TWENTY-ONE

WHO REBELLED

WHO LED

WHO FORESAW

 

 

GOLD SPONSOR OPENING THE WAY: A Women’s History Walk of Downtown Manhattan

Women’s eNews planted itself in new headquarters on Barclay Street on March 1, 2009, steps from the heart of New York’s old Newspaper Row. Here, women’s rights leaders and famous journalists who covered them changed the world through the power of their personalities, their determination, and their words.

This new location inspired Women’s eNews to create a women’s history walk researched and written by former New York Times editor Betsy Wade and founding editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and historian James Boylan.

On the walk, we find glimpses of three centuries of the work of these writers, agitators, abolitionists, suffragists, and those we now call activists, as well as three heroes who gave their lives on September 11, 2001. As you walk the streets, you will be able to absorb a sense of the world in which they worked and made themselves heard above the roar of the city.

For further information on the tour:

Call: 212-244-1720

Email: openingtheway@womensenews.org, or

Visit: www.womensenews.org/openingtheway

Funding provided by:

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STOPS ROUTE

Running Time: 1.5 hrs

Meeting Place: Women’s eNews HQ, 6 Barclay Street, between Broadway and Church Street

Ending Place: St. Paul’s Chapel, Broadway and Fulton Street

1. Margaret Sanger 2. Ernestine Rose 3. Emily Warren Roebling 4. Elizabeth Cady Stanton 5. Susan B. Anthony 6. Maria ‘Midy’ Morgan 7. Elizabeth Jennings 8. Margaret Fuller 9. Emma Bugbee 10. Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane) 11. Jenny June 12. Victorian Claflin Woodhull 13. Augusta Lewis 14. Barbara Ruckle Heck and Sojourner Truth 15. Louise Nevelson 16. Ida B. Wells 17. Anna Catharina Maul Zenger 18. Charlotte Temple

19. Frances Perkins 20. Mary White Ovington 21. Captain Brenda Berkman

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The vanished Broadway Tabernacle was built in 1836 and was the city’s main meeting hall for suffragists, abolitionists, and prohibitionists until 1857. A major voice was Ernestine Rose, a foremother of the women’s rights movement. At the New York State Women’s Rights Convention in 1853, she spoke there on married women’s property rights:

The law allows the widow . . . one cow, all sheep

in the number of ten, with the fleece and the

cloth from the same, two swine, and the pork

therefrom. (Great laughter.) My friends, do not say

that I stand here to make these laws ridiculous. No; if you laugh, it is at their own inherent

ludicrousness; for I state them simply and truly as they are; for they are so ridiculous in

themselves, that it is impossible to make them more so . . . In allusion to the laws

respecting wills, I wish to say that according to the Revised Statues of our State, a married

woman has not a right to make a will. The law says that wills may be made by all persons,

except idiots, persons of unsound mind, married women, and infants. Male infants ought

to consider it quite an insult to be placed in the same category with married women. No, a

married woman has no right to bequeath a dollar of the property, no matter how much

she may have brought into the marriage, or accumulated in it. Not a dollar to a friend, a

relative, or even to her own child, to keep him from starving. And this is the law in the

nineteenth century, in the enlightened United States, under a Republic that declares all

men to be free and equal.

An essay by Janet Freedman in the Jewish Women’s Archive online gives some details on Rose’s life; the bibliography cites Ernestine Rose: Eloquent Crusader by Yuri Suhl, published in 1970.

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?

She did flee, returning in 1916 to face the charges; but this time the government backed off. Sanger’s work eventually revolutionized American families.

Here a grandiose building once housed both a post office and the federal courts. It was the site of a case against the tenacious pioneer Margaret Sanger based on her publication the Woman

Rebel, which was launched into the mail in March 1914 and pledged to give birth-control information, although it included none. She was arraigned in the federal court for violation of the Postal Code, which covered contraceptive information and other transgressions. When she was summoned to stand trial in 1914, it became clear she would be sent to jail. She wrote:

MARGARET SANGER (1879-1966)

Old Federal Courthouse, City Hall Park

ERNESTINE ROSE (1810-1892)

Broadway Tabernacle, Broadway at Worth St.

