Hello fellow readers. I wanted to make you aware of this meeting October 1-3 and let you know that if you sign up, you will hear Ohio Women’s History Project as one of the first presentations on October 1st from 9am – 10am.
The title of the presentation will be Transformed Women Who Brought Us to Where we are Today. There will be several other presentations and a guest speaker during these three days. I hope you will be able to attend and while it is virtual, you will be able to ask questions via Chat that I will be able to answer at the end. I look forward to seeing you!!
Sojourner Truth was born Isabella “Belle” Baumfree sometime in 1797 in Swartekill, NY (died 11/26/1883 at 86). She was an abolitionist, an author and a human rights activist. She escaped slavery in 1826 with her infant daughter. She was the first black woman to get her son back in court two years later. Ms. Truth helped bring black troops to the Union for the Civil War and she also helped freed blacks to receive land grants. In the latter she was unsuccessful. She also narrated several pieces that have been published, her talk in Akron was not want of them. Today there are quite a number of memorials in her name around the country.
I want to be clear that this is just a sample of the names of women in Ohio History, it is not all of them. These are names that I could fit on a t-shirt and names of women I have begun to write about on this website, plus a few more. I made sure to get names of women that were “firsts” at something. I also tried to only get one name in different categories, and this is why all the first ladies from Ohio are not on here. If you haven’t bought your t-shirt yet, click on the link above and see the different items which are featured. Let’s educate others about Ohio Women’s History, ONE T-SHIRT AT A TIME!
Agnes May Driscoll – Coder/Mathmetician
Annie Oakley – Sharp shooter
Belle Sherwin – Activist
Berenice Abbott – Photographer
Bernice Pyke – First woman to be a delegate for the Democratic Nat’l Convention
Betsy Mix Cowles – Activist Abolition
Betty Zane – American Revolution Heroine
Charity Edna Earley – First AA woman to be an Army Officer
Dorothy Fuldheim – Journalist
Eliza Bryant – Humanitarian
Ella P. Stewart – First AA woman Pharmacist
Emma “Grandma” Gatewood – First woman to walk the Appalachian Trail
Erma Bombeck – Comedian
Evelyn Ryan – Prize winner of Defiance, Ohio (movie made about her life)
Florence Harding – First Lady
Florence Ellinwood Allen – First woman on the state Supreme Court
Florence Z. Melton – Shoe Manufacturer
Frances Jennings Casement – Suffragist
Frances Bolton – First woman to Congress/House of Rep.
Hallie Brown – Educator/Activist
Harriet Beecher Stowe – Writer
Henrietta Buckler Seiberling – Founder of AA/Oxford Group
Jane Scott – Journalist/Musicians
Jerrie Mock – First woman to fly solo around the world
Judith Resnik – Astronaut
Lillian Wald – Nurse
Lillian Gish – Silent film star
Lucy Stone – Suffragist
Lucy Webb Hayes – First Lady
Maude C. Waitt – One of the First women to the state Senate
Thank you to everyone who came out and supported Ohio Women’s History Project this year at the conference! If you wished to have a receipt, don’t forget to email me at ladyjatbay@gmail.com and let me know your name and how many shirts or prints that you paid for and I can send this back to you. If you still wanted to purchase a shirt, you can click on the store at the top of this page.
Ohio Local History Alliance held an amazing conference and I think we all learned a great deal from these presentations. We now have good ideas about how to take our museums, non-profits and new businesses forward in the years ahead. Below are some of the workshops I attended and information that I learned. I have included some links so that you might be able to research this more on your own.
The first workshop that I attended was given by Megan Woods, Cultural Resources
Megan Woods
Division Director at the Ohio History Connection. Her workshop was “Ohio Women’s Suffrage Centennial.” Megan discussed how to be included on their event page on the Ohio Suffrage Centennial website. The Ohio Suffrage Centennial Commission was passed on May 2019 by Governor Mike DeWine. There is currently a travelling exhibit of banners and a trading card project going on in Northwest Ohio by the Trumbull County Historical Society. There are also book discussion groups and you can get a list of books to read for your own groups through the Ohio League of Women Voters. In August of 2020 there will be a huge celebration that is in the planning stages at this time. Akron is working on a statue to honor Sojourner Truth. Case Western Reserve is hoping to get a play produced entitled the “Taming of the Anti.” All these and more can be found on their website above.
