To celebrate Women’s History Month, the Laurel Hill Cemetery hosted an event commemorating the efforts of twelve Civil War era women, all of whom are buried in the Laurel Hill cemetery.  Located in North Philadelphia along the Schuylkill River, Laurel Hill presented “Legendary Ladies of the Civil War Era” on Sunday, March 20, 2016. The presentation was conducted by living historian, Kerry Bryan, who portrayed one of the deceased women, Mrs. Elizabeth Hutter, before a diverse audience in a small, intimate setting.  The event was solely focused on women and their contributions to the war effort.  It centered on the works of twelve women whose individual successes supported the advancement of women in society, especially the role of working women.

Mrs. Elizabeth Hutter began by telling the story of her own life, followed by the stories of eleven of her “friends”: Louise E. (Louisa) Claghorn, Martha Jane Coston, Mary McHenry Cox, Elizabeth Duane Gillespie, Sarah Josepha Hale, Mary Anna Longstretch, Anna Hallowell, Mary Morris Husband, Margaretta Meade, Martha Thompson Pemberton, and last but not least, Laura Matila Towne.  The presentation successfully highlighted the impressive résumés of each of these women.  For example, Mrs. Hutter (1821-1895) was a dear friend of Abraham Lincoln and served as a Washington hostess during the Polk administration.  She founded the Northern Home for Friendless Children in 1853, was a volunteer Civil War nurse, the co-chair of the Labor Revenue and Income Committee for Philadelphia’s Great Central Fair in June 1864, founded Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Orphans Institute, became the first woman to receive a gubernatorial order (becoming Lady Inspector of schools for soldiers’ orphans in Philadelphia), and founded a home for newsboys, a place to help keep young men off the streets.  Mrs. Hutter was not alone in her long list of revolutionary achievements.  Anna Hallowell (1831-1905) was the first woman to serve on the Philadelphia School Board. She was a teacher, an early social worker, a nurse for wounded Union soldiers, supporter of the Women’s Medical College, organized free kindergartens in poor neighborhoods, verbally protested the fugitive slave act, and taught local black children how to read and write.  Mrs. Hutter’s presentation also discussed the difficulties these women faced while pursuing their endeavors. For example, Martha Jane Coston spent years completing and trying to patent her deceased husband’s invention.  She was repeatedly rejected on the account of her womanhood but Mrs. Coston refused to be denied and eventually succeeded in patenting Coston-type flares which are still used today.

The benevolent works of these women demonstrate the importance of women’s work during the nineteenth century.  While men were busy dodging bullets on the battlefield, these women worked to improve the world around them – opening schools, organizing community events, writing books, supporting underprivileged children, and raising the standard for a woman’s role in society.  Historian Alice Fahs of the University of California, explains that in the 1880s and 1890s, “Commentators and writers increasingly attached the idea of Civil War sacrifice for the nation to men only, gendering the memory of the war in a new way.”[1]  Although women’s contributions to the war effort were monumental, women did not receive the recognition they deserved, neither during nor after the war.  The media focused on battlefield action rather than on the groundbreaking works of women at home.  In historian Judith Giesberg’s “Waging War Their Own Way: Women and the Civil War in Pennsylvania”, she explains, “the army relied on working-class women and they , in turn, depended on money they would earn by providing goods and services to volunteers and others who camped or convalesced in the Keystone State as well as those who passed through.”[2] The war proved that in order to be successful on both the battlefield and on the home-front, men and women needed to support one another’s work.  Unfortunately, women received the short end of the stick and their work was often overlooked.  Today, those women are finally receiving a hint of the attention they deserve through small programs such as the one produced by Laurel Hill.  The goal of the Laurel Hill event was honor these women properly and show respect for their personal accomplishments.

Laurel Hill’s presentation was restricted by geographical and cultural factors when it selected the twelve women it would highlight for the event.  Because Philadelphia is in the North, eleven out of the twelve women were Northerners supporting the Union during the war.  The only Southern woman, Martha Thompson Pemberton, married Philadelphia-born John Clifford Pemberton, and the two moved back to Philadelphia after living most of their life in Virginia.  All twelve women were also white, elite women.  In the nineteenth and early twenty centuries when these women were buried, only white elites were allowed, or could afford, to be buried in the Laurel Hill Cemetery.  While the event was unable to capture the roles of all women during the Civil War, it did provided a detailed description about the lives of the twelve particular women it discussed.

