Women's History Month 2018: Flora Zabelle

Flora Zabelle
Source: LOC

Not much is recorded of Flora Zabelle Hitchcock's life. She went from refugee to Broadway star and one of the first American silent film actresses.

She was born Flora Mangasarian in Constantinople in the Ottman Empire (now Istanbul, Turkey). Her family fled to escape the Turks' Hamidian massacres of Armenians.

Flora chose the stage as her career where she flourished for both her acting prowess and her noted beauty. She adopted the stage name Flora Zabelle, later adding her husband last name. The San Francisco Call wrote of the young actress in 1902, “Endowed by nature with a pretty face and form, an uncommonly magnetic personality and a pleasing soprano voice, Flora Zabelle, one of the most attractive of Philadelphia's smart set..."

Already a star on Broadway, Flora married another famous actor, Raymond Hitchcock in 1905. The two quickly became a noted celebrity couple and innovators in musical comedy theater. They went on to teach acting lessons and arrange musical comedy tours throughout the country.

Their celebrity status was not all rosy. Several odd tales found their way into newspapers at the time. It is unclear how much truth these gossip pieces contain. At one point Flora believed her husband to have been kidnapped and possibly killed for several days. A 1912 newspaper report says Flora rushed back to the United States after reading a personal item in a newspaper about her brother being ill, but this was actually an elaborate ruse on her husband's part to convince her to come home. This same report quotes Flora as saying, "My husband and I have agreed to separate -- financially, domestically and artistically. The separation is complete and forever." It's unclear if the two stayed separated, but they remained legally married until her husband's death in 1929.

Flora's film career was not long, but she did achieve some prominence. She starred opposite John Barrymore in the 1916 silent short, The Red Widow and was featured in several other shorts and full-length films. After her husband's death, Flora began to withdraw from stage and screen appearing only rarely until disappearing from both completely in 1940. She passed away in 1968 at the age of 88. She left behind a legacy as a survivor of ethnic cleansing in the country of her birth and as a pioneer in stage and screen in the country she came to call home.

Learn more:

• Flora Zabelle's IMDB page.
• An early write-up about Flora's acting in The New-York Tribune.
• Gossip item in the San Francisco Call

Women's History Month 2018: Melitta Bentz

Melitta Bentz and her coffee pot invention
Source: Melitta

Have you ever enjoyed a cup of pour-over coffee? If so, you have Melitta Bentz to thank. Have you used a paper coffee filter? Bentz is an innovator there too. I only recently learned about Bentz, but she quickly became a personal hero. (I mean, she improved coffee brewing. I owe her).

Frustrated with difficult coffee brewing techniques that led to underwhelming coffee and arduous cleanup, Bentz decided to punch a few holes in a copper pot, line it with a piece of blotting paper and design an easy and delicious way to brew coffee. This method was easy to clean, produced sediment-free coffee (hard to do at the time) and was quick. Bentz knew she had created a great new method.

This housewife's ingenuity in the kitchen wasn't merely a life hack Bentz shared with friends. She refined her creation and received a German patent in mid-1908. By the end of that year, she founded a company to manufacture and sell her brewing system. The next year, she sold 12,000 of these filter devices at the 1909 Lepzig fair.

Both world wars upset Bentz's business, but she found ways to weather these trying times. She relocated and relaunched production several times during the years of war and unrest in Europe ultimately surviving the rationing, occupation and reallocation of resources.

Bentz went the extra step to take care of her employees. She offered Christmas bonuses, expanded time off from six to 15 days and established a five-day work week. Bentz even set up a company aid fund for employees.

Today, the Melitta brand lives on manufacturing coffee, paper filters, pour over filters and more. The brand is stocked in most major grocery stores. The Melitta Group now includes a long list of brands and creates various products all over the world.

Learn more:

• Read about Melitta's founder on their website.
• Explore this timeline of innovations for the Melitta brand.
• Pick up a Melitta pour-over coffee brewer, filters and some coffee and enjoy!

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Women's History Month 2018: Mae Young

Mae Young

Sometime between 1939 and 1941 (the dates are hard to confirm), a teenage girl named Mae Young entered a wrestling ring to begin a career that would stretch forward to 2010, outlasting most careers let alone most sporting careers.

Mae Young, born Johnnie Mae Young in 1923, was one of the pioneers of female wrestling. While in high school in the late 1930s, Young learned to fight on the boys wrestling team and played football alongside the boys at her school. Young's tenacity and fierceness won her entry to the barely existent world of women's wrestling. During World War II, doors opened for more women in the sport while men were at war.

