Daring Adventurers

The real estate agent grinned. “That’s what I planned,” she said, a knowing look on her face. She spoke in response to my comment that the acreage the agent lives on could someday be subdivided and sold into several lots.

Women in real estate? It’s not all the common. I’m reading a journal article about how Victorian houses built in the 1870s in San Francisco and it’s all about the men building and developing.

You’d think that real estate was always the male arena, at least until recently. Yes, there might of have been few women involved in property, but it’s incorrect to say there were no women, particularly in ancient times.

In the article Urban Real Estate in Late Republican Rome, the author notes that a woman called Metella purchased large blocks of property in Rome and then subdivided them, presumably for a profit.

She needed dough. Metella was the fourth wife of Lucius Sulla, a statesman and general, who fought for control of Rome. At one point, when enemies burned Sulla’s villas, Metella had to flee for safety with her children to her husband in Greece. She kindly offered to help his supporters financially.

Yet when her husband celebrated a victory with a lavish feast to the god Hercules, Metella was sick and near death. Priests told Sulla not to go near her and not to have his house polluted by her. So he divorced her and had her dumped at another house.

In hard times, a woman needs good investments.

My voice is rushed when I leave a phone message. I’m stressed. Projects are clamoring for attention this week, and nothing makes me more frantic than the words “upcoming deadline.” Yet I’m lucky. The work—revising the novel, starting a local writing group—are endeavors I believe in.

Sarah Edmonds believed so much in supporting the Union side in the Civil War that she disguised herself as a man to be able to fight.

It was not the first time she had to hide her gender. She was born in New Brunswick, Canada to a father who resented his child was not a boy. To escape his abuse and an arranged marriage, she immigrated to the U.S. and disguised herself as a man to support herself. She became a traveling Bible salesman.

In 1861, at the news of President Lincoln’s call for men after the fall of Fort Sumter, she later wrote in her autobiography that it was not her desire:

“to seek my own personal ease and comfort while so much sorrow and distress filled the land. But the great question to be decided, was, what can I do? What part am I to act in this great drama?”

Fittingly for a Bible salesman, she prayed on the matter.

Disguised as a man, she served as a nurse and mail carrier in the Union Army. In her autobiography, she wrote that she also was a spy and crossed the Confederate lines.

In 1863, she contracted malaria. She couldn’t be seen by a doctor, who would realize that this soldier was a woman. She requested a furlough, but was denied. Having no other choice, she became a deserter.

Still she persevered for what she believed in. After she recovered, she worked as a female nurse until the end of the war.

Sarah had the courage of her convictions, which got her through some challenging times. My project deadlines? In perspective, they’re not that difficult.

I’ve been paralyzed this week by bad memories, which were supposedly buried in the past but have been stirred up by politics in Washington D.C.

So many other women have felt this way too.

Somehow I get comfort in a story I discovered when researching my earlier blog, “Suffragist Anna Howard Shaw (1847 -1919) Faced Her Critics.” Anna started out as a preacher before she became a suffragist. She had to visit far-flung congregations on her own.

In the summer of 1874, she endured a overnight wagon ride on a desolated route with a strange man. It was just the two of them. Then he started to frighten her.

Anna, in her autobiography The Story of a Pioneer, tells it best:

A man appeared in a two-seated wagon and offered to take me to my destination, I felt that I had to go with him, though I did not like his appearance. He was a huge, muscular person, with a protruding jaw and a singularly evasive eye; but I reflected that his forbidding expression might be due, in part at least, to the prospect of the long night drive through the woods, to which possibly he objected as much as I did.

It was already growing dark when we started, and within a few moments we were out of the little settlement and entering the woods. With me I had a revolver I had long since learned to use, but which I very rarely carried. I had hesitated to bring it now—had even left home without it; and then, impelled by some impulse I never afterward ceased to bless, had returned for it and dropped it into my hand-bag.

I sat on the back seat of the wagon, directly behind the driver, and for a time, as we entered the darkening woods, his great shoulders blotted out all perspective as he drove on in stolid silence. Then, little by little, they disappeared like a rapidly fading negative. The woods were filled with Norway pines, hemlocks, spruce, and tamaracks-great, somber trees that must have shut out the light even on the brightest days. To-night the heavens held no lamps aloft to guide us, and soon the darkness folded around us like a garment. I could see neither the driver nor his horses. I could hear only the sibilant whisper of the trees and the creak of our slow wheels in the rough forest road.

Suddenly the driver began to talk, and at first I was glad to hear the reassuring human tones, for the experience had begun to seem like a bad dream. I replied readily, and at once regretted that I had done so, for the man’s choice of topics was most unpleasant. He began to tell me stories of the stockades—grim stories with horrible details, repeated so fully and with such gusto that I soon realized he was deliberately affronting my ears. I checked him and told him I could not listen to such talk.

He replied with a series of oaths and shocking vulgarities, stopping his horses that he might turn and fling the words into my face. He ended by snarling that I must think him a fool to imagine he did not know the kind of woman I was. What was I doing in that rough country, he demanded, and why was I alone with him in those black woods at night?

Though my heart missed a beat just then, I tried to answer him calmly.

“You know perfectly well who I am,” I reminded him. “And you understand that I am making this journey to-night because I am to preach to-morrow morning and there is no other way to keep my appointment.”

He uttered a laugh which was a most unpleasant sound.

