Private Property Project

12/17/2022

In the late 1870s, Williamina Fleming was in her early 20s and a recent U.S. immigrant from Scotland. She had come married with a child, but her husband abandoned the family shortly after arriving. Responsible for raising their son, she took a job as a housekeeper in the home of Edward Pickering, the Director of Harvard College Observatory.

As the story goes, one day, when frustrated with the men he employed, Edward yelled out, “My Scottish maid could do better!” While said in jest, there was much truth to his comment. Williamina was an advanced student while in Scotland. She was a pupil-teacher by 14 years old and continued teaching for five years until she married.

In 1881, Edward hired Williamina as the first of what would become a famous group of Harvard Computers. All women, they studied the stars through glass plate photographs. Then only a few years later, while still not even 30 years old, Williamina became curator of astronomical photographs. This role came with the responsibility of managing a dozen women computers. Within a few years, the team classified over ten thousand stars.

Williamina became a prominent astronomer of her time, receiving many awards and numerous honors. She became the first American woman elected an honorary member of the British Royal Astronomical Society. And she would discover ten novae, 59 nebulae, and 310 new variable stars. As she achieved much success and helped her team thrive, she also stood up for women in science, advocating for the hiring of women.

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Sources: “Fleming, Williamina Paton Stevens” by Kéri Katalin. Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer Science – Business Media, LLC. 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA, 2007, p. 375 ( https://bit.ly/2Nx8Sdd) / Project Continua / The Women Who Mapped the Universe And Still Couldn’t Get Any Respect by Natasha Geiling, Smithsonian Magazine (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-women-who-mapped-the-universe-and-still-couldnt-get-any-respect-9287444/) / Williamina Fleming – Wikipedia

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11/28/2022

Mary Walker earned her medical degree from Syracuse Medical College in 1855, at a time when very few women became physicians. An abolitionist, she volunteered for service as a surgeon in the federal army during the Civil War, but she was turned down. Refusing the army’s offer to make her a nurse instead, Dr. Walker volunteered her services as a spy, but was turned down again. So, she began treating the wounded and sick as a volunteer civilian doctor, until ultimately the Army hired her as a contract surgeon, the first woman ever employed by the U.S. Army in that role. In April 1864 Dr. Walker was captured while behind Confederate lines. She was a prisoner of war for four months, until released in a prisoner exchange. For her services Mary Walker was awarded the Medal of Honor. She is the only woman in American history to receive the medal.

Mary Walker was a suffragist, prohibitionist, war hero, and pioneering physician, but it was her preference for traditional male clothing that earned her the most notoriety. She was arrested on numerous occasions for wearing men’s clothing. Once when asked why she wore men’s clothes she answered, “I don’t wear men’s clothes. I wear MY clothes.”

Mary Edwards Walker was born on November 26, 1832, one hundred ninety years ago today.

11/23/2022

"Somewhere in between Willie Nelson and Jimi Hendrix was Cordell Jackson, an American musician thought to be the first woman to produce, engineer, arrange and promote music on her own rock and roll music label. She was making music reminiscent of the Velvet Underground before the world was even introduced to rock & roll. The Mississippi-born, ballgown-wearing guitarist played with more energy than any Indie band worth their salt today, and during live performances, Cordell would strum on her guitar so fast that she would often break her guitar picks by the end of the song. At the height of her career, she appeared on David Letterman and MTV news and became known as “rock-and-roll granny”.

Jackson started playing the guitar at the age of 12 in a bible belt town where “girls didn’t play guitar”. She began writing her own songs in her 20s after moving to Memphis, the capital of rock & roll. “They didn’t have a name for “rock & roll then”, Cordell later told MTV news in 1989. “I just always played it fast” ( From Nessy Messy) ~ Laurie ~ 🤓

Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45IY65vgZDU

11/21/2022

11/20/2022

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09/30/2022

07/19/2022

Jane Rigby, Webb’s operations project scientist, discusses how NASA plans to wring as much science as possible from the $10-billion observatory

06/19/2022

This is 18-year-old Alice Roosevelt and her long-haired Chihuahua named Leo in 1902. She also had a pet snake named Emily Spinach who she would wrap around on one arm and take to parties.

Alice was extremely independent and unlike many women of her time, she was known to wear pants, drive cars, smoke ci******es, place bets with bookies, dance on rooftops, and party all night. In a span of 15 months, she managed to attend 300 parties, 350 balls and 407 dinners.

A friend of Alice’s stepmom once remarked that she was “like a young wild animal that had been put into good clothes.” Her stepmom went a step further and described her as a “guttersnipe” that went “uncontrolled with every boy in town.”

William Howard Taft banned her from the White House after Alice buried a voodoo doll (of Taft’s wife) in the front yard. Woodrow Wilson also banned her after she told a very dirty joke (sadly no record of the joke exists) about him in public.

Her father, Theodore Roosevelt famously said, “I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both.”

Alice once told President Lyndon B. Johnson that she specifically wore wide-brimmed hats around him so that he could not kiss her.

During an interview in 1974, Alice described herself as a “hedonist.”

She died in 1980 at the age of 96.

06/12/2022

You’ve probably never heard of Victoria Woodhull, so I thought I’d share her story.

