapers, by and large, were sympathetic. “It is impossible not to feel a touch of patriotic sympathy for the East Side housewives,” declared the New York World on May 16. “Their method was censurable, but their motive was unselfish and even heroic.” The socialist, Yiddish-language Forward cheered them on with the banner headline, “BRAVA, BRAVA, JEWISH WOMEN!” Only the New York Times, under the editorial control of assimilated German Jews inclined to see the protestors as threats to their own acceptance among America’s gentiles, dismissed them as “a dangerous class” who “do not understand the duties or the rights of Americans.”

The Times was certainly within its rights to censure them for the violence, which no responsible voice inside or outside the Jewish community condoned. But the paper was quite wrong in its assessment of their degree of Americanization. Although many of the women had been in the United States for only a short time and could not manage much English, they had already grasped the power of that most American form of expression: protest. With little experience and few resources at their disposal, but with steely determination and a clear understanding of the common threat they faced, they asserted their collective power as consumers, found their political voice, and challenged powerful, vested corporate interests.

As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle put it at the time, the women “seem to have imbibed a fundamental principle of Americanism as quickly as any earlier [immigrants] did. They decided that they were unjustly taxed, or charged, which amounts to the same thing for the person who pays, and they went out to find a means to remedy the injustice. They found it. Their proceeding was not within the letter of the law, but neither was the Boston Tea Party.”

Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, control over the boycott would pass into the hands of men. Husbands and fathers first got involved after seeing women clubbed and jailed by police. The Ladies’ Association’s efforts to recruit other Jewish groups to join them resulted in the formation of a second, male-led organization, the Allied Conference for Cheap Kosher Meat, on May 21.

The Allied Conference brought in several rabbis to negotiate directly with the local slaughterhouse bosses, who bore some responsibility for gouging and were now being vilified as the “Jewish Beef Trust.” Their goal in raising prices had been to raise profits, but, after three weeks of boycott, they agreed on June 3 to lower prices, although they refused to say for how long. Conference leaders then offered to permit those butchers who pledged to return retail prices to previous levels to reopen. Not everyone was entirely happy with the solution because it did not include a long-term commitment to affordable prices, but it did put kosher meat back on Jewish tables.

Their cause won, Sarah Edelson, Caroline Schatzberg, Fanny Levy, and their compatriots sank back into the obscurity from which they had emerged. Although they were not remembered, their boycott would linger in memory, and be recalled as the vanguard of homemaker-organized Jewish activism in America. After it was over, immigrant Jewish women needed no further persuading that they were capable of uniting and effecting change in their new homeland.

The spirit and grassroots tactics of the Great Kosher Meat Strike of 1902 would be applied successfully in the early decades of the century in rent strikes, community protests, labor actions, and suffrage demonstrations. Even today, their influence can be felt whenever consumers unite to protest an objectionable corporate policy, a lapse in ethical behavior or, as in 1902, a most unwelcome rise in prices.

The post When Jewish Wives Beefed With Butchers and Changed the World appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The “system” had long gone unchallenged, but Matheson saw it as the underlying barrier to her fight to secure worker rights. To confront the corruption, she selected a polling site at the heart of Bufalino’s territory, sending a Pittston woman named Carmella Salatino to the polls on election day. Salatino refused to sign the election roster unless she could cast her own vote privately, with her husband standing by in support outside the booth. With Matheson’s encouragement, the Salatinos stood their ground for hours against the pressure of Bufalino’s “poll-watchers.” They ultimately backed down, but they had made a crucial first step toward change, and it would not be long before Matheson and the women workers of Pittston overcame voter suppression in the town. Later, through efforts like 1958’s Dress Strike, ILGWU members asserted the union’s control over Pennsylvania’s garment industry, and mob-controlled businesses diminished in power.

Matheson’s career with the ILGWU extended from the 1940s to the 1960s, and she frequently combated organized crime interests in the region’s notoriously corrupt towns, alternately fighting against and negotiating with gangsters. Matheson learned the dangers of fighting the mob through personal experience; one of her brothers, Will Lurye, was murdered while trying to organize a mobbed-up firm in New York’s Garment District. Yet she was an idealist, and while she has become best known for facing off against the mob, Matheson’s primary importance to the labor movement lies in the inspiration she gave to workers she led, and the way she changed attitudes among working-class women of Pittston like Carmella Salatino—turning them into a powerful political force in the region and a respected civic presence. Her gutsy leadership style and unwavering fight for the ideals of organized labor brought a transformative vision of union power to an unlikely corner of America where tradition held sway, and women seldom got a voice.

Matheson, second from left, with family, at the district attorney’s office after the investigation of her brother Will Lurye’s murder by the mob. Matheson faced off against gangsters throughout her long career as a union organizer. Courtesy of the Queens Public Library Archives.

In the early 20th century, Northeastern Pennsylvania was a region of small, often isolated townships that had been populated by waves of immigrants who had come to work in the coal mines. For decades the mines had thrived, but by the mid-1940s the coal industry was flagging, leaving families mired in long-term unemployment. Non-union garment factories emerged as an economic lifeline for a desperate workforce of miners’ wives and daughters, who worked long hours under poor conditions, with no recourse and no representation. The workers’ poverty created rich opportunities for garment contractors from New York, some with familial mob ties, who flocked to Pennsylvania for competitive advantage where they could undercut the industry’s wage rates and evade union oversight. This environment, plus very low overhead for entry, presented an opening for mobsters to extend their operations beyond New York and to secure a legitimate front for other illegal activities. The ILGWU sought to stabilize this volatile industry through the enforcement of uniform compensation and working conditions, and it sent Matheson to organize these “runaway” shops.