There are at least 10 biographies of Sanger, in addition to her own books. Ellen Chesler’s Woman of

Valor: Margaret Sanger and Birth Control, 1992, is probably the strongest. Sometimes heavy, it paints a full portrait. 5 6

 

 

The famous arches of the Brooklyn Bridge might not have been finished in 1883 had it not been for Emily Warren Roebling. After her husband, Washington Roebling, suffered decompression sickness, she took over, as “Field Engineer,” the execution of what the American Institute of Architects calls “New York’s supreme icon.” Because creating the first bridge over the East River took so long, there were anxieties about its

soundness. Delivering a plea that she and her husband be permitted to finish the work, she became the first woman to address the American Society of Civil Engineers. Early in May 1883, Emily Roebling was the first passenger to cross the completed bridge. A contemporary account says:

She and a coachman had crossed over from Brooklyn in a new Victoria, its varnish

gleaming in the sunshine. She had taken a live rooster along with her, as a sign of victory,

and from one end of the bridge to the other, the men had stopped their work to cheer and

lift their hats as she came riding along.

After the formal opening, the bridge began to create a bigger city. Ten years later, the city of Brooklyn annexed adjoining towns to encompass all of Kings County. In fifteen years, the bridge helped unite Manhattan with the four other counties to form Greater New York. And engraved on the bridge, with her husband’s name, is that of Emily Warren Roebling.

The street sign “Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton Corner” honors the place where these two suffragists from 1868 to 1870 published their newspaper, The Revolution, from 1868 to 1870. In this 1869 dispatch by Stanton from Galena, Illinois, President Grant’s hometown, you hear a Stanton who anticipated a day when all women and black men would be able to vote:

Dear Revolution: Your patriotic heart will

palpitate to think that the women of The

Revolution have taken possession of the home of

the President, and propose to hold a Woman

Suffrage Convention right under the very shadow of his flagstaff. ... We have had a most

enthusiastic meeting... Theodore Tilton had just preceded us, and some ladies laughingly told

us that Theodore said they would certainly vote in twenty years! ... Why, Mr. Tilton, when you

go to the Senate some wise woman will sit on your right, and some black man on your left. You

are to pay the penalty of your theorizing and be sandwiched between a woman and a black

man in all the laws and constitutions before five years pass over your curly head. Twenty years!

Why, Theodore, we expect to be walking the golden streets of the New Jerusalem by that time

... Do you not know, Theodore, that we have vowed never to go disfranchised into the

Kingdom of Heaven? In the meantime, we propose to discuss sanitary and sumptuary laws,

finance, and free trade, religion and railroads, education and elections with such worthies as

yourself in the councils of the American republic. Twenty years! Why, every white male in the

nation will be tied to an apron-string by that time, while all the poets and philosophers will be

writing essays on "The Sphere of Man"!

Votes for women did not come in five, or twenty years, but fifty long years later.

EMILY WARREN ROEBLING (1843-1903)

The Brooklyn Bridge

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON (1815-1902)

The Revolution, 37 Park Row

An insightful life focusing on Roebling’s work for women after the bridge was done is at American National Biography Online. Among other groups, she was active in Sorosis, founded by Jane Cunningham Croly.

After her death, Stanton’s children edited her letters, posing problems for biographers. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an American Life, by Lori D. Ginzberg, 2009, manages this problem and examines both the

good and the bad.  

