CLIO TALKS BACK: May Wright Sewall organizes the International Conference of Women Workers to Promote Permanent Peace, 1915, in San Francisco, California

The International Conference of Women Workers to Promote Permanent Peace

A second women’s peace conference opened in San Francisco during the Pan-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. This exposition had been planned with the intention of announcing to the world San Francisco’s recovery from the devastating earthquake of 1906, and in May 1914 the President of the upcoming exposition, the Hon. Charles C. Moore, had personally recruited May Wright Sewall (1844-1920) to organize a conference of “women workers” (a term that included paid workers, educators, and other unpaid workers such as philanthropists and reformers).

May Wright Sewall, from Indiana, was internationally-known as a founder and past president of both the National Council of Women of the United States and of the International Council of Women (ICW, 1899-1904), and had long engaged in work for peace. For a decade she had chaired the Peace Section of the ICW. With the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914, Sewall turned the focus of the conference toward consideration of peace. In the conclusion to her call to conference, Sewall wrote: “War is out of harmony with all the agencies of modern Civilization. War destroys Civilization – War denies the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, those two basic principles out of which all that we most value in modern life has been developed.”

CLIO TALKS BACK: Thinking About Women's Life Story-Telling in Iran

Writing in the Journal of Women’s History, Professor Farzaneh Milani observes that autobiographical writing is a very new phenomenon in the very old land of Iran. Only since the mid-twentieth century have Iranian Muslim women begun to publish their personal stories in any form.

Early in her pursuit of Iranian women’s life stories, Milani speculated that “a barrier as forbidding as a veil covers private selves and inhibits self-revelation. The cultural context . . . values and strongly institutionalizes a sharp separation between the inner and the outer, the private and the public. The culture of Hijab . . . is not conducive to the development of personal narratives and their generic public uncovering and display of the self. I surmised that in a veiled society, women are not the only ones veiled. The concrete, the specific, and the personal are also veiled. Communication is veiled. Words are veiled. Public expressions of intimate relationships are veiled. In such a society, walls abound, dissimulation conceals individualistic tendencies; houses become compartmentalized into inner and outer areas; abstractions supplant concreteness; elusiveness substitutes precision; art becomes impersonal. There is no tradition of confession, either in its Catholic sense or in that practice’s secular modern version, psychotherapy. A culture that idealizes women’s public anonymity, I concluded, considers life narratives as exhibitionism, as an act of immodest self-referentiality, as self-absorption and an ultimate act of unveiling.”

But then, living in the United States, she discovered that “invisible fences” also existed in America; these were less physical than cultural. The process of self-revelation only goes so far; zones of privacy and secrecy remain, but the boundaries keep shifting. Have these femces since fallen by the wayside in the Age of Facebook’s potentially extravagant culture of self-disclosure? Or are there still shifting boundaries? What causes a cultural shift that allows any individual to tell her story?

Even as American women, from movie stars to ordinary women, indulge in a “tell-all” or at least “tell-almost-all” culture, and sign up for courses in life-writing, women writers in Iran took to embedding their autobiographical work in poetry, in novels, and then insisting that these works were “not really” about themselves. In the late twentieth century, some began to publish more documented “hostage narratives” and “prison narratives.”

Where does one draw the line between fiction and “truth”? And why does it matter?

Clio, the Muse of History who talks back, thinks that the “facts” of personal stories do matter, but that they require considerable space to “get right.” They can’t be presented adequately in the space of the “soundbite,” the “tweet,” or the Facebook profile, or even in an on-line museum exhibit. This is why autobiographical memoirs and books still count.

What do Clio’s readers think?

Further reading: Farzaneh Milani, Women’s Autobiogtaphies in Contemporary Iran (1990); Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers (1992); and Words, not Swords: Iranian Women Writers and the Freedom of Movement (2011). This blog is based on Farzaneh Milani’s article, “Iranian Women’s Life Narratives,” Journal of Women’s History , 25:2 (Summer 2013), 130-152.