Matheson was a born organizer who knew she needed to earn trust to organize garment workers, and that she would need to demonstrate the value of the union to their lives, and not just their livelihoods. To unionize would require courage and defiance from many of these women; attitudes in Northeastern Pennsylvania were provincial and patriarchal. “The men had no jobs,” said Dorothy Ney, who worked with Matheson as an organizer. “They were out hanging around Main Street while the women worked.” But though the women were the breadwinners, they were still seen primarily as the caretakers of their households, and their male family members were not always tolerant of their union involvement. Union women who followed Matheson’s lead were subject to demeaning and vulgar verbal attacks, as well as physical threat. In the early days of Matheson’s tenure, husbands and fathers often yanked women right out of the picket lines, and hauled them back home. Organizing these workers required upending long-term patterns of subjugation that reached into the civic, economic, and familial aspects of a woman’s life.

These women’s political realities bore little resemblance to the ideals of American democracy that Matheson upheld, and showed why targeting voting abuses became one of her first efforts. For Matheson, one’s right to vote was an underlying principle of social democratic unionism—an ideal that emphasized workers’ political and economic rights. Whether recruiting workers to the union cause or dressing down a made member of the mob challenging her at the picket-line, she often delivered what she called “her little lecture on democracy.” In it, she held that the electoral process was an essential precursor to establishing democracy in all aspects of a working person’s life. “Having the right to vote doesn’t make it democratic,” she insisted, telling women they also had to exercise that right, and to push for justice at work. “If you don’t have a labor union or you don’t have an organization to represent you on the job, you’re really being denied your rights, your democratic rights.”

The Pittston voting gambit was a crucial first step that put the community and the local mob leadership on notice, and demonstrated Matheson’s fearlessness and solidarity with the rank-and-file. An outsider from Chicago, Matheson grew up in a fiercely progressive household with a union activist father who had his own violent encounters with thugs and racketeers. All seven Lurye children attended Socialist Sunday School, and young Min often joined her father at union rallies. Her parents frequently sheltered radicals in their home, including Emma Goldman. Matheson’s mother became adept at deflecting police searches during the inevitable raids on their home. “Dad wouldn’t work at anything, I don’t care what it was, without getting others who were also doing the same thing together,” Matheson later recalled.

It was an active, politically engaged climate, and Matheson developed a deep commitment to social justice during her youth. She became a zealous member of the Young Workers’ Communist League, where she met her life partner Bill Matheson—though the Mathesons both broke with the Communist Party when they saw Soviet interests superseding the interests of the American workers they organized. That, and her brother’s murder, distilled her shrewd assessment of ideologues and authority, and galvanized her personal sense of justice.

Matheson’s direct experience with personal loss in the fight for labor was highly relatable to the women of the coal region. Oral histories from the women who organized with Min show that they felt her deep commitment to their cause, and they treasured their hard-won status. Many recalled their time in the union as life-changing, and imbued with purpose. They never wanted to go back to the days of “no representation, no protections,” and they often spoke of Matheson’s courage and loyalty. “If we didn’t have somebody like Min Matheson with us, I believe we would have given up because she was so strong and she was down there with us,” Minnie Caputo, who joined Matheson’s organizing team and helped fight the mob in Pittston, told an interviewer. “We knew when we were in a shop how she fought for every girl and you weren’t gonna give all that up. It would be foolish for us after she fought so hard.”

And they refused to go backward. The ILGWU’s Northeast District grew from 404 members in 1944 to 11,000 by the late 1950s, with more than 250 union factories. As representatives of their shops, a growing number of elected chairladies and secretaries flocked to the union’s monthly meetings. “They loved to hear Min talk,” Ney said. “Whatever she believed in, they believed in.” And Matheson’s ILGWU, with Bill Matheson as director of education, cultivated active political and civic engagement. Union members took on leadership roles on the shop floor, joined school boards, and participated in local democratic party politics. In 1957, Pittston’s mayor instituted a “Garment Workers’ Day” to recognize their contributions to the community.

Matheson’s leadership transformed oppressed garment workers into constructive members of society, with status and dignity. The ILGWU Northeast District’s educational and recreational programs supported local charity drives and created a union newsletter and a radio program, which—typically written by Bill—were notable for their candor, humor, and accessibility. Matheson launched a mobile healthcare unit that traveled throughout the region to serve the needs of the union’s more remote members—the first of its kind. And, to enhance the public perception of the union and provide a creative outlet for members, the Mathesons formed a highly popular chorus, which performed to audiences in venues throughout the area. These activities were guided by principles of community engagement and empowerment—Matheson understood that her members would gain good standing in the community by becoming a visible and vocal presence invested in contributing to the common good.

After Matheson’s retirement, she lived on a meager union pension and sought to rejoin the ILGWU to organize part-time, hoping to help train a new generation of union activists. The ILGWU did not accept the idea, however, and Matheson died in 1992. Now, in 2020, only about 8 percent of the private sector workforce in the U.S. is represented by organized labor and the vast majority of workers lack the union-won protections Matheson championed. Matheson observed this diminishment in the ILGWU as early as 1988. “I feel that a union has to be constantly on its toes and force conditions to see that the employers live up to their agreement, and the girls have pride in their organization. Otherwise the whole concept of unionism just withers and dies, and I wouldn’t want to see that,” she reflected in a 1983 interview.

We now see the impact of the long neglect and decline of union power today in the challenges faced by workers, and front-line workers in particular, during the COVID-19 crisis. With decades of complacency toward worker protections on full view today, it’s time for a return to Min Matheson’s empowering message, and to reclaim the rights she and her members fought so hard to achieve.

The post The Woman Who Faced Down the Mob and Championed a Union appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the work, titled I, Moryck, a graduate of the predominantly white women’s college Wellesley, writes that though she has suffered from racial discrimination, she finds “honey as well as hemlock in the cup of every Negro, sunlight as well as shadow.”