These "lady wrestlers," as they were known, captivated audiences. Young commented that the men didn't like them because they stole the show. Preferring to fight hard and fight dirty, Young became a wrestler that audiences loved to hate. At times, chicken wire was put up around the wrestling ring to protect Young from the eggs and vegetables hurled at her during matches. In the 2004 documentary, Lipstick & Dynamite, Young said, “Anybody can be a baby face, what we call a clean wrestler. They don’t have to do nothing. It’s the heel that carries the whole show. I’ve always been a heel, and I wouldn’t be anything else but.”

Young didn't stop at being a pioneer and building her own brand in wrestling. Much of her legacy and longevity come from her dedication to training other women in the sport. She trained and became best friends with Lillian Ellison, known as the Fabulous Moolah. The two worked together for decades, going on to continue fighting into the 1990s and 2000s.

From wrestling with the boys in high school to wearing mens clothes and smoking cigars in the 1950s to becoming the National Wrestling Alliance's first United States Women's Champion in the 1960s to jumping back in the ring for WWE in the 1990s and 2000s despite being in her seventies, Young constantly challenged gender norms and never shied away from a challenge. Even with all her grit and gusto, Young took the time to nurture other women wrestlers and set the stage women in the future.

Learn more:

• Watch the documentary Lipstick & Dynamite on Amazon Instant Video (included with Prime)
• Read about her career on WWE's website.  
• Read about Young and other early women wrestlers in the book, Sisterhood of the Squared Circle. 

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Women's History Month 2018: Alice Guy-Blaché

Alice Guy-Blaché
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Oscars celebrated 90 years last night and featured several notable female nominees, but the film industry and women in film date back much further than 1929. In fact, women have a much richer history in film than most awards shows would have us think.

Starting out as a secretary to French film-industry innovator, Léon Gaumont, Alice Guy-Blaché became probably the first female film director and producer. Barbra Streisand called Guy "a French film pioneer who invented the director's job."

Guy certainly was a pioneer for film as a whole as well as women in film. She practically invented the concept of going on location. She was one of the first people to make narrative fiction films. She made action movies with female protagonists. She even made films with color tinting and used Gaumont's Chronophone, which was an early way to sync sound with moving pictures.

Guy was born in France, lived in Chile for a time, went back to France for school and eventually went to work for Gaumont. It was under his employ that she discovered moving pictures and asked for permission to film her first story, The Cabbage Fairy, on the back patio of Gaumont's studio. Filmmaking came naturally to Guy, and she set to work making new films and creating techniques as she went.

Not long after hiring Herbert Blaché to work as a cameraman, Guy married him. The pair moved to America in 1905. She had created over 1,000 films at that point. Her husband headed up Gaumont's New York office, while Guy became one of the first women to start her own studio. She began producing a film a week and made her husband president of her studio so she could focus on the work. He resigned shortly after this and started a rival studio, but the pair continued to work together.

Guy innovated in all aspects of filmmaking. She cast diverse actors, featured interracial casts, invented many early special effects techniques and coached her actors to present natural, rather than over-the-top, performances. Guy is quoted as saying, “I put signs all around my studio that said 'be natural'—that is all I wanted from my actors.”

She made her last film in 1920 as WWI began to slow the film industry. After she and her husband divorced, she returned to France where she worked primarily as a writer and film lecturer but never made any further movies. She came back to the States with her daughter in 1965 before passing away in 1968. During her later years, Guy worked on a memoir after realizing her contributions to film were not widely known.

Much of Guy's work has been lost, but her impact on film has not gone unnoticed. While she isn't widely known outside of film circles, Guy has been receiving more and more recognition for her many achievements. The Director's Guild of America posthumously gave Guy a lifetime achievement honor in 2011.

While presenting that award, Martin Scorsese said, "It is the hope and intention of the DGA that by presenting this posthumous special directorial award for lifetime achievement, the Guild can both raise awareness of an exceptional director and bring greater recognition to the role of women in film history."

Learn more:

• Watch Guy's first film, The Cabbage Fairy.
• Read more about Guy and see her filmography at the Women Film Pioneers Project.  
• Read Guy's memoirs to learn more about her in her own words.

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Women's History Month 2018: Sybil Ludington

Statue of Sybil Ludington in Caramel, NY
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Most of us learn about Paul Revere and his heroic 1775 ride to warn of the approaching British troops. Sadly, we don't learn about the 16-year-old girl who two years later rode her horse throughout the night, fending off highwaymen with a musket, to gather a volunteer militia in response to the burning of Dansbury. 

Sybil Ludington was the daughter of Colonel Henry Ludington and the oldest of 12 children. Her father headed a volunteer militia, which was on furlough that April night in 1777. When Col. Ludington received word of the attack, he needed to stay put and wait for his militia to arrive, but he had no one to gather the troops who knew where to find everyone. 