Clio Talks Back: Finding Fran

Once upon a time (in the 1950s) there were two friends in Los Angeles, California, named Lois and Fran. Both super-achievers, they were inseparable in high school, but once graduated, they attended different universities (both in California), and eventually lost touch with one another. Lois discovered feminism and became a pioneer in the new field of women’s history. She is now a history professor at the University of Southern California.

The artistic and intense Fran took a more spiritual route. With her first husband, Hans, she ultimately sought refuge in a commune called Lama in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico. Seeking spiritual peace, she left her husband, and built a new union with the founder of the Lama community (Stephen, later Nuridin). Ultimately she converted to Islam, took the name Noura, embracing a new life as a Muslim woman, wife, and mother. Fran covered herself and embarked on an adventurous but simpler lifestyle, living (after New Mexico) in Chamonix, then Mecca, and ultimately settling in Alexandria, Egypt.

How could these two young women have followed such different paths. This was the question that led Lois to decide to find Fran (Noura), and, ultimately, to write a book about their converging - and diverging - lives and ideas about religion and life. Lois’s book, Finding Fran: History and Memory in the Lives of Two Women, appeared in 1999.

In later life Lois had located Fran. The two met several times, in New Mexico and again in Egypt. Fran explained to Lois that her mother had conditioned her for domesticity, but she discovered that she needed to live her own life, to make her own choices – to escape that overpowering, albeit benevolent maternal presence. “I lived my mother’s life until I was thirty; then I wanted to live my own life,” she explained (p. 95).

Noura’s quest was fundamentally spiritual, a search for “inner freedom,” for what Lois termed “liberation thorugh surrender.” She quotes Noura as saying: “What may appear from outside Islam as a set of strictures, even a trap, a series of limitations, appears from inside to be an infinite expanding geometry, a crystalline structure of great beauty which not only insures safety and orders chaos, but allows the soul freedom to soar” (p. 193).

Noura learned to chant “La illaha illa Llah” (There is no God but God), which, in her words, “is the basis of Islam”. . . “You must acknowledge this and say, I surrender. That is what separates a Muslim from a non-Muslim, because Islam means surrender” (p. 197) She converted to Islam in 1975 in Jerusalem, the city in which the three great world - Judalism, Christianity, and Islam - converge. She was deeply moved by the traditional culture of the Muslim Palestinians, among whom she lived. And she embraced the Sufi approach to Islam.

Living in Makkah (Mecca) in Saudi Arabia for several years in the late 1970s, Noura was similarly impressed with the community of women, who came from all over the world on the ritual pilgrimage. She and her now-husband decided to establish an Islamic study center in New Mexico. This initiative never developed in the manner they had hoped. Settling in Alexandria, Egypt, where Sufism was more accepted than in Saudi Arabia, Noura and her family at last ceased their journeys.

Noura (Fran) and Lois held long conversations during their meetings in the 1990s. They debated and disagreed about women’s (and men’s) covering themselves completely, as a means of de-emphasizing sexuality. But they found common ground when evaluating the scope of women’s liberty in a society based on strict sexual segregation and parallel spheres. For example, in Islamic societies, married women could own property and establish businesses, a privilege for which wives in Western societies long campaigned before achieving it. Both Noura and Lois agreed on “equal education for women, equal access to the professions, and equal pay for equal work” (p. 213).

Noura pointed out to Lois that under Islam, “married women have the right to their own income; they can start a business with it; they can put it into the bank or buy jewelry with it; they can do anything they want with it. Women are guaranteed the right to inherit under Qur’anic law, and if the portion decreed for sons is larger than that for daughters, it’s because sons are required to care for the unmarried women of their families, and daughters aren’t required to support themselves. Under Islam, married women keep their maiden names; children alone take fathers’ names” (p. 214).