The event ended with a short walk through the cemetery followed by a light reception for the attendees.  The event successfully served its purpose as a Women’s History Month event to honor the work of women during the Civil War. The living historian’s performance was lively and entertaining. The stories of these Civil War women deserve to be heard.  Thankfully, the Laurel Hill Cemetery recognizes the value in preserving the history of these women.

Bibliography

Fahs, Alice. “The Feminized Civil War: Gender, Northern Popular Literature, and the Memory

of the War, 1861-1900.” The Journal of American History 85 (1999). Oxford University

Press, Organization of American Historians:1461–94. doi:10.2307/2568268.

Giesberg, Judith. “Waging War Their Own Way: Women and the Civil War in

Pennsylvania.” Pennsylvania Legacies 13 (2013). The Historical Society of

Pennsylvania:16–27. doi:10.5215/pennlega.13.1-2.0016.

[1] Alice Fahs, “The Feminized Civil War: Gender, Northern Popular Literature, and the Memory of the War, 1861-1900,” The Journal of American History 85 (1999): 1487.

[2] Judith Giesberg, “Waging War Their Own Way: Women and the Civil War in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Legacies 13 (2013): 20.

I attended an event about the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament presented by Stephanie Morris, the archive director of the collection. The event was held at the Blockson Collection on Temple’s campus, on 16 March, 2016.

The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament was founded in 1891 by Mother Katharine Drexel as a Catholic religious institute. The original name included “for Indians and Colored People,” which Morris made considerable note of and drew attention to as an example of the now-archaic language and terms of the nineteenth century. There were no more than 20 people in attendance, most of them much older, and only one or two other young students.

The beginning of the presentation was loaded with facts about Katharine Drexel’s family tree, which was helpful in order to have an idea of where her family came from, but I felt that it dragged on a bit too long with countless names of people who had little to do with the organization that the presentation was about. Throughout all of the naming, though, Morris tended to focus mainly on the women of the Drexel family, and even left out the name of Anthony Joseph Drexel, either in the spirit of Women’s History Month or because she felt the audience would have this knowledge already.

She talked a lot about Katharine Drexel’s upbringing: Drexel was homeschooled and very educated, extremely wealthy by way of the inheritance of her father Francis Drexel’s $15 million estate, and an astute businesswoman. Some of the inheritance was donated to various charities and orphanages; Morris explained that Katharine was “very exposed to the poverty of others,” but it wasn’t until later that I learned in what capacities she interacted with the less fortunate. Her father sat on the board of nearly every Catholic charity in the city of Philadelphia, and her stepmother, Emma Bouvier, opened up the Drexel’s home three afternoons per week to anyone in need.[1]

One criticism I have of the presentation is that Morris did not explain Katharine’s motivations for the work that she did, which I feel would have allowed the audience to understand her life and personality better. For example, we were told that in 1889, Drexel joined the Sisters of Mercy Convent in Pittsburgh to begin her postulancy, but were not informed of the reasons for her decision. After Emma Bouvier died (leaving a cryptic letter about the door to Jesus’s heart being open to those who knocked), the still-grieving Drexel family took a trip to Europe. In Rome, they met two priests whose mission was to Native American tribes in the Northwest, and Katharine was moved by their descriptions of the poverty of the Indians and committed herself to their betterment and education.[2]

Shortly after, Francis Drexel died, and Katharine and her sisters combined his banking skills with their mother’s “hands on approach to charitable concerns” in order to carry out their parent’s legacies. After a meeting with the pope who recommended she herself become a missionary instead of searching for recruits to work the mission for her, Katharine’s devoted her life to service.

Other than the small oversight on motivations, I thought the presentation was strong. The Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament was formed in 1891 and on their various missions around the U.S. helped set up schools for blacks and Native Americans that, from what I heard, had an overall positive effect on the individuals they served. It would have been interesting to have a discussion about the effects of Christian missionaries on the communities they traveled to, and to hear about the cumulative effects of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (roughly how many children were educated, what some of them did after leaving the programs, etc.).