Harriet Taylor Upton
She spoke about three women in particular from Ohio, Harriett Taylor Upton who started in Ravenna and ended up in Warren. She brought the National Women’s Suffrage Association to Warren. She became the Vice Chairman of the Republican National Committee and was a part of the D.A.R. (Daughter’s of the American Revolution).
She also shared about Florence Allen who was the first female judge in Ohio but began her career first as a musician and journalist. She had left Ohio for New York to study law and then returned to eventually receive a nomination to the Ohio Supreme Court. Later she would be nominated by Franklin D. Roosevelt to the Federal Supreme Court. Florence also wrote several books about the law.
Haley Quinn Brown
The third woman was Haley Quinn Brown who was a black woman that eventually came to Wilberforce, Ohio. She was the Dean of Tuskeegee Institute, an International Public Speaker and the President of the Colored Women’s League. She was very involved in the temperance movement as well.
We listened to various people in the audience talk about their projects. One of which is that the Girl Scouts of Ohio are working on a badge to commemorate being a good citizen and learning about the voting process.
I then attended a Grant Management Basics workshop with Jennifer Souers-Chevraux who is the owner of Illumine Creative Solutions, LLC. Jennifer taught us about ways to be organized in a fashion that would help guarantee success with the grant already received. She also gave us several non-profit organizations to help with your business.
Tracy Lawson, the author of a historical book entitled “Pride of the Valley,” engaged
Savannah Homa, Tracy Lawson and Keilah Israel
with Mt. Healthy school in Springfield, to help kids become interested in their ancestry through family trees. Two young ladies came to report on their findings. These future female historians were Savannah Homa and Keilah Israel. There were a total of eight boys and girls involved in this project.
These young girls were very bright and had amazing insight into what they had discovered on this project. I was very impressed with their advanced level of thinking.
At lunch time, on Friday, we listened to Nekole Alligood from the Delaware Nation speak on re-patriating native American remains that might be found in a family member’s home. There is an organization called NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) which handles this type of service in a culturally appropriate way so as to bring peace to the departed. When such an event occurs it needs to be a sacred event with no press invited to the ceremony. Nekole also made us aware of the fact that there are 44 federally recognized tribes that stem from Ohio. I wondered how many there were that were not recognized. We also learned that native American’s were not recognized or given U.S. citizenship until 1924. Even today, the issue of young women kidnapped from reservations, (which are often isolated locations with people living far from others) for purposes of human trafficking. The issue of rape was brought up many years ago in an article written for Amnesty International that I recall reading. I believe this took place in Alaska. It is interesting to note that girls are kidnapped from reservations but not outside of the reservation (i.e., non-natives). This is a huge concern because the reservations are meant to be protected lands – so why are the people on them not protected?
Sue Plummer and Christine Anderson
Another workshop I attended was on the “Women of King Records.” King Records was a recording studio, manufacturer and shipping warehouse run by Syd Nathan between 1943-1971, in the Cincinnati area. Christine Anderson, a professor from Xavier University in Cincinnati and Sue Plummer an Ohio History Service Corps Alumni, have been conducting research to uncover the women who produced music during that time. They shared a spreadsheet with their findings which held 2,054 recordings of various genres including hillbilly, Doo-Wop, funk and soul. They gave us access to this spreadsheet which includes links to YouTube videos if they were available. I am not sure whether or not it is acceptable to share this link so I will keep that to myself. You can however access this website which appears to be linked to Xavier University.
As you can imagined I had a wonderful time at this conference but I feel safe in saying most people seemed to be having a good time. There were smiles on these eager faces, as they walked about and the people I talked with all agreed that they enjoyed attending.
Remember #olhaempowers to follow on Instagram or Twitter.
I felt it was important to put something together, as a memorial for women in Ohio’s history. I have been working on this for the last couple of months and then met up with a graphics artist that I was referred to. Samantha Vickers is in Cleveland and runs a company called Intentions Studio Design. We spoke on the phone and I explained how I wanted the emblem to look. I wanted something that would be formal and elegant as this was the style in our history when these women would have been around. It was important to get a design that these women would be proud of. She had it in one take and I was really surprised. You never really know if you are explaining yourself correctly until you see the finished product.