Women under Islam enjoy great authority, Noura asserted. “The power of the ‘mother’ dominates the home. Muslim children are taught to honor their mother first of all. Muslims will give their paychecks to their parents and forego marriage in order to support them; they will do anything for their mothers. When you marry, you serve your mother-in-law; as you age and your children grow up and marry, you are the one who is served. Even urban professional women regard their famiies as the center of their lives. They live with husbands or families; single men and women living alone are considered anomalous, even dangerous” (p. 214). Noura’s observations on the power of mothers are especially poignant, coming from a woman who sought to escape the powerful influence of her own mother.

As the conversations of Noura and Lois continued, they discussed many more aspects of Islam and the differences between Western cultures and Muslim cultures. “By Qur’anic prescription,” Noura pointed out, women and men are equal before Allah; no mythology exists about Eve bringing evil into the world. In contrast to Christian dogma, sexual pleasure is considered integral to marriage. In Arabic the word Allah has neither a masculine nor a feminine connotation” (p. 214).

Clio invites you to read Finding Fran. The parallel yet dissimilar lives of Lois and Fran, and their evaluations are relevant today for understanding the commonalities – and differences – of great religious traditions, and how these can inform ways of living and individual spiritual journeys.

Source: Lois W. Banner, Finding Fran: History and Memory in the Lives of Two Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). All quotations from the hardcover edition. A paperback edition and Kindle edition are available through Amazon books.

Clio Talks Back: Happy Mothers, Grieving Mothers

by Mary Cassatt

Among women artists who have depicted scenes about motherhood, two particularly stand out in Clio’s mind: Mary Cassatt (1844-1926 ), an American from Philadelphia who resided for much of her life in Paris where she painted with the Impressionists, and Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), who was born in Königsberg (then in East Prussia, now part of Russia) but lived primarily in Berlin where she was identified with the Naturalist school. Both are ranked among the greatest artists of their time.

By Mary Cassatt

Mary Cassatt, a woman of means, never married nor had children of her own (because she thought marriage and children would interfere with her career as a painter). Yet she seems to have thought a lot about motherhood; some of her finest paintings are tender, benign private scenes of well-dressed mothers, seemingly unmarked by unhappiness or political turmoil, gazing at, touching, and tending to their well-fed, healthy-looking, almost sensuously delicious babies. Her paintings are colorful and, at first glance, sweet. Yet, Cassatt’s early biographer Achille Ségard, insists that she was a “painter of children and of mothers,” rather than of the romanticized joys of motherhood.

Käthe Kollwitz, on the other hand, did marry. She bore two sons while continuing to pursue her artistic career. She worked in various media, including etchings and bronze statuary. Her works of art are somber, full of shadows and blackness.

by Käthe Kollwitz

Kollwitz’s depictions of motherhood are poignant; they bear the mark of an intense social consciousness of poverty, deprivation, and death. The loss of one son who was serving in the German army in World War I undoubtedly exacerbated this tendency. Her concern for the fate of the poor and unfortunate, particularly mothers attempting to protect children or mourning dead children, was magnified by the political, social, and economic turmoil that ensued in the wake of the lost war, compounded by the ominous, overhanging threat of yet another war. In 1922 she wrote: “There has been enough of dying! Let not another man fall!” . . . and she quoted from Germany’s great poet Goethe, “Seed for the planting must not be ground.”

by Käthe Kollwitz

Kollwitz’s impressive bronze, Tower of Mothers, a work completed in 1938 – just as the shadow of war once again hovered over Europe – has inspired a contemporary poet named Gail Peck to publish the following meditation:

Today their hearts are stone,
these mothers who’ve created
a fortress with their bodies,
their children peecking from the folds
of skirts. One mother has her bare feet planted,
another has her fist in the air.
No, they shout at marching boots,
planes overhead. Nothing can get
to the children now – what kind
of game is this they ask?
It has no name. 

Clio’s question: Throughout history, mothers have repeatedly nurtured and tried to protect their children, to keep them safe from the ravages of poverty and war. Why has it been so difficult for mothers and others to triumph over those dark forces of destruction? Why can’t all children have a beautiful future, like the children of the mothers in the works of Mary Cassatt? Why do some nations continue, even today, to “grind” their seed for planting rather than planting it?


