Fearless Females (March 14, 2014): Meet "Meeley" -- A Fearless Woman You Already Know (Sort Of)

For the 5th year, Lisa Alzo of The Accidental Genealogist blog is marking National Women's History Month with daily blogging prompts for March to honor "fearless females." The prompt for today is about women who were newsmakers.  The prompt questions ask, "Did you have a female ancestor who made the news? Why? Was she famous or notorious? Did she appear in the social column?"

Taking the liberty of interpreting "ancestor" less than strictly so as to encompass women who are "relatives" rather than just actual ancestors, I am including the little girl shown above. She grew into quite a fearless and famous woman who died entirely too young pursuing her dreams and trying to extend her fame. She made the news for many years during her short life and was world famous.  She appeared in the social column quite often.  Books have been written about her and movies have been made about her and with her as a mentioned character or personality. You all actually know who she is, but you probably do not recognize her as a young girl in the photos above.  

I discovered that the girl and the woman honored here today as a truly news-making, fearless woman was a distant relative (6th cousin 2X removed) in a truly serendipitous manner. As a Mayflower descendant from two of Richard Warren's daughters (Elizabeth and Anna), I was sitting reading the newly arrived September 2011 Mayflower Quarterly when I came upon an article by the then Governor General of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, Judith H. Swan.  The article was part of a series about Women of the Mayflower -- and this particular piece highlighted a descendant of Richard and Elizabeth Warren through one of their seven children, Anna Warren Little (my 9th great grandmother).  This caught my immediate attention and I quickly realized that this famous woman and I shared Richard Warren, his daughter Anna, her son Ephraim Little and his daughter Mercy Little as common ancestors! My 6th great grandfather, Job Otis, Jr. and her ancestor, Ephraim Otis, were brothers.  

Here is the descent of my 6th cousin 2 x removed from the first of our common ancestors, Mayflower passenger Richard Warren and his wife Elizabeth Walker Warren. . . 

Richard and Elizabeth Warren

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Anna Warren and Thomas Little

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Ephraim Little and Mary Sturtevant

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Mercy Little and Job Otis  [To this point our line of descent is exactly the same.]

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Ephraim Otis and his wife [Ephraim is the brother of my 6th great grandfather Job Otis, Jr.]

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Ephraim Otis, Jr. and his wife

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Ephraim Otis, III and his wife

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Isaac Otis and his wife

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Alfred Gideon Otis and Amelia Harres

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Amelia Otis and her husband

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The fearless woman honored here today was named for her two grandmothers; her maternal grandmother, Amelia Harres, and her paternal grandmother, Mary Patton. And since she shared her mother's first name, when she was born she was the third "Amelia" in as many generations in her maternal line.

Amelia Mary, known as "Meeley," was born in Atchison, Kansas on July 24, 1897.  She had one sibling, Grace Muriel, known as "Pidge," who was almost two and a half years younger.  When Meeley and Pidge were seven and five respectively, they were left for three years in the care of their grandparents while their parents moved to Des Moines, Iowa where their father had taken a job with the Rock Island Line Railroad after his law practice failed. In Iowa, Meeley and Pidge were taken to the famous Iowa State Fair and there for the first time in 1908 they saw an airplane in flight. Meeley's and Pidge's parents, Amelia "Amy" and Edwin Stanton Earhart could not have known then what the newly invented airplane would mean in the life of their daughter Meeley whose given name would become internationally famous within the next twenty years. Amelia Mary Earhart was an accomplished and fearless woman indeed! 

If you ask almost anyone what they know about Amelia Earhart, it almost certainly will be that she disappeared in the Pacific Ocean during an attempt to circumnavigate the globe in an airplane. But of course she was much more than the female pilot who died trying to fly around the world.  She held many aviation records and firsts.  She was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic (1928) and was thereafter called "Lady Lindy." She also became the first woman to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. She was the first person to cross both the Atlantic and the Pacific in an airplane and was the first woman to fly solo back and forth across the North American continent.

Amelia had other indications of strength and determination. Her family moved around as her father lost jobs and became more debilitated by alcoholism.  Her mother took Meeley and Pidge and moved to Chicago during one separation from her husband and there Amelia chose specifically to attend Hyde Park High School because it had the best science program.  She excelled in chemistry and graduated from Hyde Park in 1916 -- by which time she had accumulated a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings she found about women who succeeded in male dominated careers. It was probably around this time -- after the tumult of her parents' marriage and her father's inability to consistently provide for the family -- that she decided she would never rely on someone else to take care of her.