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SUSAN B. ANTHONY (1820-1906)

The Revolution, 37 Park Row

Stanton's collaborator, Susan B. Anthony, carried their campaign for women's suffrage wherever she could find an audience to hear her out. She told a crowd in 1893:

I had an experience in publishing a paper about twenty-five years ago and I came to grief. I never hear of a woman starting a suffrage paper that my blood does not tingle with agony for what that poor soul will have to endure -- the same agony I went through. I feel, however, that we shall never become an immense power in the world until we

concentrate all our money and editorial forces upon one great national daily newspaper, so we can sauce back our opponents every day in the year; once a month or once a week is not enough. .... We need a daily paper edited and composed according to woman's own thoughts, and not as a woman thinks a man wants her to think and write. As it is now, the men who control the finances control the paper. As long as we occupy our present position we are mentally and morally in the power of the men who engineer the finances. Horace Greeley once said that women ought not to expect the same pay for work that men received. He advised women to go down into New Jersey, buy a parcel of ground, and go to raising strawberries. Then when they came up to New York with their strawberries, the men wouldn't dare to offer them half price for their produce. I say, my journalistic sisters, that it is high time we were raising our own strawberries on our own land.

A smaller building erected on this site in 1858 was the first built by a New York newspaper, The Times. Expanded twice, it is now the last surviving newspaper building on Park Row itself. In 1869, the Irish-born Maria Morgan got a job here covering the stockyards, race meets, and horse auctions. She has been identified as the first woman reporter permitted to enter the city room of The Times, and with her great height and stockyard boots, she soon became a striking figure on Newspaper Row. Yet no one dared laugh; even princes prized her advice on horseflesh. Morgan continued at The Times until she died in 1892, having lived long enough to move into the expanded building you see here now. Her obituary in the 1892 Times was long and admiring: Towering well above the average man, with more than six feet to her credit, and clad in roomy serge, stout shoes showing to the ankles, and a bonnet defiant of wind and rain, she passed along at a swinging gait with more momentum to it than most men would venture to check. But this odd exterior housed qualities of heart and mind which won and kept friends for her and commanded respect and professional success . . . Miss Morgan was one of the first women to take up daily newspaper work in this city, and was called a pioneer. The designation was deserved in more senses than one, for, while women have followed her, they have not gone into her field. She stood alone in the specialties she cultivated.

MARIA ‘MIDY’ MORGAN (1828-1892)

New York Times Building, 41 Park Row

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Nan Robertson’s book The Girls in the Balcony, Women, Men and The New York Times, 1992, provides two pages, mostly from Morgan’s obituary of June 2, 1892. For serious research, seek Sarah Amelia Spensley’s 1918 bachelor’s paper for the University of Wisconsin, “Pioneer Women Newspaper Writers in the United

States.” Copious quotes from Morgan’s work are given.

Of this group, Anthony is the only one on a U.S. coin and the only protagonist of an opera (The Mother of Us All, by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein). The glut of biographies is no surprise. The

American National Biography Online article is a starting point.

 

 

In 1854, Jennings became the first African American to bring a successful lawsuit against race discrimination on public transit in New York City. On Sunday, July 16, on her way to play the organ at church, a conductor on the Third Avenue Railway line tried to eject her because she was riding in a “white-only” car. This was at Pearl Street and Chatham Square, four blocks north of this corner. Two days later, a letter from her was read at a public meeting and on July 19, it was printed in the New-York Daily Tribune. It said:

I told him not to lay his hands on me; he took hold of me and I took hold of the window sash and held on; he pulled me until he broke my grasp and I took hold of his coat and held on to that, he also broke my grasp from that (but previously he had dragged my companion out, she all the while screaming for him to let go). He then ordered the driver to fasten his horses, which he did, and come help him put me out of the car; they then both seized hold of me by the arms and pulled and dragged me flat down on the bottom of the platform, so that my feet hung one way and my head the other, nearly on the ground. I screamed murder with all my voice, and my companion screamed out “you’ll kill her; don’t kill her.” The driver then let go of me and went to his horses; I went again in the car, and the conductor said you shall sweat for this; then he told the driver to drive as fast as he could and not take another passenger in the car; to drive until he saw an officer or a Station House. With financial aid from her father, Jennings’s lawsuit was handled by a noted white firm. The jury awarded her damages of $225, and the case began the desegregation of the city’s public transit.