Further reading: 

Griselda Pollock, “Mary Cassatt: The Touch and the Gaze, or Impressionism for Thinking People,” in Women Impressionists (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 2008).

Martha Kearns, Käthe Kollwitz, Woman and Artist (Feminist Press, 1976).

Elizabeth Prelinger, et al., Käthe Kollwitz (National Gallery of Art, Washington, and Yale University Press, 1992).

Gail Peck, “Tower of Mothers,” Wild Goose Poetry Review, posted Nov. 10, 2011.

CLIO TALKS BACK: Thoughts About the Empress Maria Theresa As Mother

Clio recently revisited Vienna, where she was reminded of the remarkable career of the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa (1717–1780).  She was the sole female Habsburg ruler, thanks to the Pragmatic Sanction negotiated by her father Charles VI to guarantee her succession.  In her early twenties, she took power following his death in 1740.

It is hard to grasp just how much of Europe Maria Theresa and the Habsburg dynasty once ruled.  These crownlands encompassed what is now Belgium in the west to Transylvania in the east, not to mention Austria proper, the Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia, Croatia, Serbia, and much of the Dalmatian coast plus major parts of northern Italy.  Taking an active role in directing affairs of state, this empress fought several wars against Frederick the Great of Prussia to maintain her right to rule Silesia as well as to keep the Turks at bay.  She engineered an alliance with the French, hoping to contain the expansionist aims of Prussia.

During her reign (following her marriage to Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who was subsequently appointed Holy Roman Emperor and duke of Tuscany), Maria Theresa made her mark as a prolific mother – producing sixteen children, of whom eleven lived to adulthood. Such numbers, she believed, would assure the dynastic future of the Habsburgs. 

Maria Theresa took great interest in her children, their upbringing and their futures.  She produced three daughters before the birth of her first son and heir, Joseph.  Then two more daughters, and another son (short-lived).  Then six more daughters and two more sons.  It’s a wonder she could even keep track!  One would need a secretary just for birthdays!  But then, in a court where four languages were regularly used (German, Italian, French, and Latin), perhaps keeping track of birthdays was just one complication among others.  Even so, the children’s education was less thorough than it might have been.

Work-life conflicts can be less of a problem for royal mothers, or for families of the super-rich.  They have no shortage of household help, and they don’t have to purchase the groceries, wash the dishes, join the parent-teachers’ association, or drive carpools to school or after-school activities, tasks which consume many mothers in the western world today.  They can call on wetnurses, maids, cooks, coachmen, and nannies.  Relieved of these mundane duties, Maria Theresa found time to build a summer palace at Schoenbrunn, which rivaled the Versailles of Louis XIV of France – a fine playground for lively, growing children, when the Hofburg in central Vienna was not enough.

Maria Theresa was one of the three major enlightened despots of eighteenth century Europe, along with Catherine of Russia and Frederic the Great of Prussia.  A celebrated female historian of international affairs (Ragnhild Hatton) once commented, “I never really understood enlightened despotism until I became a mother.”  Indeed, enlightened despotism is an excellent metaphor for the act of mothering, especially when children are small.  But when they grow up, more liberty is called for.  However, Maria Theresa never withdrew from her children’s lives or offered them much liberty.  Motherly advice  – and directives – were never in short supply.  They were above all Habsburgs.

Maria Theresa kept up a voluminous correspondence with her adult children, who had married – or been systematically married off – to consolidate or  reinforce political alliances for the House of Habsburg.  One of her most notable – and intrusive – correspondences (later published) was with her youngest daughter, Marie Antonia, who became Marie Antoinette – the queen of France who would be guillotined during the Revolution. 

Further Reading:  Karl A. Roider, Jr.  Maria Theresa (1973); Robert Pick, Empress Maria Theresa: The Earlier Years, 1717-1757  (1966); Regina Schulte, “’Madame, Ma Chere Fille’ – ‘Dearest Child’ : Letters from Imperial Mothers to Royal Daughters,” in The Body of the Queen: Gender and Rule in the Courtly World 1500-2000 (2006).