In 1917 Amelia visited her sister in Toronto and ended up volunteering as a nurse's aid for the Red Cross to help minister to wounded soldiers returning from WWI. She came to know and admire the aviators among them.  The flu pandemic reached Toronto in 1918 and in late fall she became a victim herself. She survived, but it took her a year to recover.  She then enrolled in medical studies at Columbia, but quit after a year to join her parents in California where they had reunited.  It was in Long Beach, California that she began her flying lessons with a pioneer female aviator by the name of Anita "Neta" Snook.  

And the rest of Meeley's story became history that is well worth reading. She was a remarkable woman for her time and will be remembered for all time as a fearless woman who succeeded in a field and in endeavors dominated by men.

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First childhood portrait of Amelia Earhart (with ribbon in her hair) is a media file in the public domain in the U.S. -- obtained from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ameliachild.jpg

Second childhood portrait of Amelia Earhart from http://dingeengoete.blogspot.com/2012/07/this-day-in-history-jul-2-1937-amelia.html

Photo of adult Amelia Earhart in aviators cap from http://www.ameliaearhart.com/about/historicalphotos.html

For more about Amelia Earhart see . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Earhart

http://www.biography.com/people/amelia-earhart-9283280

http://dingeengoete.blogspot.com/2012/07/this-day-in-history-jul-2-1937-amelia.html

Judith H. Swan, "Amelia Mary Earhart: Woman of the Mayflower," The Mayflower Quarterly Vol. 77 No. 3 (September 2011): 241 - 43.

"Amelia," 20th Century Fox (2009) starring Hilary Swank and Richard Gere [who is also a descendant of Mayflower passenger Richard Warren] and directed by Mira Nair.
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Copyright 2014, John D. Tew
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Fearless Females -- Mary Abigail Fillmore

Mary Abigail Fillmore

Today is the 181st anniversary of the birth of the only daughter of President Millard Fillmore.  She was born in Buffalo, New York on March 27, 1832.  She lived a short life, but for a woman of her time she lived a very full life in her 22 years.

Mary graduated from the New York State Normal School [1] and was a teacher for a time at a private school in Lenox, Massachusetts.  She later taught briefly in the public school system of Buffalo, New York up until her father succeeded to the Presidency in 1850.  

Campus of the New York State Normal School (1909)

Mary spoke French fluently and was conversant in Spanish, German and Italian, which must have been quite useful when her father became President and her mother became ill and could not function as hostess at White House social events.  Mary became White House Hostess from 1850 to 1853 during her mother's health difficulties.  Mary was also a musician who played the piano, harp and guitar.  She often performed at White House functions.

  
Sadly, Mary died suddenly of cholera at age 22 barely a year after the death of her mother.  Her mother, Abigail (Powers) Fillmore,  died 160 years ago this week on March 30, 1853 in Washington, DC.  Abigail died just twenty-six days after she and Millard left the White House following the inauguration of Fillmore's successor, Franklin Pierce.  Abigail died at the Willard Hotel in Washington following an illness she first suffered after the outdoor inauguration of Pierce and that later developed into pneumonia.

Mary Abigail Fillmore is my 5th cousin 4X removed. 

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[1]  The New York State Normal School is today known as The University at Albany, State University of New York.  It is now the oldest university campus in the SUNY system having been established in 1844.  A "Normal School" was a school that was developed in order to establish standards or "norms" for teaching -- thus the designation "Normal School."  The first publicly funded Normal School in the United States was founded in Massachusetts in 1839.  It is now known as Framingham State University.  Almost all the former "Normal Schools" later became known as teachers' colleges and by the 1960s most had become universities or were absorbed by established universities.  See, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_school for more information on Normal Schools.

Bust photograph of Mary Abigail Fillmore posted at Find-A-Grave by Garver Graver http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=2706

Photograph of Mary Fillmore in gown from the Buffalo Architecture and History website page on the Millard and Abigail Fillmore House Museum http://www.buffaloah.com/a/EastAur/shearer/mus/hist/index.html 

Photograph of the New York State Normal School campus is part of the collection of the Library of Congress.  The image is in the public domain.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_York_State_Normal_School_1909.jpg 
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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew
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Fearless Females -- Nineteen Who Joined "The Call"

Last month was Black History Month in the U.S. and Canada (the UK also celebrates it, but in October).  This month is National Women's History Month.  Here are 19 Fearless Women who are worthy of noting and remembering every March AND February:

     Miss Jane Addams of Chicago                                     Mrs. Ida Wells-Barnett of Chicago
     Mrs. Harriet Stanton Blatch of New York                   Miss Kate Claghorn of New York
     Miss Mary E. Dreier of Brooklyn                                Mrs. Florence Kelley of New York
     Miss Helen Marot of New York                                  Miss Mary E. McDowell of Chicago
     Miss Lenora O'Reilly of New York                            Miss Mary W. Ovington of New York
     Dr. Jane Robbins of New York                                  Miss Helen Stokes of New York
     Mrs. Mary Church Terrell of Washington, DC           Mrs. Henry Villard of New York
     Miss Lillian D. Wald of New York                             Mrs. Rodman Wharton of Philadelphia
     President Mary E. Wooley, Mt. Holyoke College       Miss Susan P. Wharton of Philadelphia    
     Mrs. Anna Carpenter Garlin Spencer of New York

So who are these 19 women and why do I use the antiquated Miss and Mrs. distinctions throughout?  Well, that was the formal convention back in 1909 when these brave and principled women stepped up and joined "The Call."