MARGARET FULLER (1810-1850)

New York Daily Tribune, 1 Pace Plaza (also 30 Ann St.)

The Pace College building was once the home of Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune and had as a staff member Margaret Fuller. She came to New York in 1844, borne on her reputation as a New England transcendentalist and author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century. She’d accepted an offer from Greeley and lived with his family at his East River estate while learning to meet the demands of daily journalism. Her chief job was book reviewing, but she branched into reporting, as her 1845 essay on the city’s public institutions shows: Passing to the Penitentiary, we entered on one of the gloomiest scenes that deforms this great metropolis. Here are the twelve hundred, who receive the punishment due to the vices of so large a portion of the rest. And under what circumstances! Never was punishment treated more simply as a social convenience, without regard to pure right, or a hope of reformation.... It must be that the more righteous feeling which has shown itself in regard to the prisons at Sing Sing and elsewhere, must take some effect as to the Penitentiary also.... The want of proper matrons, or any matrons, to take the care so necessary for the bodily or mental improvement or even decent condition of the seven hundred women assembled here, is an offense that cries aloud. It is impossible to see them in the Hospital, where the circumstances are a little more favorable, without seeing how many there are in whom the feelings of innocent childhood are not dead, who need only good influences and steady aid to raise them from the pit of infamy and woe into which they have fallen. And, if there was not one that could be helped, at least Society owes them the insurance of a decent condition while here. We trust that interest on this subject shall not slumber.

ELIZABETH JENNINGS (1830-1901)

Spruce St. and Park Row

Margaret Fuller, From Transcendentalism to Revolution by Paula Blanchard, 1987, is part of the newer wave of Fuller appreciation. Carolyn G. Heilbrun’s pithy introduction tells why Fuller is so important, though

often ridiculed.

After a brave career, Elizabeth Jennings Graham was nearly lost to memory. But John H. Hewitt Jr. gave her a chapter in Protest and Progress, a history of St. Philip’s, New York’s first black Episcopal Church (2000, 2015). A 2005 article in

The New York Times, “The Schoolteacher on the Streetcar,” reprising Hewitt’s work, can be found online. 11   12  

 

 

Emma Bugbee 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:

The march to Albany is now history. The suffrage army marched in triumph into the city this afternoon and drew up with a flourish before the State Capitol at precisely 4:30 o’clock. The faces of the little band were flushed with the exaltation of victory, and they gazed long and wistfully at the great stone building, which is the repository of all their hopes as well as the goal for which they have endured cold and storm and hunger and blistered feet for two long weeks. Then they turned with a satisfied sigh and marched down the hill to the hotel, where General Rosalie Jones disbanded her army.

EMMA BUGBEE (1888-1981)

New York Tribune, 1 Pace Plaza (also 154 Nassau)

After Pulitzer bought the dowdy old World in 1883 and shook it back into life, one of his new stars was Nellie Bly, who is usually remembered for besting Jules Verne's fictional 80-day world trip. But Nellie Bly was not simply a stunt reporter: She had a major impact on the lives of women incarcerated in the insane asylum on Blackwell's Island. Although she suffered discomfort in the asylum, she collected harsh testimony from other patients who were treated far worse: 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. Eagerly I accepted the mission to learn the inside workings of the Blackwell Island Insane Asylum. One of the patients, Mrs. Cotter, a pretty, delicate woman, one day thought she saw her husband coming up the walk. She left the line in which she was marching and ran to meet him. For this act she was sent to the Retreat. She afterward said: 'The remembrance of that is enough to make me mad. For crying the nurses beat me with a broom-handle and jumped on me, injuring me internally, so that I shall never get over it. Then they tied my hands and feet, and, throwing a sheet over my head, twisted it tightly around my throat, so I could not scream, and thus put me in a bathtub filled with cold water. They held me under until I gave up every hope and became senseless. At other times they took hold of my ears and beat my head on the floor and against the wall. Then they pulled out my hair by the roots, so that it will never grow in again.' Mrs. Cotter here showed me proofs of her story, the dent in the back of her head and the bare spots