CLIO TALKS BACK: Eleanor Rathbone and the Endowment of Motherhood in Britain

From 1908 on Eleanor Rathbone (1872-1946) served on the Liverpool City Council in England and later became one of the first women to be elected to the British Parliament. Throughout her life she concerned herself with the plight of the disadvantaged – be they British children, Indian women, African victims of female circumcision rites, or refugees from Nazi Germany. She clearly understood how dependent women had become in British society as well as elsewhere.

Rathbone opposed the idea of a “family wage” paid to employed men, advocating instead a plan for family allowances whereby the husband’s employer, or in case of his unemployment, the state, would pay a separate allowance for each child directly to his wife. By this means she hoped to enhance the oppressed and narrow lives of working-class wives and mothers. The notion that wives and children were necessarily men’s dependents seemed, to her, demeaning.

Eleanor Rathbone viewed this economic approach to empowering mothers as part of a “New Feminism,” by which she meant dealing with women’s needs in women’s terms. In 1924 she elaborated her views in a widely-read book, The Disinherited Family, in which she argued that the time had come to focus on the problems of women in the family. Not surprisingly, it was her controversial insistence that the family allowance be paid to the wife/mother that stirred up the most resistance.

Opponents of the plan included Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Rathbone’s predecessor as head of the National Union of Woman’s Suffrage Societies. Fawcett, herself an economic thinker, feared that such payments to the wife and mother would undermine the sense of responsibility of men – husbands and fathers – by degrading their hallowed role as economic providers. This, she feared, would destroy rather than stabilize the family. Eleanor Rathbone strongly disagreed.

In 1925 Rathbone responded to Fawcett’s concerns by rolling out a visionary agenda in which she suggested that merely clearing away the old laws or seeking equal pay for equal work did not go far enough. Finally the time had some, she argued, to “demand what we want for women, not because it is what men have got, but because it is what women need to fulfil the potentialities of their own natures and to adjust themselves to the circumstances of their own lives.” This, she claimed, was the agenda of the “New Feminism.”

Rathbone’s plan was ultimately incorporated into a “Family Endowment Act” by the British Labour Government in 1945, immediately after the end of the Second World War.

Clio wants to know what you think about the notion of employer-allocated or state-allocated family allowances as a means of empowering mothers. Is this still an attractive solution for women today? Your comments are, of course, welcome.


Sources:

1. Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, vol. 2 (1880-1950), documents 88-91: Family Endowment and the “New Feminism.”
2. Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (Yale University Press).

CLIO TALKS BACK: Why did so many young Irish women leave Ireland?

Early Irish Immigrants

In the years 1885-1920 nearly 700,000 mostly single women under the age of 24 left family farms in Ireland to seek a better life in the cities of North America. They travelled by themselves across the Atlantic Ocean. No family members – no fathers, mothers, husbands or brothers accompanied them. Single women emigrants from Ireland in these years outnumbered male emigrants – exceptional among European migrants to the New World.

Why did so many young Irish women emigrate? In those years of great deprivation following the famine years when Ireland’s potato crops collapsed, they simply sought a better life, one which would – according to Janet Nolan – allow them to reclaim their earlier status, to earn their keep, to marry as they chose, and – most of all – to create lives free of severe hardship. Many (well over two-thirds) first sought employment as domestic servants in the cities of the eastern United States. They generally married after a few years and often bore large numbers of children. Upwardly mobile, many of the offspring of the families these young women founded, obtained an education and became wildly successful by the standards of the land their mothers had abandoned.

What is striking in Nolan’s account of this emigration in her book, “Ourselves Alone,” was that, very unusual for the times, the young women’s travel was mostly financed by female relatives. Networks of older women helping younger women. Older women sending back money to help their little sisters and nieces emigrate as they had. In Nolan’s words (p. 95),“They were the first generation of Irish women to realize fully their own social and economic modernization as women.”