Some reports say the 16-year-old Ludington volunteered and some suggest her father asked her for her service. Regardless, she set out on her horse, Star, to ride forty miles, twice as far as Paul Revere, through the night. Along her way, some accounts say Ludington encountered ruffians with no allegiance to either side and fought them off with a musket. 

The militia went on to fight thanks to Ludington's long and fearless ride, but her story remained mostly unknown. After the war, she married a soldier, had a son, lost her husband to yellow fever, ran a tavern to support her son as he worked to become a physician and bought a home for her son and his family. Sadly, her son passed away, and Ludington struggled and died in poverty. 

Almost 200 years after her ride, history started to tell the story of that heroic night. In 1961, a local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution built a statue in her honor. She was featured on a US Postage stamp in 1975, and more recently, books have been published telling the story of the 16-year-old girl who fought bravely for freedom.

Read more:

• Mental Floss wrote about Ludington in 2016. 
• Play a board game that follows "Ludington's Ride." 
• Read one of the many books written about her. 

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Women's History Month 2018: Lorraine Hansberry

Lorraine Hansberry in Vogue Magazine, April 1959
Source: Thirteen Media

Earlier this year, I happened upon a documentary in the PBS American Masters series titled, Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart. I had heard the name, Lorraine Hansberry, before. She wrote A Raisin in the Sun and was the first African-American female playwright to have a play performed on Broadway. That's all I knew about her. The documentary showcased a short but vibrant life of work, in which A Raisin in the Sun was only one piece.

Hansberry was born to Carl and Nannie Hansberry in Chicago, IL, in 1930. Her father was a prominent real estate broker who fought hard against the segregation in Chicago. This would become a foundation for Hansberry's own activism, and a theme in her famous play.

Following her time at college, Hansberry moved to New York City to work as a writer. She wrote for Freedom Newspaper, a political publication addressing racism and colonialism. She wrote extensively on these issues both locally and globally.

In 1953, Hanberry married Jewish publisher and activist, Robert Nemiroff. She left Freedom to pursue fiction writing. For a while, she worked part-time jobs and freelanced, until she and her husband could afford for her to focus on her novel and play. During this time, she wrote A Raisin in the Sun.

The play would go on to establish Hansberry's career, but it wasn't easy to get the play from paper to stage. A young, unknown, African-American, female playwright didn't draw investors. Producers were convinced that an African-American cast paired with an unknown playwright and an African-American director would not succeed. Despite the skepticism, producer Philip Rose pressed onward to make the play happen. It did succeed, not only for Hansberry and the cast but also for the people the play represented. It went on to become a film for which Hansberry wrote the screenplay. It broke away from racial stereotypes in film at that time and set the stage for more honest and realistic portrayals.

Hansberry's career flourished from here. She took every interview she could. She talked about the issues presented in the play as well as the issues facing the world around her. Hansberry tackled difficult interviews and tough questions with confident and direct answers. Since her time at Freedom, Hansberry had been on government watchlists for her affiliations with communism and her radical, outspoken political involvement. She did not let any of this keep her from saying what she believed. 

Hansberry's careers in both writing and politics were varied and passionate. She wrote books, essays, letters and more plays. Her works didn't advocate only for the civil rights movement, but also for women's rights and gay rights. Hansberry identified privately as a lesbian and wrote on the topic in letters and in her diary. Her activism extended beyond her writing too. She also hosted fundraisers to help the civil rights movement and spoke publically against injustice whenever she had the chance.

Hansberry died young, at only 34 years old after suffering from pancreatic cancer. Her short life held great impact and her early passing was deeply mourned. A young, self-possessed and determined woman, Hansberry lived by her convictions. She said, “one cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart and not know or react to the miseries which afflict this world.”

She knew. She reacted. She made great strides for her many causes and her art. She set down a framework for those who would come after her and continue her work.

Further reading:

• Watch the documentary, Lorraine Hansberry: Sighted Eyes/Feeling Heart.
• Read about more Hansberry on Biography.com.
• Read her autobiography, To Be Young, Gifted and Black for an account of her life in her own words. 

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Women's History Month 2018: Neith Boyce

Neith Boyce
Source: Wikimedia Commons

If the fictional Carrie Bradshaw raised eyebrows when she started writing about the single life first in Candace Bushnell's 1997 book, Sex in the City and a year later on the HBO show of the same name, imagine how people reacted to the very real, 26-year-old Neith Boyce as she chronicled navigating the world as a single woman in 1898 in the pages of Vogue magazine.

Boyce predates the fictional Bradshaw by a century. She is considered by some to be America's first "bachelor girl." She came from a journalism family. Her father, Henry Harrison Boyce, co-founded the Los Angeles Times. Later, her mother, Mary Boyce, became the associate editor of a women's right publication in Boston affording her daughter the opportunity to publish many of her early essays and poems.

