Seven Who Insisted on Better Futures
15. Nellie Bly: Recorder of Injustice
. . . . .
I was asked by the World if I could have myself committed to one of the asylums for the insane in New York, with a view to writing a plain and unvarnished narrative of the treatment of the patients therein and the methods of management, etc. I said I could and I did.
. . . .
16. Ida B. Wells: Documenter of Lynchings
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Having lost my paper, had a price put on my life, and been made an exile from home for hinting at the truth, I felt I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth now that I was where I could do so freely. . . . Accordingly, the fourth week in June the New York Age had a seven-column article on the front page giving names, dates, and places of many lynchings for alleged rape. This article showed conclusively that my article in the Free Speech was based on facts of illicit association between black men and white women. . . . I found that white men who had created a race of mulattoes by raping and consorting with Negro women . . . these same white men lynched, burned, and tortured Negro men for doing the same thing with white women, even when the white women were willing victims. . . .
printed ten thousand copies of that issue . . . and broadcast them throughout the country and the South. One thousand copies were sold in the streets of Memphis alone.
. . . .
17. Frances Perkins: Protector of Working Women (And Men)
. . . .
We got there just as they started to jump. I shall never forget the frozen horror that came over us as stood with our hands on our throats watching that horrible sight, knowing that there was no help. They came down in twos and threes, jumping together in a kind of desperate hope. The life nets were broken. The firemen kept shouting for them not to jump. But they had no choice; the flames were right behind them . . . .Out of that terrible episode came a self-examination of stricken conscience in which the people of this state saw for the first time the individual worth and value of those one hundred forty-six people who fell or were burned in that great fire. . . . and we all felt that we had been wrong, that something was wrong with that building, which we had accepted, or the tragedy never would have happened. Moved by a sense of stricken guilt, we banded ourselves together to find a way by law to prevent this kind of disaster.
. . . .
18. Emma Bugbee: Walker with the Suffragists
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Emma Bugbee, a Barnard graduate of 1909, joined the Tribune on July 23, 1910, and became its first woman assigned to hard news. Even so, she was not allowed to sit in the city room but for a long time had a desk down the hall. Bugbee covered the suffrage movement and in December 1912 walked with the suffragists as they made a cold, wet one-hundred-and-fifty-mile march to Albany, carrying a petition to the legislature to put suffrage on the agenda. As they walked, the reporters were subject to the same slurs and outcries as the petitioners; in fact, Bugbee later said, the reporters considered themselves soldiers in the war for the vote, as war correspondents later linked themselves to the doughboys they covered in Europe. At the end, she wrote, exultantly:
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19. Margaret Sanger: Healer of Women's Bodies
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I was not afraid of the penitentiary; I was not afraid of anything except being misunderstood. Nevertheless, in the circumstances my going there could help nobody. I had seen so many people do foolish things valiantly, such as wave a red flag, shout inflammatory words, lead a parade . . . . Then they went to jail for six months, a year perhaps, and what happened? Something had been killed in them; they were never heard of again. I had seen braver and hardier souls than I vanquished in spirit and body by prison terms, and I was not going to be lost and broken for an issue which was not the real one, such as the entirely unimportant Woman Rebel articles. . . . There was a train for Canada within a few hours. Could I take it? Should I take it? . . . Could I ever make anyone understand?
. . . .
20. Louise Nevelson: Sculptor of Ambition. . . . .
In the toughest economic days, I didn't have the price to go uptown. The WPA did give me a little breathing space. I only came in at the tail end, in 1937, when it was almost over. You had to go on relief to get on the project, and I didn't quite want to fill out the papers because my family were helping me at the time but by 1937, I felt it was necessary. So I taught on the project, but I also did painting and sculpture. . . . All my sculpture I had in my first show at Nierendorf in 1941 I did right on the project. I trained myself not to waste. I feel you must know if you're going to live your life as an artist, you steel yourself daily. You don't develop fancy tastes, fancy appetites.
21. Brenda Berkman: Survivor of the First Responders
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We all must make it our fight to raise the profile of women in this struggle: not just to give credit where credit is due, but also to ensure that American women are not made invisible in the way the women of Afghanistan have been forced into invisibility by the Taliban. The United States as a society is better than that. I would ask all of you to do everything you can to show your children that:
* Women are firefighters;
* Women are patriotic;
* Women are heroes.
. . . .
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