Born in 1838 in a rural frontier town in Ohio, Woodhull grew up in abject poverty in an abusive household. She was forcefully married off to an alcoholic womanizer when she was just 15 years old. She had two children, one of whom was born with an intellectual disability. She often had to work outside the home to make ends meet.

After years of abuse and infidelity by her first husband, she was managed to finally get a divorce. Soon after, Woodhull began to support the idea of free love. In 1871, she gave a speech in Steinway Hall, New York City in which she declared:

“To woman, by nature, belongs the right of s*xual determination. When the instinct is aroused in her, then and then only should commerce follow. When woman rises from s*xual slavery to s*xual freedom, into the ownership and control of her s*xual organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom, then will this instinct become pure and holy; then will woman be raised from the iniquity and morbidness in which she now wallows for existence, and the intensity and glory of her creative functions be increased a hundred-fold…”

In the early 1870s, Woodhull became the first female stockbroker and opened her own brokerage firm on Wall Street and made a fortune advising high profile clients such as the Vanderbilt family. With the money she made from her brokerage, Woodhull founded her own newspaper which reached a national circulation of 20,000 at its peak. The newspaper generated considerable controversy by advocating for women’s suffrage, s*x education, birth control, licensed prostitution, vegetarianism, and short skirts.

In 1872, she became the first woman to run for the President of the United States during a time when women were not even allowed to vote. She also chose Frederick Douglass as her running mate.

She spent Election Day 1872 in Ludlow Street Jail (located on Ludlow Street and Broome Street in Manhattan, New York) after being arrested for publishing an obscene newspaper. She was imprisoned for a month.

Ulysses S. Grant went on to win the presidential election.

04/08/2022

Her father was a preacher. Her mother taught Sunday school. When Nannie Helen Burroughs was born in 1879, the family lived in Orange, Virginia.

Nannie's father died not long after she was born. Nannie’s mother, now raising her daughter as a single parent, moved with Nannie to Washington D.C. in search of better opportunities.

There Nannie went to school, and after completing her schooling, looked for work teaching. Unable to find a job, she spent over a decade working as an editorial secretary and bookkeeper.

But tenacious in personality, she refused to let her dream die. She raised money and opened a school, the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington D.C. in 1909, intending to help Black women achieve financial independence and help “uplift the race.”

“Specialized training meets the definite requirements in the world of today. It gives the graduate special advantage over those who have only a general education. It is less difficult for her to secure employment and make advancement in her field. It develops job security.” This was her reasoning for opening a trade school as in Washington D.C. at the time, the “largest occupational category for black female workers was domestic service.”

Nannie had a motto for life, “Do ordinary things in an extraordinary way.” This motto was at the heart of all she did and the training students received.

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Sources: Harley, Sharon. "Nannie Helen Burroughs: 'The Black Goddess of Liberty'." The Journal of Negro History 81, no. 1/4 (1996): 62-71. Accessed October 12, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2717608. / Taylor, Traki L. “‘Womanhood Glorified’: Nannie Helen Burroughs and the National Training School for Women and Girls, Inc., 1909-1961.” The Journal of African American History, vol. 87, 2002, pp. 390–402. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1562472. Accessed 20 Oct. 2020 / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nannie_Helen_Burroughs / Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

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04/01/2022

Dorothy Lavinia Brown was born in Philadelphia, in January of 1919 to an u***d mother who moved to Troy (NY), and then placed her in an orphanage when she was just five-months-old. In 1925, Brown's estranged mother reclaimed her, only to see her run away from home on five separate occasions.

At age 15 (the last time Brown ran away from her mother), she enrolled herself in high school. Recognizing that she had no place to stay, the school's principal arranged for Brown to live with foster parents who became a very positive influence in her life.

Brown went on to graduate at the top of her high school class at the age of 18, and then enrolled at Bennett College in Greensboro (NC), where she graduated number two in her class in 1941. Pretty remarkable so far, right? Well, hold onto your seats to see what she did next.

Following college, Brown returned to Upstate New York where she worked as an inspector at the Rochester Army Ordnance Dept. for two years before returning to school to study medicine at Meharry Medical College in Nashville.

After graduating from medical school in 1948, Brown became the first African-American female to be appointed to a general surgery residency in the racially segregated South.

Fast-forward to 1957 and Brown was named Chief Surgeon at Riverside Hospital in Nashville, and in 1966, became the first African-American female to be elected to the Tennessee State Legislature.

Along the way, she also became the became the first unmarried woman in Tennessee authorized to be an adoptive parent.

03/10/2022

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03/09/2022

In 1931—59 years after Yellowstone was founded—Herma Albertson Baggley became the first woman to have a permanent position as an NPS ranger-naturalist in the park.

She built and guided visitors on the Observation Point trail so they could experience natural history. Formally trained as a botanist, Herma also collaborated with plant ecologist W.B. McDougall to produce the first wildflower field guide for the park.

03/03/2022

In 1887, Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, better known as Nellie Bly, was a 23-year-old inspiring journalist. Upon a New York World newspaper editor's request, she faked insanity to conduct first-hand research at a New York insane asylum. The asylum she was sent to typically housed poor immigrants. She stayed there for ten days until the editors could get her released.

Speaking of her experience, Nellie said, "What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment?... I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck."

Nellie published Ten Days in a Mad-House, which helped increase funding and change in New York insane asylums.

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Sources: Nellie Bly. Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, / Wikimedia Commons

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10/29/2021