Then, when the emigrant women were settled in their new country, many of them sent money home to assist those who had remained behind – for example, to purchase a horse to replace the one that had died. Ironically, “the most expendable group in post-Famine Ireland – dependent daughters and sisters – became the saviors of a society that could not have remained intact save by their emigration and their remittances” (p. 71).

Some of these emigrant women and their daughters became prominent labor organizers in the U.S. Nolan names Kate Mullany, organizer of the laundry workers in Troy, New York; Leonora Barry, head of the women’s work committee for the Knights of Labor; Mary Kenny O’Sullivan, of the A. F. L. [American Federation of Labor]; Leonora O’Reilly, of the Women’s Trade Union League; and Mother Jones (Mary Harris Jones) and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, respectively founder and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World. All these women activists supported equal pay for equal work and the rights of laboring women.

Clio celebrates the courage and initiative of these thousands of Irish emigrant women to bettering their condition by “packing up and leaving,” to create new lives in a new country.

Source: Janet Ann Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration From Ireland, 1885-1920 (University of Kentucky Press, 1989).

CLIO TALKS BACK: The First Woman to Support Herself as a Writer: Christine de Pizan

Throughout history, many women have attempted to support themselves by writing. Few have succeeded. Not until the nineteenth century did self-support through writing and publishing become possible for more than a very few.

The Irish writer Lady Morgan (Sydney Owenson, 1776-1859) was the first financially successful woman writer of that time. She wrote many novels about Ireland and in 1840 published an important work in women’s history, Woman and Her Master. The illustrious French author, George Sand (Aurora Dupin, baroness Dudevant, 1804-1876), published novels, short stories, and plays; her works were widely translated. And today, J. K.Rowling, author of the world-renowned Harry Potter series, has become one of the wealthiest women in England through her writing.

However, the first women known to have supported herself as a writer was Christine de Pizan (c. 1364/1365, in Venice - c. 1420). As a small child, she came to the French court with her father (appointed as court astrologer) and was educated there. Widowed in her mid-twenties, and with three little children, she had to support her family.

In the days before printing made bound books more widely available (not to speak of paperbacks, photocopies, and the Internet), Christine successfully gained substantial royal commissions for her manuscript works, which were then copied by others and often bound in elegant covers. She wrote over twenty works on the history of France, French monarchs, war, and on the history of women.

The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) is undoubtedly the most famous of these works; in it, Christine denounced misogyny and celebrated the virtues of women. In fact Christine de Pizan can be considered the first (published) feminist, having produced (in the words of Christine’s translator) “the first work by a woman in praise of women.”

Christine had begun to notice how important French men were publicly maligning women in certain manuscript works then circulating throughout literate circles. In The City of Ladies, she recounts her depression over one such book, The Lamentations of Matheolus, which portrayed women as vile creatures. In her story, Christine then receives a visit from three allegorical women, Reason, Rectitude and Justice. These three women provide Christine with new, more positive ways of thinking about women, and it is decided that Christine will build a citadel – a fortified city – for worthy women, whatever their rank or class. The foundation of the City of Ladies will be prepared by digging out the “dirt” of misogyny, deemed an unnatural and irrational phenomenon.

The Book of the City of Ladies became a beautifully illuminated manuscript, featuring illustrations of women actually building the city of ladies. Some twenty copies still exist, which now reside in major libraries in Europe. More than that, Flemish weavers produced six massive sets of tapestries made from these illustrations in the later fifteenth century, to be presented to princesses and queens. These tapestries hung in the most prestigious Renaissance courts of Europe, including that of Queen Elizabeth I. But, unfortunately, the tapestries did not survive into our own times. Even so, as Susan Groag Bell has written, her quest for the tapestries provided “evidence that Christine de Pizan’s ideas had continued to exert substantial cultural, aesthetic, and political influence for about two centuries after her death.”