NELLIE BLY (1867-1922)

New York World, 1 Pace Plaza (also 32 Park Row)

Bugbee gets no praise in The Paper, the history of the Herald Tribune. But she was the New York reporter with the best access to Eleanor Roosevelt, and she wrote her friend’s obituary for the Trib. If you can find it, Bugbee’s

1936 teen-age “career book,” Peggy Covers the News, reflects newsroom life in Bugbee’s day. 13   14  

The fullest adult biography of this celebrated reporter is Brooke Kroeger's Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter,

Feminist, 1994. Her best-known works, Ten Days in a Mad-House and Around the World in Seventy-Two Days, are available in paperback and online.  

 

 

JENNY JUNE (1829-1901)

New York World, 1 Pace Plaza (also 32 Park Row)

This was the home of the New York World in its earliest days. Jane Cunningham Croly, who used the byline Jenny June, became women's department editor of The World in 1862, but there was almost no paper in town she did not write or work for. In 1868, signing only her initials, she nervily applied for a ticket to a dinner tendered by the Press Club of New York. She was found out and rejected; no women need apply. She responded by convening a number of female colleagues and planning to give women a club of

their own, the first of its kind. They called it Sorosis--a flowering plant. Later, she fostered the creation of the Women's Press Club of New York. When asked why more women had not followed her into daily journalism, she said: Sex alone, not at all capacity. There are plenty of women who would be preferred as workers to men, if they were not women. But men are not accustomed to act with women from a business point of view, and their presence oppresses them. They will stand carelessness, negligence, even drunkenness from a man, because that is in the regular order of things, but a woman, without trial, is generally understood to be a "nuisance" in a newspaper office. Then, it is true that they cannot as yet be put upon subordinate routine work. A large part of the work of a daily paper has to be done at night, and editors say, with truth, that a sense of impropriety attaches to the idea of a woman going unattended to night meetings for the purpose of reporting them, returning late to the office, writing her report and traveling home alone after midnight. Still, there are many things that a woman can do upon a daily journal, and women could be used upon them much more than they are, with benefit to the journals themselves.

The formidable sisters Victoria Woodhull and Tennie C. Claflin started as stock traders south of us at Forty-four Broad Street, but march right into history with journalism and politics. Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, begun in the early 1870s, exposed the adultery of the famed Brooklyn preacher, Henry Ward Beecher. Their frank accounts of the scandal sent Victoria Woodhull to jail on obscenity charges. The weekly closed briefly but reopened at this site, and continued until 1876. In 1872, Victoria Woodhull entered the campaign for president, running on a platform of individual rights. Shortly before she began her newspaper, she gave a speech in Apollo Hall that explicitly clarified her stance on women's rights:

I have asked for equality nothing more. ... Sexual freedom means the abolition of prostitution both in and out of marriage, means the emancipation of woman from sexual slavery and her coming into ownership and control of her own body, means the end of her pecuniary dependence upon man ... means the abrogation of forced pregnancy, of... undesired children and the birth of love children only. Rise and declare ... yourself free. Women are entirely unaware of their power. Like an elephant led by a string they are subordinated by ... just those who are most interested in holding them in slavery. If the very next Congress refuses women all the legitimate results of citizenship ... we shall proceed to call another convention expressly to frame a new constitution and to erect a new government ... We mean treason, we mean secession, and on a thousand times grander scale than was that of the South. We are plotting revolution.

