Catching Up

It's been a while since my last post! But here I am back with an update.

Much of the time I have been assessing my archives, taking me back to my long-ago mid-life career change as director of an anti-poverty agency to a freelance journalist writing essays, articles, and stories for magazine sand journals. The many titles ranged from "When Parents Make Mistakes," Ladies' Home Journal, Oct. 1989 to"Girls and Sports," Sports Illustrated for Kids, Sept. 1993, (for which I was awarded the Miller Lite Women's Sports Journalism Award). A longtime contributor and "resident historian" for BookWomen, I recently, I wrote about Gloria Steinem's literary contribution—Ms. Magazine, an assignment that led me to discover a long-ago-stashed away box of Linda's Ms. Magazines!

In 1992, I published my first two nonfiction books: Breaking the Chains: The Crusade of Dorothea Lynde Dix, and Spies! Women and the Civil War. Although I continued writing articles, I shifted my focus to writing nonfiction books, including Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial and Rosie the Riveter: Women Working on the Home Front in World War II.

Storage boxes from Staples contain hanging files with clippings, edited manuscripts, letters and emails from publishers and editors, reviews, readers' comments, promotional materials, unpublished manuscripts, etc. One large box has my historic women t-shirts collection. Two others are packed with women's history artifacts and ephemera. (My more than thirty years of photographs of landmarks to women are in The Penny Colman Collection of Historical Landmarks of Women are housed at Ramapo The College of New Jersey.)

Unearthing, reminiscing, sorting, and organizing has been illuminating and fun! In the midst of all that we did take a road trip to western New York to visit several landmarks to historic women that I have long wanted to see, including the two competing statues to Lucille Ball. (Happily I also got together with my brother Kip and nephew Ford who live in that area.) It was an eventful 4-day trip and I'll tell it chronologically.

After a long drive across New York, we checked into a hotel, in Jamestown, a city south of Lake Erie and 20 miles north of where I grew up in North Warren, Pennsylvania. We lived there because my father, a psychiatrist, worked at Warren State Hospital. During my teenage years, he opened a private practice in Jamestown.

Just a few blocks away from our hotel was the first landmark—a marker to Edith M. Ainge, one of the valiant suffragists I wrote about in The Vote: Women's Fierce. Known as "Aingy," she was "an expert in caretaking, calming, and cheering up." Edith Ainge was incarcerated five times for peacefully demonstrating, once she was confined in an underground cell in a rat-infested jail in Washington, D.C. that had been declared unfit for human habitation. The marker is located at the intersection of Pine and 4th Street. My next stop was downward on Pine to 2nd Street, where I found landmarks that weren't on my list. I write about that in my next post.

The image on the left appeared in newspapers across the country during the suffragists grueling fight for ratification of the 19th Amendment. The caption reads: "Miss Edith Ainge is the Betsy Ross of the National Woman's Party. This photograph shows her sewing the eleventh start on the suffrage flag, a purple, white and gold emblem. The last star is for Missouri. The other States which have ratified the suffrage amendment are Wisconsin, Michigan, Kansas, Ohio, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Texas." It appeared in a Binghamton, NY newspaper on July 18, 1919. Edith Ainge's obituary appeared in the Los Angeles Times, April 14, 1941.