REFERENCES

[1] Cecilia Murray, “Katharine Drexel: learning to love the poor,” Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice 9.3 (2006): 307-319, accessed March 22, 2016, 308.

[2] Ibid., 310.

Vicki Ruiz makes some really interesting observations in her article, “’Star Struck’: Acculturation, Adolescence, and Mexican American Women, 1920-1950”. She attempts to examine how Americanization “influenced a generation of Mexican women coming of age” during the 20s through the 50s (363). Most of the article emphasizes the war between staying Mexican and becoming American.

One of the main points she brings up is how Mexicans as a whole had to live this kind of double life. There was a pressure for them to “walk in two worlds” (364). They had to prove that they were American to the Americans while at the same time proving that they were still Mexican to the Mexicans. I found this interesting because this is a feeling that hasn’t really gone away for Mexicans (and other Hispanic/Latinos). There’s a movie that came out in 1997, starring Jennifer Lopez, called Selena. In the film she brings the famous Mexican Tejano singer back to life. There’s a famous quote in the film where Selena’s father is lecturing her about being Mexican American. He says, “We have to be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time! It’s exhausting” (Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUZ5Yhwzz80 ).

By coming to America, women (especially young women) were able to participate in a freedom they hadn’t experienced before, through work. One woman describes America as a place were women are treated like humans (373). This could be a narrative for most women of all races that we’ve learned about. The feeling of having earned their own money gave women power. Though most Mexican women experienced this freedom, the article explains that most of the money was immediately included towards the family income. Furthermore, if a Mexican woman wanted to keep her money, the only option to do so was to move away from her family and find her own place. I like this observation she makes because it shows the conflicting sides of growing up as a Mexican woman in America. To be American meant having the ability to spend your own money but being Mexican meant that you had to share. By choosing one over the other is almost like throwing away your future or throwing away your heritage.

The use of consumerism and its contribution to the Americanization of Mexican women was something I had not thought about before. She starts off by explaining how there was a great desire for mobility amongst the Mexicans in the United States. This is something that the consumer world picked up and ran away with. Through film, radio and magazines women were able to gossip about the biggest stars and digest the newest fashion and make-up tips that gave the illusion of upward mobility. Even magazines written in Spanish were directing young women into this direction. In addition to this, she explained how film shaped the stereotype of the “hot and fiery” Latina; a troupe that continues to live on today (371).

Though the article does well at pointing out interesting observations, I still have some questions. At one point she talks about the middle-class Mexicans and how they wanted their children to marry white people only. What is the break down of the middle-class Mexican? Are they comprised of only white Mexicans or are there black middle-class Mexicans too? What’s the reaction from the white middle-class to the Mexican middle-class.  When she brings up the way women had to watched the way they dressed, where does this come from? Does it come from the religious culture or is this a way to distinguish themselves from other Americans? Is this a result of their feeling of being constantly observed by other Americans? As a general question, the fear of deportation was brought up near the end of the article. In regards to the way people react to immigrants and immigration policy today, have America and the American people changed?

-Alisha Rivera

Ruiz’s essay makes use of thirteen oral histories in order to trace the impacts of the “agents of Americanization” that Mexican American women engaged with in the 1920s and 1930s. Although the author considers education and employment to be the most significant influencers of these women, I found that the media aspect was given the most attention. In some women’s experience, speaking their native Spanish resulted in corporal punishment by teachers and a decrease in their enthusiasm for learning. Conversely, some women were inspired by notions of the American dream that placed a high value on schooling for the purpose of bettering oneself and one’s family. Economic necessity apparently drove Mexican women into the labor force, and this made me curious about whether or not there was intense class-based stratification within the Mexican American community during this time, what these differences consisted of, and whether or not some women chose not to go to work and why. I do not doubt that there may have been a high incidence of poor Mexican women, only that it would have been interesting to see another side of the situation. But the feasibility of this kind of analysis with only 13 oral histories is likely to be slim because there can only be so much class difference in a sample size of that number.