The women on this design have all passed. They are not ALL of the women in history in Ohio because you wouldn’t have been able to read the names if we did this. These are not even ALL of the women who have passed. This sample is based on women that I have written about or are preparing to do so. The names that are highlighted are women were “First” to achieve in the state of Ohio or wherever they became famous. The women that are considered for an Ohio Women’s History list are women who were either born in Ohio or those who made history here. For example, Mildred Wirt Benson (aka Carolyn Keene) was born in Ladora, Iowa and grew up there until she graduated college. When she came to Ohio, she began to write and eventually penned the “Nancy Drew Series,” or at least the majority of the stories. There are other women, like Natalie Clifford Barney who born here and lived here only 10 years. However, she went to boarding school in France and eventually stayed in Paris and ran a “Salon,” which was an intellectual gathering place for forty years. (She is not on the emblem but written about here on my blogposts).
If you click on Women’s History Store, above, you will see this emblem featured on products for men, women, youth and toddlers. This online store is based in Ohio. When you click on the products in the store, it will take you to the “EnlightenedGal” store that I created and this is through the manufacturer (CustomizedGirl). Whatever you purchase, Ohio Women’s History gets a commission from this. This is going to be set aside to pay for setting up Ohio Women’s History Project. This will be a non-profit geared toward educating and bringing awareness to our young people but also to adults. I have already given a lecture for the Westerville Kiwanis on four of the women in Ohio’s History. I would like to have contests for students, that we can feature here on the blog and will be an assignment for their history classes (If you are a teacher, please get in contact with me at ladyjatbay @ gmail.com to discuss). My way of educating will be focused on writing and lectures. The direction of this business will be based on what funds are able to be collected from the sales of these shirts in the store here.
Thank you for taking the time to peruse Ohiowomenshistory.com. Feel free to contact me about contributing an article or telling me a story about an Ohio Women in your history. They don’t need to be famous, just a remarkable person who transformed the people around her.
Jeannine Vegh, Founder of Ohio Women’s History Project
August 13, 1818 – October 19, 1893 (Leo and an Artemis Archetype)
Lucy Stone was born and died in Massachusetts but what is important about putting her on an Ohio Women’s History page is her contribution to women which began to surface during her time at Oberlin College, in Oberlin, Ohio. While she was the next to the last of nine children, this did not distract her from becoming a leader and a survivor (you often see this amongst the eldest children). Observing how women were left to the mercy of men, as a young child and seeing that it was not to protect them but to take power over them, she decided she would never marry and would take care of herself. She was also distraught over the fact that the Bible included passages that re-enforced misogyny and this gave her reason to be spiritual frustrated. Naturally this was the sign of the times and so I am not putting down men of this time period, only showing how a woman from this time period made a name for herself and survived the obstacles of the period.
As a teenager she began her road to independence by teaching and soon learned that she was being paid less than what men received. Back then, it was a dollar a day! And people complain now about trying to make a living. Over the years, Lucy began to research women’s issues since the topic of women’s issues were just starting to appear in local newspapers. She attended abolitionist rallies and conferences and was impacted by the “Letters on the Province of Woman”, which would later change its name to “Letters on the Equality of the Sexes.”
Her education began at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary at the age of 21 but she left as quickly as she arrived when she learned that the Dean was in favor of slavery and not to keen on women’s rights. She then went on to Wesleyan Academy. It was here that she began to find solidarity amongst women and would follow the lead of a young woman, Abbey Kelley, an anti-slavery agent who tried in vain to speak up and make her voice heard. At the age of 25, after hearing that Oberlin College was one of the first of its kind to admit women and African-Americans, she hopped on a train and began her journey west to Ohio.
At Oberlin, she had a lot of high expectations for women on campus, a natural assumption. Unfortunately, she was wrong. She again was paid half what the male students were being paid for school type positions meant to pay expenses. She was having to do double the work of male colleagues and her health began to wane. She fought with the school on this and after a number of students supported her on this, she won.
At the same time, she was fighting to be a public speaker, which was not allowed for women at this time. What Lucy wanted to do was begin by approaching women’s issues on the platform. Amazingly, the men in her family supported her but the women did not.
She graduated Oberlin at the age of 30 and went on to continue speaking and petitioning about women’s issues and anti-slavery. Other items of interest were that she kept her name after she did eventually marry and she wore pants (under her dresses).
Ohio Women's History 