The piece conveys a profound sense of mission—even a calling—to help others: “But as a woman, what did I learn? … Work, play, and that highest opportunity, the opportunity to help and give, to mother and to heal,—are mine… I am a Negro—yes—but I am also a woman.”

The 1920s ushered in an extraordinary international representation of Black artistry and intellectualism in the United States. Called the “New Negro Movement” or the “Harlem Renaissance,” this artistic movement by African Americans from the United States and West Indies heralded an African American intellectual output and demand for representation that the world had supposedly never seen.

However, the term “New Negro” was misleading. African American cultural production had debuted with force in the 19th century when some of the most significant Black newspapers, poetry, and narratives that critiqued slavery were written.

Likewise, Moryck’s writings grew upon a long legacy of Black intellectualism and activism in her home city of Newark. A close examination of more than 100 years of archival records reveals clear examples of how Newark’s mid-19th-century Black abolitionism and Black women’s claims for justice were the foundation of the “New Negro” and the much later “Black Arts Movement.”

Wellesley College Portrait of Brenda Moryck. Courtesy of Wellesley College.

Newark’s significance looms due to its involvement in all of the major movements for abolition and activism of the period. It was a place where free and enslaved Black long-term residents and new migrants built some of the earliest African American churches, engaged in significant dialogues about emancipation, and led activist organizing, including forming societies and writing petitions about abolition and suffrage in the years before the Civil War. There, the Black activist community used its wealth, energy, and power to expand the dialogue about abolition and suffrage within the community and also assist with basic livelihood issues.

From the historical record, largely written by men, it’s possible to find brief glimpses of what life was like for Newark’s Black women.

For example, in 1804, an indirect note about the value of education appears when the Newark Female Charitable Society committee decided that “Mrs. Thibou was directed to pay Mrs Browns account of schooling Sarah a black womans children.”

Or in 1805, a newspaper article tells the story of a murdered Black woman named Polly, whose murderer, her husband, was hung in Newark’s Military Park. When Polly refused to reunite with her husband after he had her beaten with a stick, he tried to poison her two times and succeeded on the third.

By tracing the archive in this way, the early ways women worked to help each other becomes apparent. A church deposition documents the story of one African American woman offering to purchase the freedom of another. The woman, Jenny, offered to pay 50 pounds for Flora within a year. She received a handwritten note from Flora’s white owner, but Jenny could not read, and her employer informed her that the note for Flora was not a bill of sale. This deposition gives us insight into how Black women purchased freedom for themselves and others, even as some faced challenges like illiteracy and limited income.

The challenges that Polly and Flora would face, and the work that women like Jenny would do to help them, would essentially model much of the work that Black women progressive reformers, writers, and activists would do to liberate themselves artistically, socially, and economically after the Civil War.

Part of the reason it is hard to find Black women in the historical record is because early African American formal institutions in the city were male-centered. In 1818, Newark’s “African Society” allowed women and the enslaved to be members. However, they clearly stated that “None but male members may vote nor any under the age of 16 years.’”

But women’s work and importance within abolitionist organizations in the city ultimately forced public comment. By May of 1834, the “Constitution of the Colored Anti-Slavery Society of Newark” explicitly decreed that “any person” could qualify for membership. The “First August March” in Newark, celebrating emancipation in the West Indies in 1838 and 1839, indicated that the entire community took part, though all the scheduled speakers were male. By the time the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, renowned African American poet and Newark clergyman Elymas Payson felt it necessary to detail women’s influence and bravery when he wrote:

But whence that voice, so soft, so clear,
So musical within my ear?
It says “We’ll every power defy
Beneath which helpless women sigh,
And seek to mitigate their grief,
And toil and pray for their relief.
We will for fugitives provide,
We will the trembling outcast hide:
This will we do while we have breath,
Fearless of prisons, chains, or death.”
This voice is from the female band
Who are united heart and hand
With all the truly good and brave,
To aid the poor absconding slave.

Through the 19th century, Black women in Newark continued to take on more formal and public roles in civic life. Archival documents reflect how they worked expressly to reach the most vulnerable women and children and cultivate the minds of the privileged around political and artistic issues.

In June 1833, for instance, Christopher Rush, who helped found the first Black church in Newark, contributed to the formation of the Phoenix Society in Manhattan. The goals of this organization included Dorcas Societies—groups formed by women to collect books for circulating libraries and clothing for the poor.

This long legacy of women’s activism in Newark led directly to Brenda Ray Moryck’s 1927 manifesto. By the time Rose Moryck, Brenda Ray’s mother, was born in 1860 to prominent Newark abolitionist parents, the roles available for women leaders in Newark were transformative. In 1872, a female student integrated Newark schools. Prominent women began taking on the roles of teachers, including Harriet Brown, the daughter of Newark’s Underground Railroad leader, and Grace Baxter Fenderson, daughter of Newark’s first African American principal James Baxter. Fenderson went on to found Newark’s chapter of the NAACP in 1915. Rose Moryck would follow in their footsteps to become one of Newark’s early African American teachers.

This combination of empowering Black women with reform power and encouraging the circulation of books and “mental feasts”—meetings for intellectual cultivation and improvement—set the stage for organizations like the Phillis Wheatley Society and Sunday lyceums, all discussion groups that were organized in the 1910s by Black women in Newark. Rose Moryck, one of Newark’s African American teachers, was a prominent speaker at these gatherings, which included lectures on Black history.

Surely, women like Rose Moryck reflected the beliefs and practices of even white and immigrant women during that progressive era of reforms between 1890 and 1920. Women reformers regarded their agitation and social reform as extensions of their natural roles as mothers. But that work became more strikingly political among the women of Newark.