“Well,” he said, coolly, “I’m damned if I’ll take you. I’ve got you here, and I’m going to keep you here!”

I slipped my hand into the satchel in my lap, and it touched my revolver. No touch of human fingers ever brought such comfort. With a deep breath of thanksgiving I drew it out and cocked it, and as I did so he recognized the sudden click.

“Here! What have you got there?” he snapped.

“I have a revolver,” I replied, as steadily as I could. “And it is cocked and aimed straight at your back. Now drive on. If you stop again, or speak, I’ll shoot you.”

For an instant or two he blustered.

“By God,” he cried, “you wouldn’t dare.”

“Wouldn’t I?” I asked. “Try me by speaking just once more.”

Even as I spoke I felt my hair rise on my scalp with the horror of the moment, which seemed worse than any nightmare a woman could experience. But the man was conquered by the knowledge of the waiting, willing weapon just behind him. He laid his whip savagely on the backs of his horses and they responded with a leap that almost knocked me out of the wagon.

The rest of the night was a black terror I shall never forget. He did not speak again, nor stop, but I dared not relax my caution for an instant. Hour after hour crawled toward day, and still I sat in the unpierced darkness, the revolver ready. I knew he was inwardly raging, and that at any instant he might make a sudden jump and try to get the revolver away from me. I decided that at his slightest movement I must shoot. But dawn came at last, and just as its bluish light touched the dark tips of the pines we drove up to the log hotel in the settlement that was our destination. Here my driver spoke.

“Get down,” he said, gruffly. “This is the place.”

I sat still. Even yet I dared not trust him. Moreover, I was so stiff after my vigil that I was not sure I could move.

“You get down,” I directed, “and wake up the landlord. Bring him out here.”

He sullenly obeyed and aroused the hotel-owner, and when the latter appeared I climbed out of the wagon with some effort but without explanation. 

“Awesome,” bellows a woman. I had just confided that her former university had published my first two books, and it changed my life.

Bessie Coleman was a daring pilot, the first African American woman to have a flying license. She was fearless and determined. But like all of us, she needed encouragement.

Bessie was the tenth of thirteen children. Her parents were sharecroppers, barely eking out a living. She walked to a one-room schoolhouse located 4 miles away. In college, she lasted only one term before running out of money.

She went to Chicago to live with her brother and worked as a manicurist and beautician. It wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to “amount to something.”

Her brother taunted her that French women did something she could never do: fly a plane. It spurred Bessie on, but she was an African American woman in a country where discrimination was rampant. No flying schools in the U.S. would take her. No one would teach her to fly.

Robert Abbott, owner of a Chicago newspaper, told her to go learn to fly in France. He opened up the door to a whole new world for her.

She helped herself by studying French for seven months. She withdrew her savings. Then with some financial support by Abbott and another person, she set off for Paris.

Robert Abbott’s encouragement changed her life. For me, having an academic publisher recognize my passion for history and writing put me on a new path.

We all need encouragement to help us change our life.

My heart pounds.  A friend  is telling me my career is about to take off.

It’s exciting because finally my writing will be out there. But it’s also scary because my novels will be open to criticism. Writers, who already have a vivid imaginations, can easily imagine the worst.

Anna Howard Shaw campaigned tirelessly for women’s suffrage for over 30 years. She was a great orator. In 1912, when states Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon gave women the right to vote, Anna spoke at the major cities in all three states, making four or five speeches a day.

She knew how to speak to a crowd from her earlier experience as a minister. Yet after her first time preaching, she could have easily given up her calling. She had been well received by the audience, but the next day her brother-in-law took out a notice in the newspaper:

A young girl named Anna Shaw, seventeen years old, preached in Ashton yesterday. Her real friends deprecate the course she is pursuing. 

Her friends and family stating publicly they detesting that she was preaching? She must have been humiliated. But she didn’t let it stop her. She went on to preach 36 times that year.

Yes, I might get some criticism. But I won’t let it stop me.

With swelling pride, I honk my horn and give the women a thumbs up. This morning’s drive took me past four schools where teachers, predominantly women, are on strike. As a teacher for eight years, I know it’s a hard job. Teachers don’t get paid enough, and now many in local districts are on strike.

Rose Schneiderman knew the importance of striking. Her mother, a struggling widow in New York City with four children, fed her family with charity food baskets. In 1895, Schneiderman left school at age 13 to earn money.

In 1903, while working in abysmal conditions at a factory, 21-year-old Schneiderman and a partner applied for a charter from the United Cloth and Cap Makers Union. Leaders told them to organize 25 women. They did it within days.

Schneiderman was an organizer of what was at the time the largest strike of American women, the “Uprising of 20,000.” In November, 1909, Jewish women in their teens and early twenties went on strike for eleven weeks. They were protesting terrible wages, long working days, and horrible conditions at shirtwaist factories.

The women had to be strong. In one month, the police arrested 723 people, with 19 sentenced to the workhouse. The average bail was a $2,500, a significant amount at the time. Even a 10 year old was sentenced without testimony to five days in the workhouse for allegedly assaulting a strike-breaker.

The women were victorious, for most companies signed contracts with benefits including a standard work week of 52 hours with four paid holidays per year.

Schneiderman later became friends with Eleanor Roosevelt and was the only woman on President Franklin Roosevelt’s Labor Advisory Board. She played a key role in shaping labor laws in industries which had predominately women.

Schneiderman knew that striking is unpleasant work. Sometimes, though, it’s the only way you change things.