Today, Christine’s celebrated book has become very well-known. It has been republished, translated, and discussed. Her other works are also studied in universities. Today there is even an International Christine de Pizan Society whose members meet every three years to revisit her literary contributions. Many entries concerning Christine and her works can be found on the Internet.

Clio celebrates Christine de Pizan and her contributions to women’s well-being. She provides a wonderful example of a woman “taking action” as well as “talking back.”


Suggested reading:

Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, translated by Earl Jeffrey Richards. Foreword by Marina Warner (Persea Books, 1982; many reprints).

Susan Groag Bell, The Lost Tapestries of the City of Ladies: Christine de Pizan’s Renaissance Legacy (University of California Press, 2004).

The next meeting of the International Christine de Pizan Society will be in Poznan, Poland, in 2012.

Reclaiming (Her)Story: Drawing Strength from the Past

Contralto singer Mabel Ritchardson in San Francisco, circa late 1930s.

For the past two years, I have been researching the history of my family. I have spent hours rummaging through old photographs and documents, constructing family trees, and scouring the internet for information about my ancestors. What an incredible journey it has been! The more I learn about my family's past, the more I long to know. The stories of the women in my family are particularly compelling. I am fascinated by the story of my great-grandmother, Mabel Ritchardson, who was a noted contralto singer in San Francisco during the 1930's. She performed pieces by Bach and Brahms, as well as spirituals, all while raising her six children in the city's Western Addition neighborhood.

A review of Ritchardson's performance in The San Francisco Spokesman reads, "Mrs. Ritchardson scored another triumph in her career when she was presented in an intimate musicale, by a group of artists at the fashionable Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill. Mrs. Ritchardson, the only colored on the program was introduced as a cultural leader of her race. The audience was spell-bound while she sang "Come Let Us All This Day" by Bach. For encore she sang "Vittoria Mio Core" by Carissima in Italian. She appeared later on the program with a group of Negro spirituals which were enthusiastically received."

I found this review of her work, along with programs, letters, and photos Mabel saved from her singing career. I was inspired by her dedicated pursuance of her craft, especially since this was an era where a woman's "place" was considered to be in the home. In spite of the obstacles facing all women, and especially Black women, she made her dreams a reality.

Gay Marriage, Women's Suffrage, and the American President

Photo courtesy of Change.org

Today The New Republic came out with a thought provoking Op-ed comparing U.S. President Barack Obama to President Woodrow Wilson, who was in office just a few years prior to the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote. Both were liberal American presidents who wanted to be known for their progressive stances. Both were also populists, and therefore wanted to appease citizens across the political spectrum. But both presidents, in doing so, wavered on civil rights issues and compromised liberal causes.

And both presidents, in the view of TNR writer Richard Just, are destined to have tarnished legacies as a result of their failure to clearly and actively support civil rights issues.

In the years leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Wilson became cagey and tried in vain to avoid the question of whether or not he supported a woman's right to vote. Instead of taking a stand, he deemed women's rights a local rather than federal issue. Just writes that this moment in history now seems oddly familiar:

"An evasive stance on a controversial civil rights issue from a liberal president; an insistence that the issue is primarily local, rather than national, in character; a complete failure of sincerity, nerve, and will: If these things sound familiar in 2010, it is because Barack Obama is taking exactly the same approach on gay marriage."

I'd like to think that Obama cannot simply be reduced to an ineffectual, spineless Woodrow Wilson of his day. But his lack of support for gay marriage positions him to the right of republicans Laura Bush, Cindy McCain, and Arnold Schwarzenegger; as well as 52% of the American people, according to a recent CNN poll.

What do you think? Is Obama destined for less-than-greatness on civil rights issues?

Women Talk Women

CREDIT: Flickr / Roy Sinai

Last week, I.M.O.W. hosted a giveaway on our Facebook fan page and through Twitter. To win, followers had to respond to the question, "Who is a woman in history that you admire, and why?"

And that opened the floodgates! It was amazing to see so many enthusiastic--and diverse--responses. I have to admit I hadn't even heard of several of the women our fans were talking about. Here are a few of my favorites: