WebPearls...A Woman's E-Zine

Ride A Magic Carpet Through Women's History....

Do you have a few minutes? Stop making history for awhile, and relax, while we shake the dust from our thickly woven magic carpet and rev it up for a trip through time---our time---the changes women have caused, lived, and witnessed.

Jump on, and we'll zoom backward through the last millennium to the Viking ships carrying about 80 or so Norwegian men and women to the North American shores of L'Anse aux Meadows, at the furthest end of the Northern Pennisula, Newfoundland, Canada.

Like Helga in the comic strip, Hagar The Horrible, the women who stay behind in their long linen dresses covered by woolen tunics care for children, make butter and cheese, smoke meat and fish for storage, administer herbs to the sick, and are responsible for the farm and animals. All the while wondering when Leif or Hagar or Sven might, or if he will, make it back from the voyage.

A few years after Ericson's trip, Thorfinn Karlsefni with his wife Gudrid, settle a bit further south in Vinland. While living there in Ericson's house for a little over three years, they have the first European child born in the New World. One can only wonder about the women who help run this icy cold encampment in the New World around the year 1000 or so. Trying to squeeze aerobics into their agenda is probably not an issue.

Our carpet takes a sharp turn on a hard wind current, and we are now whistling through the 1400's where women (ancestors of those who will eventually travel to North America) are already writing about problems and challenges affecting them in European society. In Paris Christine de Pizan has been educated by her father, a lecturer in astrology and a physician, far beyond the norm for women of her day, and at 15-years-old she marries, Etienne du Castel, a royal secretary who continues to encourage her studies which goes against the norm for women at this time.

Pizan is probably Europe's first woman who earns her living by writing, and since some of her work is commissioned, some scholars will one day consider Pizan to be Europe's first professional writer. Her books, such as The Book of the City of Ladies published in 1405, deal with women's issues that will continue to be important such as equal education for women, the concept that women sometimes invite rape, and violence in marriage. In one work Pizan discusses men's misogyny with Lady Reason.

Our carpet slides like a cube of butter through a Teflon sky, and it's already 1492. Queen Isabella of Spain is raising money and support for Christopher Columbus to sail the seas toward what Columbus assumes is Japan (Of course, he won't ask for directions…), but will turn out to be North America. Queen Isabella is a proponent of learning and the arts, particularly architecture, but she is also a prime force behind the inhumanity of the Spanish Inquisition. Queen Isabella seeks to spread Christian ideas and garnish great wealth for Spain, but her heart may also pound with excitement as she vicariously sails with Columbus excited by the knowledge that she is an impetus for change and discovery.

The first women to put together a thanksgiving meal are below us now---it's 1620 and the Mayflower with its passengers of 51 men, 20 women, 22 boys and 11 girls lands at Plymouth Rock. Sixteen-year-old Pricilla Mullins (the only marriageable young woman and later the inspiration, along with ship's cooper, John Alden, for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's, The Courtship of Miles Standish) and 6-year-old, Remember Allerton are among the women who live in this evolving Massachusetts settlement. They are able to barter and buy on credit at local shops and are sometimes consulted by their husbands regarding property and legal issues, but they themselves are still considered to be property.

Were they really witches in 1692 or simply women trying to assert themselves in some fashion (Sometimes the word today starts with a "B"). Or will Madonna (who?) be right when from a future stage she shouts, "Girls just want to have fun"? Not really a laughing matter this, the Salem witch trials. Spurred by the sudden physical seizures and odd behavior of Elizabeth Parris, Abigail Williams and other young girls in the Salem village, already divided over religious and political leadership issues, accusations and arrests began to fly, often after disputes about other issues, as 344 people were accused of witchcraft, most all of them female.

The Puritan church in an effort to keep strict societal order encouraged women's dependence on men as a way of keeping the family together. A woman living alone was considered strange and defiant of conventional and religious laws; she was in particular danger of being thought a witch, and ironically with no man to protect her, as a sad result she paid with her life.

New roads jut through forests and mountains down below as we whisk along through time making inroads into the wilderness of America around the year 1773. Women care for children and perform domestic chores, but are also often seen carrying heavy loads, plowing fields, and hanging onto the reins of a wagon bumping along rutted ground. Daniel Boone writes in a journal of his wife, Rebecca, "…during my captivity with the Indians, my wife, who despaired of ever seeing me again, expecting the Indians had put a period to my life, oppressed with the distresses of the country, and bereaved of me, her only happiness, had, before I returned, transported my family and goods, through the wilderness, admist a multitude of dangers, to her father's house in North Carolina". We can imagine as we look at the terrain below Rebecca during her trip home lying alone at night, dead-tired but for a last moment, looking at the stars. As she listened to animals howling, or perhaps only still silence she must have wondered what in the world she was doing, would she and her children make it home to her family or die on a lonely patch of land in the middle of nowhere… (I do in retrospect, however, question that "her only happiness" thing; I mean, Daniel, get over yourself.)

Nancy Ward earned many names over the years. When she was born to the tribe in 1738 her Cherokee mother chose the name "Nanye-hi" which means "One who goes about" and is taken from Nunne-hi, the legendary name of the Spirit People of Cherokee mythology.

We nervously race through a forest in 1755, and a bullet sears through the fibers of our carpet. The Cherokee and Creek Indians are engaged in a war, (Later children will read in their books that this is the Battle of Teliwa.) and Ward's husband has just been hit; he falls to the ground dead. Ward feels a grab at her heart, but bends to take the rifle lying next to him and leads a charge winning the squrimish.

Because of her bravery, the Cherokees christen her "Beloved Woman", and Ward will go on to become a powerful voice in tribal government, a proponent of peace with American settlers, and an American Revolutionary Patriot by aiding John Sevier (forefather of Sevierville, TN) in his military excursions.

The 1700's bustle below us as circumstances change for women in Europe and America as effects of the Renaissance in Europe now illuminate for men and women the importance of a liberal education. Men increasingly want their daughters to learn advanced subjects so they can when the time comes tutor grandchildren (especially grandsons).

Women in America also now have the opportunity to learn trades such as tinsmithing and candle making beside their husbands as men operate businesses within the household. It has also became easier for women in America to own a business or seek a divorce, although women overall are still viewed as property in colonial America.

We're perhaps feeling fatigued as our carpet bumps along on the winds of change, but fortunately below us is the year 1840, and a pot of steaming tea as well as a chance for rest awaits us. Hovering in a parlor, we listen in on a conversation between Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They're just back from the World Anti-Slavery Conference in London and are upset because, even though both are abolitionists, they were not allowed to participate in the deliberations because they are women. Still stinging from this rebuke they discuss the possibility of a woman's rights movement modeled after the anti-slavery movement.

Mott and Stanton organize the world's first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York on July 19 and 20, 1848. Women in the 1840's still cannot inherit property, sign contracts, or initiate lawsuits. Woman at this time can't vote, hold public office, or be tried in a court of law before their peers. The law in 1840 does not protect woman from abusive husbands, and a married woman's money earned and children borne by her belong to her husband.

Our carpet now whizzes along the rails of the 1850 Underground Railroad into a small frame house where a woman, about 35 or so, in a plain, dark dress sits with a pistol and a lantern on the small table before her. Only just recently having escaped from slavery herself, and after working earlier in the day at a low paid, but independent, free job, Harriet Tubman is now at this late hour planning yet another trip to rescue slaves from plantations and bring them to freedom in the north. She will lead her small group through the night stopping at homes and churches along the way during the day to hide and rest. The price on Tubman's head offered to bounty hunters is high, as much as $40,000.

Tubman leaves no detail of the escape untended---food, clothing, train tickets (paid for by churches), forged passes, even sedatives to keep babies from crying. The civil war is only as of yet wild emotions brewing in a caldron of social, political, and economic woes, as is the women's movement. Listen closely as we linger one last moment and you will hear Tubman's words, "My people must go free".

Now our carpet is held aloft by hot air from the noisy debate surrounding us in an 1851 temperance meeting where Elizabeth Stanton and Susan B. Anthony have met and are initiating a lifelong alliance and friendship based on commonly held, passionate beliefs about woman's rights, abolitionism, and temperance. Anthony, who will be single all her life, remembers working in her late teens and early 20's as a teacher, but being paid only one-fifth of what her male colleagues were paid.

When Stanton marries her husband, Henry, a journalist, they agree to omit the word "obey" from their vows, and Henry abdicates all right to Stanton's property allowing her a personal income and independence even as a married woman. They eventually have six children, and as we look down on them, she slows her pace by speaking less and becomes editor of the women's newspaper, Revolution, because it allows more time for her family.

Stanton has always been more the "writer and idea person" of the duo while Anthony, who is publisher of Revolution, has been more the organizer, doing more traveling and speaking to groups and bearing more of the public's anger at their cause.

Both Anthony and Stanton as Quakers were raised to believe in equality among men and woman and of the races; they, along with many other woman and some men, tirelessly speak, write, attend conventions and meetings, and walk in protests for these causes. In 1868 Anthony and Stanton establish the National Woman Suffrage Association with Stanton as president. Later their organization merges with the American Woman Suffrage group to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890.

These women as well as being free thinkers are apparently free-wheeling because just before our carpet lifts back toward the sunshine we hear Susan B. Anthony exclaim as the wind whistles past her ears, "(Bicycling) has done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world. It gives her a feeling of self-reliance and independence the moment she takes her seat; and away she goes, the picture of untrammeled womanhood".

A pastor stands before Mary Todd Lincoln and Abraham Lincoln as they say their marriage vows in the parlor of Ninian Edwards, Mary Todd's guardian, and his wife Elizabeth Edwards on a Friday evening, November 4, 1842. Mary Todd wears a long, simple white dress, no veil or flowers in her hair. Abe a week later writes a letter to a friend, and ends it by saying, "Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder".

The Civil War (1861-1865) blazes around us licking at our feet as we swiftly curl our legs up and gaze wide-eyed at the blue, gray, and red swirl of bodies in fields below us. Dr. Mary K. Walker, a surgeon in a makeshift hospital in Louisville, KY, is tending to female prisoners. Also a suffragette (and proponent of more comfortable women's clothes), Dr. Walker, if she had a carpet such as ours would know that she herself will be a prisoner of war in a southern prison, after which she will be awarded our nation's highest award, the Medal of Honor....

(Continued on page two)

By Karen Gossett

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