The journal Ebony and Topaz. Courtesy of Public Domain.

By 1922, Newark was hosting the national meeting of the N.A.A.C.P., while Grace Fenderson organized a parade to support the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill that was then in Congress. Prominent women’s groups marched, and groups of men and women carried signs reading “The Failure of the Anti-Lynching Bill Would Officially Condone Mob Murder.” A group of boys carried a banner that said “We are Fifteen Years Old. A Boy of Our Age Was Roasted Alive recently.”

This Newark community, a bridge between the abolitionist and reconstructionist past with a modern Black sensibility, prepared Brenda Ray Moryck to join the “New Negro” movement. After graduating from Wellesley, Moryck went on to write, organize, and teach in Newark, Brooklyn, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. She was an in-demand speaker, theater critic, and fundraiser, and, because of her family’s standing, a Black socialite. She worked with W.E.B. Dubois and other leaders of the Harlem Renaissance and the NAACP, published in Opportunity, and The Crisis, and also produced plays with the Harlem Experimental Theater and wrote theater criticism. Her peers viewed their artistic and activist work not as competing callings, but as complementary—using literature and art to facilitate social change.

Moryck’s first marriage was to a schoolteacher, an African American graduate of Harvard who died a year after their marriage. Her second marriage, 13 years later, was to a Black lawyer born in Haiti who she claimed graduated from the Sorbonne. She would move from Newark to Washington, D.C., and back to Manhattan.

While Moryck was very much a part of the Black elite, she was both enamored with and critical of the privileges and limitations of her caste. Her essay defending the Black elite of Washington D.C. against Langston Hughes’s denunciations of them in an August 1927 issue of Opportunity magazine as “pompous” and “pouter-pigeons” and the youth as “moving away from the race” is often cited in debates about the Black elite in the 1920s.

Her fiction explores the internal and external prisons of the elite. In I, Moyrck writes that her family’s economic and class privilege allowed her to not connect her Blackness to inferiority or caste until her adolescence. And in the short story Days, she writes of a middle-class African American couple being harassed and discriminated against by the working-class whites in her building. The wife, who seems to be modeled after Moryck, is shocked by their racism. Her character orders custom wallpaper, plays the piano, and even gets picked up by a famous Black entertainer in a car for dinner—fueling the class envy and bigotry of her white neighbors.

For the most part, Moryck was not ashamed of her middle-class upbringing and her commitment to aesthetics and beauty—rather it empowered her. As a teacher at both the Douglas High School in D.C. and Bordentown, she would lead the theater club and write letters about discrimination to visitors of the Black veterans in the soldier’s hospital. Being a member of the esteemed New York Committee of 100 (women) led her to highlight “disenfranchisement of the Negro in the South.”

Though she was comfortably middle-class and married by the 1940s, surely economic insecurity haunted her. In her 1941 biographical update for her biography at Wellesley College, she explains why she appeared to publish little under her own name. In the questionnaire, she wrote her “present position as “Writer,” adding: “because of prejudice, facts must remain knowledge of firm, by their request, as they claim many Caucasians would boycott magazines if they knew the author of some of their favorite stories was colored, since stories are not about Negroes! Since money rather than fame is my unworthy goal, I don’t mind loss of public acclaim.”

Moryck died in 1945, and she was buried in Newark in the same plot as her mother and father.

Today, Newark remains home to generations of Black women artists and organizers, who carry on the city’s long tradition of art, freedom, and justice.

The post The Incredible Legacy of Newark’s Black Women Activists appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“When I think about women in politics, I’m not talking about the woman who’s holding the microphone on stage,” said panelist and UCLA gender studies professor Ju Hui Judy Han, whose research tracks the demonstrations on behalf of the so-called “comfort women” that have persisted every Wednesday for 28 years now in South Korea. “I’m looking at who sets up the microphone, who builds the stage, who prints the signs, who cleans up afterward.”

The evening’s moderator, Rinku Sen, co-president of the Board of the Women’s March, agreed. When it comes to women-led protests, she said that in her experience “longevity and logistics” are “two words that should be closely tied together.”

Sen recalled once separating organizers by their gender identities for a training session. While the men were done in half the time, with demands and a press plan made, the women didn’t even finish the exercise. “They were trying to figure out where’s the child care, how are we going to turn people out, what was the phone tree system going to be,” she said. In protest, like in many other situations, she said, women often take care of “the logistics and the hospitality and inclusion: the ways that feel like people are welcome and belong at this protest or this movement or this meeting.”

That sense of inclusion and cooperation transcends borders, said panelist Valentine M. Moghadam. “There’s always been this solidarity,” explained the Northeastern University sociologist, whose research focuses on transnational feminist networks that bring together women from two or more countries around a common theme or set of objectives. “We know [transnational collaboration] took place in the International Socialist Movement, which was worldwide. The Women’s International Democratic Federation, that was also worldwide. So we’ve always done this.”

USC labor historian and panelist Francille Rusan Wilson, who is also the co-curator of the Natural History Museum’s Rise Up L.A.: A Century of Votes for Women exhibition, agreed. “One of the things we don’t really pay attention to is just how long these transnational women’s networks have operated,” she said. Famously around 1906, she pointed out, the suffragist and civil rights leader Mary Church Terrell spoke at an international women’s conference in Berlin, where she was the only American woman to give her speech in English, German, and French.

Today, Moghadam said, technological advances have only heightened and accelerated such networks. Offering a recent example, Han drew attention to how Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a Woman” speech was used in a queer activist rally in South Korea in 2015. “We see the lessons from Black feminism in a very significant and direct way,” said Han, explaining that in this context, Truth’s words were used to challenge a women’s rights agenda that was promoting gender equality at the expense of LGBT rights. But Han also cautioned that such transnational exchanges of ideas can also cause harm, as in the case of women’s role in global evangelical Christian networks that have shaped gender politics and sexual politics in South Korea.

The significance of right-wing women’s movements, including the danger of conflating feminist movements and women’s movements and whether the gap between progressive and conservative women activists can be bridged, was also discussed, along with the importance of women in protest whose work has long been overlooked.

On the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, Rusan Wilson added that there is much work to be done to address the many people whose stories have still been left out of the suffragist narrative in the U.S.

“We hear about Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Alice Paul, but we don’t hear about the Black, brown, Indigenous women, the Chinese women, the other Asian American women, who also joined the struggle to vote and did not get the right to vote in 1920,” said the historian. “This is a time for us to think about who got the right to vote and who was excluded.”

Later, during a Q&A session with audience members, the panel reflected on how the struggle continues when it comes to women’s representation in U.S. politics today.

“We have a long way to go in our own country,” said Rusan Wilson, “about why we—including women—judge women and men so differently.”

The post The Enduring Power of Women’s Protests appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If Goldberg was drawn to “Star Trek” because its cast included a powerful black woman of the future, in crafting a character for Goldberg on “TNG,” creator Gene Roddenberry conjured a name from the past. He named the bartender who blended mysticism with shrewd wit “Guinan,” after the once legendary Texas Guinan, a larger-than-life Texas girl turned emcee of some of the most exclusive speakeasies in Prohibition-era New York City.

Although Guinan may be forgotten today, her name was once as familiar as Whoopi Goldberg’s. Born Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan in 1884, Guinan took vaudeville by storm in her 20s, she starred in silent films in her 30s, and in her 40s, she was an influential impresario. An entrepreneur and a business woman, who ran nightclubs considered hubs of political and cultural power in New York City, Guinan alleged she was once thrown out of France for being too hot to handle.

Guinan grew up in Waco, Texas, where her parents ran a grocery before turning their hands to running a horse and cattle ranch. Her childhood consisted of riding horses, roping cattle, and shooting guns, skills that prepared her for a world of entertainment—Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, pageants, and spectaculars—that was already beginning to disappear, just as she mastered it.

Promotional picture of Texas Guinan. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

After a brief stint in Colorado, Guinan moved to New York City, where she quickly found work in vaudeville. When a get-rich quick scheme involving a weight-loss scam went sour in 1913, Guinan left for Hollywood, performing in two-reelers, generally of the Roman-riding, gun-toting variety. Buxom, outspoken, already in her 30s, and by the standards of the day, old, it was hard to imagine Guinan as a damsel in distress. Judging from the look on her face and the set of her jaw in films and photos from the era, it was more likely that Guinan would make the outlaws rue the day they’d set eyes on her.

Guinan emceed in L.A. before returning to New York City, where she partnered with bootlegger Larry Fay, conducting business in their speakeasies perched at the center of the room, armed with a clapper and police whistle. While rumrunners sold pricy pints of whisky from back hallways, Guinan’s patrons listened to “her girls” sing and dance. Guinan, meanwhile, greeted customers with her trademark “Hello, suckers” or zippy one-liners like “You may be all the world to your mother, but you’re just a cover charge to me.”

Guinan flaunted Prohibition-era laws. Busted for violating the Volstead Act on more than one occasion, she defiantly wore a necklace made of tiny gold padlocks around her neck, an in-your-face statement against federal investigations and harassment. After she was found not guilty of violating the Volstead Act in 1927, federal agents—who had already condemned her as a “moral pervert”—dogged her footsteps, arresting her again the next year for violating a new curfew law.

Like many professional women, Guinan hungered for financial independence. Ambitious and independent, she refused to play by the rules of her era. And she wasn’t shy in expressing this desire. Of an actor she was involved with in Hollywood, Guinan recalled: “I should have taken him like Grant took Richmond. … I was the one woman who could take [him] and leave him where I found him. I was out to take not be taken. He taught me one thing, though, that the sweetest things in this life are obtained by the work of one’s own hands.”

At the time, men who were creating and curating media legends only saw the boobs and the busts and the bucks. But there was far more to Guinan’s story than that. An animal lover who refused to eat meat, Guinan was a teetotaler who never drank alcohol, preferring coffee. Despite her risqué reputation, she only married once, to newspaper cartoonist John J. Moynahan. When she wasn’t on the road, Guinan lived with her mother, father, brother, and pets in Greenwich Village.

To be sure, Guinan was no saint, but she was no “blonde bombshell” either. She was a New Woman, not in a Mary Pickford, girl with the curls kind of way, but with the moxie of a devoted New Yorker. Until Guinan broke into the nightclub business, emceeing was pretty much the exclusive province of men. Guinan opened doors for other women in burlesque and vaudeville, admiring women who also struggled to control their images and make headway as managers and owners. Guinan met Mae West in the teens, when they were struggling performers in New York’s vaudeville stagehouses, and they remained friends for the rest of Guinan’s life. She was frenemies with evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, alternately admiring and antagonizing her, and wanted to play McPherson on the big screen.

At a time when few women stood up to theater owners and producers, Guinan fought for pay equity. In 1928, she won a $26,000 award from Duo Art Productions, when the company was ordered to pay her the difference between the wages promised her for starring in the revue Padlocks of 1927 and the amount they actually paid her. When Guinan joined protests against the Mastick Law in 1930, which eliminated overtime for women working in factories and department stores, she told the crowd “the law was intended to keep women out of jobs in which they competed with men.” At 46, Guinan knew a thing or two about laws intended to exclude women from jobs reserved for men. When Guinan died unexpectedly of dysentery in 1933, 12,000 funeral goers came to the Campbell Funeral Church on Broadway. Women who came from very different walks of life but shared the experience of being paid less than men gathered to comfort each other.

Because of her outsized reputation and early death, there were some halfhearted efforts to turn her life into the stuff of legend. Shortly after she died, Guinan served as the basis for the character Maudie that Mae West played in Night After Night (1932). A film biography of Guinan’s life, starring Betty Hutton and titled Incendiary Blonde (1945), characterized her as a rough and tumble starstruck tomboy, enamored by the prospect of wearing a white gown with a sequined head dress, with two silver pistols at her side. Martha Raye starred in a musical flop based on Guinan’s life—Hello, Sucker!—in 1969. In 1995, Bette Midler said she’d been cast in “a star vehicle directed by Martin Scorsese about the legendary New York saloonkeeper Texas Guinan.” Mostly, these versions made Guinan’s story fit into one Hollywood loved to tell about women caught in its hungry star machine: they loved the sexism of Hollywood, they’d sell their very souls for stardom, they wanted it, they asked for it, even if what they were said to want ended more like Sunset Boulevard than It Happened One Night.

But in the mid-1950s, Guinan’s story had a chance at a different kind of telling when Vera Caspary began shopping a project based on the Texas girl turned emcee of some of the most exclusive speakeasies in Prohibition-era New York City. If Caspary’s name also has you scratching your head, that’s because hers is another that few other than film buffs or historians would recognize today. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, Caspary enjoyed successes of her own, as a bestselling novelist and prolific screenwriter. In fact, one of her trademark novels about independent-minded working girls was made into the Academy Award-winning film Laura.

Caspary was drawn to stories about women who had come before her, whose struggles had in part paved the way for her own successes. That made Guinan a natural choice for a project. Caspary, a fan of live entertainment, had, in fact, been a regular at Guinan’s clubs in the late 1920s, where she watched as Guinan “bawled at patrons to give each little girl a big hand.”

Though Guinan had been dead for nearly 25 years when Caspary started working on her story, she remained a touchstone for women eager to tell stories about women who had opened doors before them. In Caspary’s script, Guinan figures as a boss who refuses to let her “girls” be sexually harassed—“In my club no gentleman pulls a girl’s fringe without a license.” She wants love, but on her own terms. And she’s a “hard-headed business woman” who, when asked why she “can’t be a normal woman,” launches into a tirade:

Normal, huh! Listen, Mister, where I grew up the neighborhood was full of normal women. Good, normal women. Worked like dogs seven days a week. For what? On Saturday night a kick in the teeth from the drunken bums that called themselves normal husbands. No, thank you.

But by 1957, Caspary was forced to give up on the project. All her efforts to get a formal contract for “the Texas Guinan story,” she told producer Hal Stanley, “have been in vain.” At a time when film and television were narrowing the definition of what counted as a normal woman, it would hardly have done to have someone like Caspary—who held unorthodox views of her own—make a film celebrating another woman who had refused to put up with someone else’s definition of normal.

It’s a shame Caspary never had the chance to make her version of Guinan’s story. And while Roddenberry’s shout-out to Guinan in 1987 was a sweet Easter egg of a tribute for those who got the reference, this oblique nod to a hidden figure doesn’t really satisfy those who’d like to see more stories appear on the screen about those who struggled against sexism in the industry and onscreen in the past and who—even if it was for a fleeting moment—enjoyed some measure of success.

So when Guinan appears, perhaps behind the bar of the Ten Forward, on the next season of “Picard,” raise a glass in tribute to Texas Guinan and Vera Caspary and tell the person next to you about them. And while you’re at it, think about why—nearly a century later—we still know so little about Guinan, Caspary, and women like Gertrude Berg, Gypsy Rose Lee, Hazel Scott, Fredi Washington, Lois Weber, and others who worked to transform media industries and, in doing so, change the stories we tell about the past and the future.

The post The Legendary Saloonkeeper Who Was the Real-Life Inspiration for Star Trek’s Guinan appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was a perilous time. Only eight weeks before, a British cargo vessel had been torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat off Cape Farewell just to the south. As newly minted members of the Greenland Patrol of the Atlantic Fleet, the Bowdoin and the Comanche were responsible for preventing German forces from establishing a base on Greenland and for providing vital support for the Allies.

As the Morrissey’s passengers disembarked, town residents gathered onshore. Commander Donald Macmillan of the Bowdoin hurried forward to greet the person in charge. Defying all expectations, the leader was no grizzled Navy man. Instead, a stately, well-coiffed California woman of a certain age clambered out of the rowboat and strode toward him.

Louise Arner Boyd was the world’s leading female Arctic explorer and geographer. By that time, she had organized, financed, and led six maritime expeditions to East Greenland, Franz Josef Land, Jan Mayen Land, and Spitsbergen. She had been showered with honors by five countries, and her scientific accomplishments and daring exploits had earned her newspaper headlines and global renown. A month earlier, many journalists had covered the departure of the 1941 Louise A. Boyd Expedition to Greenland from Washington D.C. But after the Morrissey weighed anchor, more than a few local residents wondered what this outspoken, unusual woman was doing in the company of high-ranking officers engaged in war matters.

The answer to that question was a secret. Boyd, operating under the guise of her work as an explorer, was conducting a covert mission for the American government, searching for possible military landing sites and investigating the improvement of radio communications in this region. Even the captain and crew of her own ship were unaware of the expedition’s true goals.

Boyd’s extensive technical knowledge of Greenland and her work as a U.S. military consultant would make her an invaluable asset to the Allied war effort. But, for all her accomplishments and service to her country, she has largely been forgotten, and not just because historians preferred to consider the larger-than-life dramas of her male colleagues. Her focus on contributing to scientific journals rather than pandering to the sensationalistic whims of the reading public cost her some acclaim. And she had no direct descendants to carry on her legacy.