 

VICTORIA CLAFLIN WOODHULL (1838-1927)

Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, 111 Nassau Street

A biographical article on Croly by Elizabeth Bancroft Schlesinger appears in the initial volume of Notable American Women. Her opinions on women in journalism are in Charles Frederick Wingate's Views and

Interviews on Journalism, 1875. 15   16  On Victoria Woodhull, see Barbara Goldsmith's Other Powers: the Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the

Scandalous Victoria Woodhull, 1998. On the two sisters, see Myra McPherson's The Scarlet Sisters, 2014.

 

 

AUGUSTA LEWIS (1848-1920)

New York Era, 26 Ann Street

In the 1860s, this site held the offices of the weekly New

York Era. Here the teenage Augusta Lewis came to learn typesetting, entirely a hand process in those days. She soon became one of the swiftest and most accurate in the trade. In those days, women printers were often hired to supply cheap help during labor disputes with unionized printers. But Gussie Lewis would have none of that. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had her fired when Lewis tried to organize a union in the printing shop of Stanton’s

newspaper. In response, Lewis organized the first and only chapter of the Women’s Typographical Union and, at the 1870 convention of the National Typographical Union, petitioned:

We beg to call your attention to the large number of women working at the trade, whose

neglected interests, uncared-for welfare, and disorganized labor are obstacles to your perfect

organization, a detriment to the trade, and disastrous to the best interests of printers.

Heretofore women compositors have been used to defeat the object for which you have

organized—have been the prey of those philanthropic persons who employ women because

they are cheap—their labor has been used during strikes to defeat you. When that object has

been accomplished they are set adrift, disorganized and unprotected, their necessity

compelling them to work for a price at which they cannot earn a living, and which tends to

undermine your wages. In view of these facts, and the injustice we have done you, as well as

ourselves, and believing the interests of Labor—whether that labor be done by male or female—

are identical, and should receive the same protection and the same pay, we, the women

compositors of New York, have taken the initiative in this, and formed the Women's

Typographical Union No. 1, of New York.

The Old John Street Chapel is the site of the first Methodist house of worship in America, the Wesley Chapel, built in 1768. Here two early American religious leaders worshiped. Barbara Ruckle Heck, known as the “mother of New World Methodism,” was among a group of followers of John Wesley who left Ireland for New York in 1760. When the going got rough, and faith seemed to fail, she became a crucial force in Methodism’s survival.

Four generations later, in 1828, this was the first church that the Dutch-speaking former slave known as Isabella joined after leaving Ulster County upstate. Though unable to read, she had documents certifying her conversion to Methodism and admitting her to the congregation. By 1843, she announced her new identity, Sojourner, and said the Spirit called her to go forth. She became an evangelist and lecturer of wide fame.

BARBARA RUCKLE HECK & SOJOURNER TRUTH (1734-1804) (179?-1883)

Old John Street Chapel, 44 John Street

On Ruckle Heck, the best resource is G. S. French's article in Canadian National Biography, available online. Sojourner Truth, a Life, a Symbol by Nell Irvin Painter, 1996, finally separates the person from the

myth, and gives weight to both. 17  

A biography called Champion of the Working Woman was unfinished in 1976 when the author died. But when a school named for “Gussie” in New Haven, Conn., was rededicated in 2008, the local Labor History Association

used the material for a booklet, available at http://www.laborhistory.org/aboutaugustalewistroup.

 

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LOUISE NEVELSON (1899-1988)

Louise Nevelson Plaza, William Street at Liberty

This triangle bounded by Liberty, Maiden Lane and William Street is Louise Nevelson Plaza, now home to the steel sculptures Nevelson gave to her adopted city in 1977. Nevelson, born Leah Berliawsky near Kiev in 1899, came to the U.S. as a child. In 1920, married to Charles Nevelson, she came to New York. Her affair with the city lasted far longer than her marriage. “New York is a city of collage,” Nevelson said, “a collage with kinds of religions, and the whole thing is magnificent. . .