Despite the literary roots, Boyce was self-taught without formal higher education. She was a self-made woman in the Victorian era of tightly laced corsets and high society marriages. She rejected this world and moved to New York City alone in search of a career and independence.

Boyce opened the first installment of her Vogue column "The Bachelor Girl" on May 5, 1898, with the following:

“I was born a bachelor, but of course several years elapsed … before my predestination to this career became obvious. Up to that time people acknowledged threatening indications by calling me queer, while elderly persons who wished to be disagreeable said that I was independent. [Their] prediction … has so far been justified. I did not marry. The alternative of course was a profession.”

She is most often quoted as saying, "I shall never be an old maid, because I have elected to be a Girl Bachelor." Boyce did eventually marry, but even this she did on her own terms. She wed Hutchins Hapgood in 1899, entering into what they both termed a "modern marriage." Fidelity was of little importance to either. Once married, Boyce not only maintained her career, but she also tackled an endless list of literary and artistic stations going on to be a poet, novelist, playwright and theatre artist. Much of her work addressed the themes of women's rights, sexuality and agency.

Neith Boyce didn't simply live an independent life, she worked to prove to the world that such a life was possible for women.

Further reading:

• Discover more about Boyce where I first learned about her in Spinster: On Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick.
• Download the Spinster book club kit for a Neith Boyce paper doll! 
• Though out of print and expensive, The Modern World of Neith Boyce edited by Carol DeBoer-Langworthy collects Boyce's autobiographical and personal writings. 
• DeBoer-Langworthy has basic information about Boyce on her website. 

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Women's History Month 2018

Women's Suffrage Picket Parade, 1917
Source: Library of Congress

March is Women's History Month.

Growing up, I learned about a few key female figures in history, but they seemed scarce. As I learned more about women's rights throughout time, I originally assumed women were too limited by various cultural and societal norms to make much history.

Thankfully, that assumption was wrong. Women might have been held back by limited access to education, traditional roles and society in general, but that didn't stop them from shaping history. The more I read about amazing women, the more I realized I'd never been told about the incredible stories of so many women who came before me.

For 2018 the National Women's History Project has chosen the theme "Writing Women Back Into History." I'm not affiliated with NWHP, but I love this idea. I want to contribute to the effort.

Over the past few years, I've been collecting the names of amazing women in history who lead movements, broke barriers, challenged norms and exceed expectations. These women fascinate me and inspire me. I want to learn more about them.

So this March, I'm giving myself a challenge: I'm going to pick a different woman from history every day and write about her.

These posts won't be long, I'll provide links to my research and to further reading. This is a project I could easily expand beyond the month of March, but I'm starting with a few women I've run across in my own reading and research. (Feel free to suggest more in the comments). I don't claim to have the broadest or most representative list to start with, but this is only a beginning. I hope to expand this project in the future.

Keep tabs on this introduction post. I'll turn it into a master post with links to all the other 2018 Women's History Month posts I make. Here's to girl power!

Master list:

• Neith Boyce: The Carrie Bradshaw of 1898
• Lorraine Hansberry: First African-American female playwright on Broadway
• Sybil Ludington: 16-Year-old Paul Revere
• Alice Guy-Blaché: First female film director
• Mae Young: Pioneer of women's professional wrestling
• Melitta Bentz: Coffee-brewing innovator
• Flora Zabelle: Refugee turned silent film star
• Kentucky Book Women: Horseback librarians 
• Amelia Bloomer: Fashion-forward Suffragette 
• Caresse Crosby: Inventor of the bra
• Rebecca Lee Crumpler: First female African-American doctor
• Patsy Mink: First Asian-American women in Congress
• Zabelle C. Boyajian: Conservator of Armenian myths and legends
• Diana Apcar: First female international ambassador
• Mary Anderson: Inventor of the windshield wiper
• Maeve Brennan: Gender-role smashing Irish-American writer
• Arabella Mansfield: First female lawyer
• Tye Leung Schulze: First Asian-American woman to vote
• Donaldina Cameron: "Angry Angel" who fought human trafficking 
• Julie Ward Howe: Writer of the Battle Hymn of the Rebulic
• Henrietta Smith Bowers Duterte: First female funeral home director
• Beatrice Hicks: Pioneering female engineer
• Marie Van Brittan Brown: Inventor of the security system
• Sue Sarafian Jehl: Secretary to General Eisenhower
• Artemisia Gentileschi: 17th-century Italian painter 
• Madam C.J. Walker: Haircare pioneer and entrepreneur 
• Sarah Winnemucca: Native American author and activist
• Jeannette Rankin: First American congresswoman
• Louise Chéruit: First female fashion house owner
• Zabel Yesayan: Armenian activist and writer