Her 1941 mission along the western coast of Greenland and eastern Arctic Canada was Boyd’s seventh and final expedition. As on her previous voyages, she pushed the boundaries of geographic knowledge and undertook hazardous journeys to dangerous places. Boyd also brought in promising young scientists to participate in vital polar research. Exploration of the Arctic seascape—with its vast expanses of bobbing ice, the rhythmic sway of the wooden ship as it traversed the surging waves, the soothing solitude of the north—resonated deeply with Boyd and defined who she was and what she did.

“Far north, hidden behind grim barriers of pack ice, are lands that hold one spell-bound,” she wrote in 1935’s The Fiord Region of East Greenland. “Gigantic imaginary gates, with hinges set in the horizon, seem to guard these lands. Slowly the gates swing open, and one enters another world where men are insignificant amid the awesome immensity of lonely mountains, fiords and glaciers.”

But her life had not always been like this. Born in 1887 to a California gold miner who struck it rich and a patrician mother from Rochester, Louise Arner Boyd was raised in a genteel mansion in San Rafael, California. As a child, she was enthralled by real-life tales of polar exploration, but grew up expecting to marry and have children. Like her mother, Boyd became a socialite and philanthropist active in community work.

But her life took unexpected turns. Her brothers died young; her parents did not survive into old age. By the time she was in her early thirties, she had lost her entire family and inherited a fortune. Unmarried and without children, she followed a dream to travel north.

Her first tourist cruise to the Arctic Ocean was so moving that she returned a few years later. This second voyage was also only a pleasure trip, but she chose Franz Josef Land as her destination—then as now, one of the most remote and unforgiving locations on Earth. Following her return to California, Boyd knew that her future was linked to the north. But it took a stroke of destiny to transform her into an explorer.

Boyd planned her first full expedition and arrived during the summer of 1928 in the far northern Norwegian city of Tromsø, prepared to set sail. She was shocked by the news that the iconic explorer Roald Amundsen—conqueror of the South Pole and the first person to successfully traverse the Northwest Passage—had vanished while on a flight to rescue another explorer. A desperate mission involving ships and airplanes from six European countries was launched to locate Amundsen and his French crew.

Boyd lost no time in putting the ship she had hired, as well as the provisions and services of its crew, at the disposal of the government in its rescue efforts. But there was a catch—Boyd demanded to go along. The Norwegian government eagerly accepted her offer, and she ended up an integral part of the Amundsen rescue expedition. Only the most experienced and high-ranking explorers, aviators, and generals had been chosen for this dangerous undertaking, and no allowances were made for a woman. Despite her lack of expertise and the skepticism of male expedition participants, Boyd assumed her responsibilities with vigor.

Louise Arner Boyd holding a piece of equipment on an expedition. Courtesy of Joanna Kafarowski.

Tragically, Amundsen was never found, but by the end of that fateful summer, Boyd had won awards from the Norwegian and French governments for her courage and stamina. And she had discovered her purpose in life as an Arctic explorer.

From this point forward, she began living a double life. While at home in the United States, she was a gracious hostess, a generous benefactor and a beloved member of California high society. While sailing on the high seas, she assumed a different, heroic identity.

How did one become an explorer? She had no formal education to draw on. She had left school in her teens, had limited outdoor expertise, and no family members remained to advise her. Instead, she implemented her charm and networking skills to identify individuals who could help her. She developed an unerring ability to choose exactly the right scientist for the job. Her expedition participants included geologist and famed mountaineer Noel Odell, who was the only survivor of the tragic British Mount Everest Expedition of 1924. She was also a remarkably fast learner who sought out experts in her fields of interest—including photographer Ansel Adams and California Academy of Sciences botanist Alice Eastwood—to teach her what she needed to know.

During the 1930s and ’40s, Boyd’s skills and abilities as an explorer grew. Unlike her male colleagues, she had no interest in conquering territories or being the “first.” Rather, as a self-taught geographer who was awarded the Cullum Geographical Medal in 1938 (only the second woman to earn it), Boyd focused on contributing to science.

She left extensive photographic documentation of Greenland currently used by glaciologists to track climate change in Greenlandic glaciers. She pioneered the use of cutting-edge technology, including the first deep-water recording echo-sounder and photogrammetrical equipment to conduct exploratory surveys in inaccessible places. She discovered a glacier in Greenland, a new underwater bank in the Norwegian Sea, and many new botanical species. More than 70 years later, data generated during her expeditions is still cited by contemporary scientists in the fields of geology, geomorphology, oceanography, and botany.

After the perilous 1941 mission to Greenland was a resounding success, the National Bureau of Standards commended Boyd for resolving critical radio transmission problems they had grappled with in the Arctic for decades. A certificate of appreciation from the Department of the Army extolled her “exemplary service as being highly beneficial to the cause of victory.”

For all this good work, she was not universally respected by her expedition participants. Despite her seemingly gregarious nature, Boyd battled shyness and struggled at times to assert herself. Initially, most academics were happy enough with her credentials and her generous offer to join the team, but once the expedition was underway, some of them ridiculed her behind her back and undermined her position as leader. University of Chicago geologist Harlen Bretz and Duke University plant ecologist H.J. Oosting wrote scathingly about her.

By the time the war was over, Louise Arner Boyd was nearly sixty years old; the 1941 trip was her last true expedition. In 1955, she would realize a dream by becoming one of the first women to be flown over the North Pole. And her polar work continued—through her active participation as an American Geographical Society Councilor, and a member of the Society of Woman Geographers and the American Polar Society—until her death in 1972.

Today the name Louise Arner Boyd is only a dim memory. But it is one worth reviving.