I think Ruiz’s heavy focus on the media’s influence on young Mexican American women makes them seem to have been obsessed with and brainwashed by the vapidity of American “consumer culture.” I would have liked to read more about the contrast between U.S. culture and Mexican culture at this time (including where specifically in Mexico these women were from), in addition to the differences in the political climates of the two countries—information that is probably outside of the scope of this article but that would make for a more balanced or contextualized framework around the information presented here.

On page 268, Ruiz mentions the social role of the Catholic Church and Mexican women’s need to blend new behavior with “traditional ideals” but does not make any mention of what these ideals were. Also, I would have liked to see the author answer the (very important) question she poses at the end of the writing: “Can one equate the desire for material goods with the abandonment of Mexican values?” It may have even been better to answer this question at the beginning of the piece, because it leaves much to be desired. What are “Mexican values” anyway, and were they typically the same across communities and regions? This is a short article, and obviously part of a larger body of work, but it lacks some crucial elements that could help it stand on its own.

-Nina Taylor

In “Rethinking Betty Friedan and the Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America,” Daniel Horowitz sets out to reshape our understanding of both Friedan’s past and her reasons for writing The Feminine Mystique (1963) by bringing to light a new way of looking at a time in Friedan’s life that is absent from the book. What Horowitz also finds in the process of rewriting Friedan’s history is a new way of viewing the second wave of feminism.

As someone who has read portions of Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Horowitz’s detailed analysis of Friedan’s life before writing this book is extremely eye opening and enlightening. He truly sets out to expose a side of Friedan’s life that is absent from the book. Her life prior to the book involved her time as a radical in the 1940s and 1950s, working as a labor journalist. Without the detailed context of Friedan’s life, The Feminine Mystique can appear to paint Friedan as a privileged suburban and middle class housewife who is out of touch with the realities of women who fall outside of this category, but Horowitz attempts to shatter this image of Friedan, instead showing her as a woman who spent years as a radical fighting on the side of working class women, women of color, and even for the rights of men.

One of the points that Horowitz attempts to get across to the reader in the paper is that Friedan’s life early on, beginning after she graduated Summa Cum Laude from Smith College, provided the foundation for what would eventually become The Feminine Mystique. Horowitz sees this time as part of the process for her reasoning behind writing the book. The idea of the feminine mystique is that a woman has a natural place in society to be at home, submissive to men, and to be mothers. Women felt a need to conform to this ideal. Although, when many women did not conform, they felt depressed, which stemmed from unfulfillment with their situation. Horowitz describes Friedan as feeling as if she needed to conform years before she ever wrote the book or lived in suburbia. Right out of college, she was offered a fellowship, yet she turned it down because a boyfriend at the time threatened to leave her if she were to take the fellowship. She ended up turning it down (p. 4). Horowitz describes various moments in Friedan’s life where she herself felt trapped in the feminine mystique, feeling torn between her career, husband, and motherhood. By describing Friedan’s life during these years post-graduation, he shines a new light on Friedan’s writing the book.

Horowitz wants the reader to understand that Friedan’s connection to feminism did not begin while she was living in suburbia, but that her life prior to writing The Feminine Mystique involved her time working as a journalist and covering various stories that involved discrimination against women. Shortly after becoming pregnant with her second child, Friedan, according to Horowitz, made efforts to start a protest, saying of this time that it was “the first personal stirring of my own feminism” (p. 6). Horowitz also explains how her time at Smith College may have instilled within her an idea that she could do it all, even as a woman (p.12). Horowitz continues to explain a side of Friedan that portrays her as an activist who wrote about women’s issues years before The Feminine Mystique was published. According to Horowitz, “she paid special attention to stories about protecting the jobs and improving the situation of working women, including married ones with children” (p.12).

Horowitz also uncovers a new way of looking at the second way of feminism. Friedan has been credited with starting the second wave of feminism with her book The Feminine Mystique. The second wave has been described by scholars as beginning in the 1960s. Horowitz describes the origins of the second wave as beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, both times when feminism and feminist activism were thought to be rather silent. He describes Friedan’s role as a radical in college, as well as her job as a labor journalist working with unions as a starting point to the second wave. His claims are rather groundbreaking as well, because the second wave when tied to the 1960s has been criticized as lacking diversity and focusing mostly on white, middle class women. Horowitz’s claim that the second wave began sooner would provide a new, more inclusive history for the second wave.

Horowitz’s “Rethinking Betty Friedman […]” illuminates a time in Betty Friedman’s life that has been looked over by many historians. By bringing to light her past in reference to her 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique,” he has created new life around the origins of the second wave, created a new reading of the book, and also a new way of looking at Friedman, who has been viewed as lacking an understanding of working class women and women of color.

Questions:

Why do you think Betty Friedman left out so much of her past when writing The Feminist Mystique?

How do you feel about the way Horowitz portrayed Friedman?

Why do think other scholars have stayed away from portraying Friedman in the same light that Horowitz has in this paper?

-Pamela Kelly

In his article, Rethinking Betty Freidan and the Feminine Mystique: Labor Union Radicalism and Feminism in Cold War America, historian Daniel Horrowitz attempts to reexamine and contextualize the narrative of Betty Freidan’s life that she presented to the public in contrast with her published work that complicates her personal struggle with ‘the feminine mystique’. Freidan was committed to portraying herself as a victim of ‘the problem with no name’, but her activism, career as a newswoman for union publications, and personal remarks about her life between 1940 and 1960 suggest that Freidan embraced feminism and social justice long before she began writing The Feminine Mystique. Horrowitz also posits, but could have further developed, that this corrects a larger problem with the historiography of feminism because it neglects the connection between social justice movements of the 1940s and the 1960s. Unfortunately, I felt that the article raised more questions than it could answer.

Horrowitz begins by detailing the accepted historical narrative of Freidan’s life, which is the version that Freidan herself popularized. This makes the organization confusing since Horrowitz has already told us that this version is false in many ways.  He then includes a section about her educational background, makes various claims about how her feminist political consciousness was formed, and details what work she was actually producing during the time when she claimed to be trapped by the feminine mystique.  The volume and speculative language of the evidence that Horrowitz utilizes makes much of Freidan’s biography hard to follow chronologically. He has a bad habit of qualifying his claims, frequently using the words maybe or perhaps and devoting a lot of explanations to counter arguments. This weakens the credibility of his argument because the reader is left unable to draw their own conclusions.  Horrowitz paints a strong picture of Freidan as an activist for women in the public sphere, including working-class white and African American women.  He then details her abrupt, and seemingly inexplicable, shift to an almost exclusively white, middle-class audience. Horrowitz successfully captures the many facets of the narrative, but he fails to connect them in a way that is easy for the reader to understand.

In my personal opinion, I don’t know that Horrowitz was asking the right questions. I wanted to know more about why Freidan abandoned her roots in working-class activism. She railed against female consumer culture in UE Fights for Women Workers, yet ten years later she became a part of that consumer culture. She sold a palatable version of her life story, a lie for all intents and purposes, to the women whom she had warned against consumer culture. I would also like to know what it says about Freidan, and America, that in order to reach a female audience with any political or social capital, Freidan had to transform herself into a non-threatening housewife who had only come to realize ‘the problem with no name’ through a life of feigned complacency. Would we have the modern feminist movement if Betty Freidan had published the Feminine Mystique as a radical left-wing journalist? If not, does this justify Freidan compromising her authenticity as well as her commitment to a more inclusive version of feminism and social justice in order to bring feminism into the popular political lexicon?  Horrowitz touches on these issues, but I wanted more about what we do know about Freidan and what we can say about her without question, rather than a focus on what we might be able to glean from the varying narratives.

– Courtney DeFelice

Initially, it is unclear what this piece is about, with a title that is, interestingly, purposely unrevealing.  Once deeper into the reading, the content becomes obvious as focusing on sexuality in all-female bands in the World War II-era in the United States.  After learning this was the subject of the reading, I could not help but feel excited, all to be let down when the author admits her research hit a dead end.  That dead end was the complete unwillingness of her interviewees, former band members of these all-women groups, to talk about their personal lives.  This surprising turn of events that started off as disappointment transformed into a really interesting perspective on not only the history of sexuality, but the nature of research itself.

Tucker’s admission that she went into her work expecting certain results and ending up frustrated and confused at the information she was given was very entertaining.  More often than not, going into research one always has the answer they want in the back of their mind instead of constructing it along the way.  To me, it seemed like she expected these women to be out and proud and almost thankful that someone wanted to ask them questions about being lesbians in the 1940s.  Instead she got highly secretive women who were very much aware of Tucker’s intentions and therefore worked actively against any chances of being asked about their sexual identities.  The shock experienced by the researcher at these attitudes of privacy was really captivating and at times, very relatable.  Having such a strong notion of how sexuality worked in the music industry during that period knocked down so effortlessly by these women was a really crucial moment for this researcher.  It also drew attention to the fact that sometimes the research question we start out with does not turn out to be the one we end up answering, and that that does not always have to be a bad thing.

One section of this piece I was personally fascinated by was the discussion of why the author felt like she was owed the coming out of these women.  The honest and intensive self-evaluation Tucker goes through in the middle of this piece was refreshing, as it provided very human moments of realizing you might be part of the problem.  The topics of “coming out” and the closet definitely brought up great questions, both in regards to how sexuality was viewed in the past as well as in the present.  Why do we place so much importance on classifying someone as gay or straight? Why didn’t Tucker take her loss more lightly and move on to focusing on the musical careers of these women?  Have we started relying on the LGBT community to fix their own problems by coming out instead of accurately identifying the institutional forces that create homophobia?

Another intriguing portion was the content of her research itself, most notably the different stories she tells of specific interviewees.  The particular story of the woman who lied about having a son that would not let her interview with Tucker just so she could avoid questions about her sexuality was amazing.  What Tucker thought was male oppression turned out to be another case of someone who valued their privacy, but was willing to risk that privacy to share her experience as a member of an all-woman band. These female musicians may not have wanted to talk about their personal lives, but they were overtly proud of their membership in these bands, and that was a really admirable fact about these women.  They battled sexism and racism, doubting of their abilities, and any evidence of nontraditional sexual identities.  While not discounting the importance of the nature of sexuality of that time, I believe Tucker had compelling information to work with, even if it meant she had to abandon her initial research path.  By being so obsessed with learning about how it was to be a lesbian back then, she realized she was taking away from the accomplishments these musicians made.

“When Subjects Don’t Come Out” was a fresh take on the harsh realities of researching human behavior and history in general.  Not taking such a firm, scholarly approach to this paper was what really made me like everything about it.  Learning about someone being so confident about the personalities of these women she had never met but only read about was a great tool to understanding different approaches to research.  Relying on one source or just a hunch you have about a subject is proven as problematic and therefore enforces the practice of using every available source before coming to a conclusion.

-Meghan Madonna

I found Valerie Matsumoto’s article “Japanese American Women during World War II” to be very interesting and thought provoking. I think it gave a lot of useful information on the lives of Japanese Americans during WWII including all of the struggles they had to endure within Japanese internment camps. That being said, I found this article a little more difficult to read than some of the others we have read, and I have several reasons for this. I think the introduction was a little confusing and I had a little bit of trouble getting into the article. She kind of just throws us into the middle of the action by beginning with a quote. I do not know very much about the subject, so for me, it was a little bit difficult to really focus on what was happening. Generally speaking, although I do think the article was good, I think that it tackles so many different areas of Japanese life that each section could be its own individual paper. While reading the article, I felt a little rushed and a slightly overwhelmed by all of the information that I was getting at one time. Personally, I wanted to know more about everything in this article because I have such little knowledge about it. For example, I would love to learn more about the wartime labor shortage and the Japanese American labor force or the relocation of young Japanese Americans. Again, due to my lack of knowledge of the subject matter, I feel as if images would have helped. The format of the article is very uniform and again, a little bit intimidating to me. I know I can just look up images on the internet of Japanese internment camps, but I think that putting images in an article, especially one like this that tackles such a huge topic, helps the reader to better identify with the ideas that are being presented. Matsumoto’s sources seem very well done. The main problem I faced with her sources was that some of them were so detailed that I lost track of what I was reading about in the article. I think it would have worked out better to add some of the citation details into the paper in order to make it a little bit easier to follow and to understand.

-Nicole Thomas