There’s no place like it.” But the life of a beginning artist was hard. She said:

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 was 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.

Louise Nevelson lived, worked and taught here until she died in 1988.

Ida B. Wells is a hero of journalism and human rights. Born to a slave family in the South on the cusp of Emancipation, she grew up during Reconstruction and the troubled period of violence and segregation that followed. She became the editor of Free Speech in Memphis and set about to expose the region’s epidemic of lynchings, but came to this city in 1892 after her newspaper was destroyed by a mob. She continued her campaign here at

T.T. Fortune’s New York Age, and was later instrumental in founding the NAACP in New York in 1909. She wrote:

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 . . . [The Age] 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.

IDA B. WELLS (1862-1931)

The New York Age, 4 Cedar Street

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Sculptors differ from writers: the art’s out there for you to see. If you also want to hear this artist’s voice, try Dawns + Dusks, Conversations with Diana MacKown, 1976. As Nevelson lived in Rockland, Maine, on

arriving in the U.S., the museum there gave her two shows and catalogues.

 

20  Ida, a Sword Among Lions by Paula J. Giddings, 2008, is a comprehensive modern biography of

Wells, with a scholarly listing of virtually all sources on her.

 

 

The gravestone with the name “Charlotte Temple” is an odd literary landmark, linked to the English novel Charlotte Temple, a Tale of Truth, published in the U.S. in 1794. Rowson’s story was based on the ruined life of Charlotte Stanley, a British woman who was persuaded by a married man to elope with him to America--only to be abandoned after bearing his child, and purportedly buried here. Who engraved or re-engraved this stone is not known. Here is the burial scene from the novel. It was nearly dark: he heard from a neighboring

steeple a solemn toll that seemed to say some poor mortal was going to their last mansion: the sound struck on the heart of Montraville, and he involuntarily stopped, when, from one of the houses, he saw the appearance of a funeral. Almost unknowing what he did, he followed at a small distance; and as they let the coffin into the grave, he enquired of a soldier who stood by, and had just brushed off a tear that did honour to his heart, who it was that was just buried. "An please your honour," said the man, ”tis a poor girl that was brought from her friends by a cruel man, who left her when she was big with child, and married another." Montraville stood motionless, and the man proceeded--"I met her myself not a fortnight since one night all wet and cold in the streets; she went to Madam Crayton's, but she would not take her in, and so the poor thing went raving mad." Montraville could bear no more; he struck his hands against his forehead with violence; and exclaiming "poor murdered Charlotte!" ran with precipitation towards the place where they were heaping the earth on her remains. . . . To the end of his life he was subject to severe fits of melancholy, and while he remained at New-York frequently retired to the church-yard, where he would weep over the grave, and regret the untimely fate of the lovely Charlotte Temple.

This building, on the site of the city hall and jail built in British colonial times, is considered the birthplace of the First Amendment. In 1734, a local printer, John Peter Zenger, was arrested on charges of seditious libel and jailed here for months. His New-York Weekly

Journal failed to appear immediately after his arrest, but resumed the next week with Anna Zenger, his wife, producing the issues on the basis of instructions he gave through his cell door. Eight months later, after an eloquent summation by his attorney, Andrew Hamilton, Peter Zenger was acquitted. Under Anna Zenger’s hand, the Journal carried this account:

As you last week were disappointed of my Journal, I think it incumbent on me to publish my apology, which is this. On the Lord's Day, the seventeenth, I was arrested, taken and imprisoned in the common jail of this City by virtue of a warrant from the Governor, the honorable Francis Harison, and others in the Council (of which, God willing, you will have a copy); whereupon I was put under such restraint that I had not the liberty of pen, ink or paper, or to see or speak with people, until my complaint to the honorable Chief Justice at my appearing before him upon my habeas corpus on the Wednesday following. He discountenanced that proceeding, and therefore I have had since that time the liberty of speaking thro' the hole of the door to my wife and servants. By which I doubt not you will think me sufficiently excused for not sending my last week's Journal, and hope for the future, by the liberty of speaking to my servants thro' the hole of the door of my prison, to entertain you with my weekly Journal as formerly.