The post The Genteel California Socialite Who Became the World’s Leading Female Arctic Explorer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We had decided to create a Jeopardy game for Women’s History Month based on women who were involved in the early years of the physician’s practice that evolved into our internationally renowned academic medical center. I offered to visit the clinic’s historical archive, expecting to glean a few little-known facts about the handful of women who were staples of the organization’s 150-year-old history.

To my surprise, the staff in the archive brought me lists, files, and boxes of information about many women I never had heard of before. As a native of Rochester, Minnesota, where the clinic originated, and as an employee for nearly two decades, I was mystified as to how I missed knowing about these women and their important contributions.

Weeks after completing the Jeopardy game, the absence of these women in our local history still unsettled me. I consulted several histories of the region that cover the years when the Mayo practice was emerging from the prairie, expecting to find that women were included and that I had merely missed seeing their stories previously.

But I found very little about women at all.

The most comprehensive early history of the city of Rochester is a pictorial history. I counted 270 photographs in the book and only 49 of them—18 percent—are of women. There are nearly as many images of horses in the book as there are of women. That was my tipping point, and I embarked on a quest to uncover the stories of these significant women.

Mayo Clinic’s early years were documented in an 800-page book with hundreds of citations, but this seemingly comprehensive history included only scant mention of women. So I dove into the many files provided by the archive staff, and over four years I collected the stories of more than 40 women who made important contributions during Mayo Clinic’s founding years.

Dr. William Worrall Mayo began practicing medicine in Rochester during the Civil War. His sons joined him after medical school and together they built a practice in leased office space downtown.

In 1883, a devastating tornado hit the small prairie town, killing 40 people and leaving 500 people homeless.

As the town was recovering, Mother Alfred Moes, the mother superior of a Franciscan congregation of sisters, envisioned the need for a hospital to meet the needs of the community. She persistently approached Dr. Mayo, who was reluctant to start a hospital because of the cost and poor reputations of hospitals at the time. But eventually he agreed that, if she and the sisters built it, he and his sons would care for patients there. In 1889, after six years of giving music lessons and selling handicrafts to fund the hospital, the Sisters opened Saint Marys Hospital with 27 beds and two operating rooms, a venue that became the cornerstone of a successful surgical practice.

The Clinic’s renowned nursing care began within weeks of the hospital opening. Edith Graham, the youngest of 13 children from a farm outside of Rochester, took the train to Chicago with three other young women to obtain nursing diplomas. After graduation, Edith returned to Rochester and began teaching the Sisters the latest in nursing practices, establishing a sound basis for nursing care in the facility.

Alice Magaw, who also went to Chicago for nurse’s training, would develop a method for administering anesthesia at Saint Marys that set the national standard. Considered the “Mother of Anesthesia,” she documented 14,000 cases without an anesthesia-related death, greatly contributing to the excellent surgical outcomes that Mayo physicians achieved in the early days and upon which they established their reputation.

In 1892, Sister Joseph Dempsey followed Mother Alfred as the administrator of Saint Marys Hospital, a role she held for 47 years. Under her competent leadership, the hospital grew from 27 beds to 600, making it the largest and arguably finest privately owned hospital in the country. At the opening reception of the seven-story expansion of the hospital in 1922, Dr. Henry S. Plummer, one of the most esteemed physicians in the Mayo practice, declared: “Only someone of great genius and great faith would dare to double the size of this already great hospital…. Sister Joseph had the vision and greatness to do it.”

In 1899, Dr. Gertrude Booker Granger became the second physician outside of the Mayo family to join the practice. She assumed responsibility for the ophthalmology cases, making her the first specialist at the clinic. She also made many important contributions to public health in Rochester. Shortly after Granger’s arrival, several more women physicians became part of the clinical practice and research.

Another important addition was Mayo’s head librarian. From her arrival in 1907 to her death in 1936, Maud Mellish Wilson expanded the clinic’s national and international reputation. As a gifted editor as well as librarian, she assured that the medical articles the Mayo doctors wrote were of the highest quality. She also started the highly influential medical journal known today as Mayo Clinic Proceedings.

Women joined the Mayo practice as social workers, caring for the non-medical needs of patients. These included unescorted children sent from across the country, and Jewish patients whose dietary needs and customs at death were unfamiliar to the Mayo doctors. Women, mostly nurses, from Mayo Clinic also deployed to France during World War I and cared for wounded and ill soldiers 50 miles from the front.

Put simply, Mayo Clinic would not be the internationally renowned medical center that it is today without the contributions of many women who are left out of the history.

To its credit, Mayo Clinic supported my research and writing to fill in the missing pieces of history, but the Mayo history is not the only record that has overlooked women. I am now researching the contributions that women in the Midwest made during World War II in the military, industry, and home. I am running into more gender bias as I consult books, even recently published, with titles such as World War II: A Complete History, which include very few women, despite the reality that millions served in the armed forces, millions worked in industries, and millions supported home front activities vital to the war effort.

And of course, the problem of underrecognition is broader, to the point of being pervasive. Very few trade biographies published each year are about women. Our daily newspapers and news feeds, which form our most immediate historical records, reveal significant gender inequity as well.

The trouble with biased histories is that they endure. Even Ken Burns’ documentary of Mayo Clinic, which first aired in September 2018, gives well-deserved recognition to the Sisters of Saint Francis, but only briefly acknowledges a few other women, mostly the spouses. The critical contributions of Alice Magaw, Maud Mellish Wilson, and other important women are left unrecognized.

What began for me as a desire to set the Mayo Clinic record straight has become a commitment to find and proliferate the contributions of as many women as I can during my career. I hope others will join me in this endeavor.

The post The Women Who Built Mayo Clinic appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.