Fannie Garrison Villard -- "Mrs. Henry Villard"
(1844 - 1928)
Daughter of publisher and noted abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison 

Jane Addams (1860 - 1935)
First American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

Mary Church Terrell (1863 - 1954)

Daughter of slaves she was one of the first African-American

women to earn a college degree 

1909 was a time in America when women still did not have full voting rights.  It was a place where Jim Crow laws were rampant throughout many states in the country and where the civil rights of black Americans were violated in horrible ways with very little official intervention.  Black Americans were beaten, tortured and lynched for the most minor of infractions and often for no reason other than being non-white.  Just five to seven years later, white mobs in largely Southern states lynched 126 black Americans.  It was not an easy time to be a progressive who defended and worked for the civil rights of  Americans who happened to be other than male or other than white.  As the 100th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln approached on February 12, 1909, it was not a time when there were many profiles in courage involving the political and civil equality of Americans who happened to be other than male or other than white.  And yet in early 1909 the nineteen women named above joined with forty-one men to do a remarkable thing.  They signed a manifesto that came to be known later as "The Call."

Oswald Garrison Villard wrote what he titled a "Call for the Lincoln Emancipation Conference in 1909." Sixty well-known Americans (black and white) -- including the nineteen women named above -- signed Mr. Villard's manifesto.  The manifesto stated truthfully and plainly the lack of progress in America since the time of Lincoln.  It stated in part . . .

If Mr. Lincoln could revisit this country he would be disheartened by the nation's failure . . . He would learn that on January 1st 1909, Georgia had rounded out a new oligarchy by disenfranchising the negro after the manner of all the other Southern states.  He would learn that the Supreme Court of the United States, designed to be a bulwark of American liberties, had failed to meet several opportunities to pass squarely upon this disenfranchisement of millions by laws avowedly discriminatory and openly enforced in such manner that white men may vote and black men be without a vote in their government; he would discover, there, that taxation without representation is the lot of millions of wealth-producing American citizens, in whose hands rests the economic progress and welfare of an entire section of the country.  He would learn that the Supreme Court, according to the official statement of its own judges in the Berea College case, has laid down the principle that if an individual State chooses it may "make it a crime for white and colored persons to frequent the same market place at the same time, or appear in an assemblage of citizens convened to consider questions of a public or political nature in which all citizens, without regard to race, are equally interested." . . . He would see the black men and women, for whose freedom a hundred thousand of soldiers gave their lives, sit apart in trains, in which they pay first-class for third-class service, in railway stations and in places of entertainment, while State after State declines to do its elementary duty in preparing the negro through education for the best exercise of citizenship. * * * Added to this, the spread of lawless attacks upon the negro, North, South and West -- even in Springfield made famous by Lincoln -- often accompanied by revolting brutalities, sparing neither sex, nor age nor youth, could not but shock the author of the sentiment that "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth." Silence under these conditions means tacit approval.

The nineteen women named above -- who themselves still lacked the right to vote -- were joined by forty-one men and they did not remain silent.  They put out The Call saying, ". . . we call upon all the believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty."  The conference took place and from that meeting a new organization was founded.  It was called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  

The nineteen fearless women named above were instrumental in encouraging the formation of the NAACP in 1909; among them was Anna Carpenter Garlin Spencer.  More will be said about Anna at this blog on April 17th.

Anna Carpenter (Garlin) Spencer (1851 - 1931)

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Photograph of quote by Jane Addams in The American Adventure in the World Showcase pavilion of Walt Disney World's Epcot by Neelix.  The copyright holder released the work into the public domain.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Addams.JPG 

Photograph of  Fannie Garrison Villard (1913) was taken before 1923 and is now in the public domain in the United States.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fanny_Garrison_Villard.jpg  

Photograph of Jane Addams in profile is in the public domain in the United States and is available from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs division. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jane_Addams_profile.jpg

Photograph of Mary Church Terrell is based on the work of a National Park Service employee created as part of the person's official duties and as such is in the public domain.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mary_church_terrell.jpg

Photograph of Anna Carpenter (Garlin) Spencer from the Anna Garlin Spencer Papers (DG 034), Swarthmore College Peace Collection. 

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Copyright 2013, John D. Tew

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