ANNA CATHARINA MAUL ZENGER (1697?-1751?)

Federal Hall Memorial, 26 Wall Street at Nassau

CHARLOTTE TEMPLE (1756-1824)

Trinity Church Graveyard, 89 Broadway

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Besides the extensive literature on the Zenger trial, see the article on Anna Zenger on the History of American Women Website.

The text of the novel and biographical information on Rowson can be found in a 1986 edition of Charlotte Temple edited by Cathy N. Davidson.

 

 

Oswald Garrison Villard was the owner of the Post and became in 1909 a founder of the NAACP. Here at 20 Vesey Street he set up its first offices and those of its magazine, The Crisis. A key figure was Mary White Ovington, who not only wrote about racial problems but herself defied its taboos—most notoriously at a 1908 dinner of the Cosmopolitan Club, an ordinary event except, as she noted, “black and white sat down together.” She recalled: The story went over the country. Negro and

white had sat down together in a restaurant in New York and talked miscegenation…But the speeches were not the real news. The news was the dinner itself and the reporters had industriously gathered the names of the guests, especially of the women. By the time the story got thoroughly drenched in their imagination, the gathering became a meeting of voluptuous white women and smirking Negro men…My name and address were in the paper. I had been one of the speakers, and I came in for the most publicity. My mail was very heavy…A few friendly letters, congratulating me, letters from Negroes regretting what I was going through, and the rest showing contempt or scorn…The bulk were illiterate and nauseatingly obscene. I was smothered in mud. Like so many of the women of my class, I had led a sheltered life. That mail, entirely from the South, taught me much…When I read of a lynching today, I think of those letters and know the men who engineered it… But the dinner accomplished one important thing. The dining of white and colored together in New York ceased to be news. The NAACP turned one hundred years old in 2009; its magazine, The Crisis, also continues to this day.

Frances Perkins was the first woman named to a presidential cabinet, serving as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor. She was a social worker who was abruptly swept into a life of progressive reform on March 25, 1911. She was having tea in Greenwich Village when fire broke out across Washington Square at 22 Washington Place, the factory of the Triangle Waist Company. Fifty years later, she still recalled: We got there just as they started to jump. I shall never forget the frozen horror that came over us as

we 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.

FRANCES PERKINS (1880-1965)

Triangle Fire Investigation, 165 Broadway

MARY WHITE OVINGTON (1865-1951)

Evening Post Building, 20 Vesey Street

The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR’S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience by Kirstin Downey, 2009. A major effort to place Perkins in her historical role as an innovator. 23   24  

She recounts her career in Black and White Sat Down Together: The Reminiscenses of an NAACP Founder, edited by Ralph E. Luker, 1996.

 

 

We end at two hundred forty-four-year-old St. Paul’s Chapel, New York’s oldest standing church. This is the place that served as a refuge for the rescuers working at the World Trade Center site, and here we honor those who on September 11, 2001, first responded to the attack. They included three women who died trying to save others: Captain Kathy Mazza of the Port Authority Police; Officer Moira Smith of the New York Police Department; and Emergency Medical Technician Yamel Merino. This is an excerpt from a speech given by Captain

Brenda Berkman of the New York Fire Department on November 14, 2001, in front of the National Women’s Law Center. The words of Captain Berkman, still active in the women’s rights movement, are an apt finale for this tour:

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.

CAPTAIN BRENDA BERKMAN (1951- )

St. Paul’s Chapel, Broadway and Vesey Street

Sisters in the Brotherhoods by Jane LaTour, 2008, collects oral histories of women who broke into all-male occupations after the lawsuits of the 1970s. Captain Berkman is a heroic example.

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