"Ride a Magic Carpet Through Women's History"

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Just moments before Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford Theatre on April 14, 1865, his last words were reportedly a brief reassurance to his wife that no one would notice her holding his hand. Quiet moments as telling as shattering ones…

Our carpet lunges on a sudden downdraft, and we're in the Victorian Age of America---1876 to about 1915---and below us is Louisville, Kentucky at the turn of the century. Mary Conrad is sitting in the parlor of her home (what is now the Conrad/Caldwell House) at 1402 St. James Court reading the December 31, 1899 Courier-Journal. Sunlight flashes through large windows past heavy, luxuriant drapes onto the newsprint that reads, "The closing year of the Nineteenth Century will not come upon Louisville unnoticed. At 12:00 tonight whistles of factories and steamers will blow, fireworks will sound a welcome, watchnight services will close with songs of praise and prayers for guidance and blessing throughout the coming year…"

This is a time in American society when Victorian sensibilities, activities, and accoutrements of fine manners and calling cards, tea and garden parties, needlework and glass painting, and linen and lace encase a developing nucleus of ideas related to women's independence and freedom. Even as the Victorian Age embodies genteel beauty and charm in the best of its customs, art, literature, fashion, architecture, middle class and poor woman, of course, experience in varying degrees struggle and sacrifice.

In the late 19th century most married women do not work outside the home, but single, widowed, and poor women do have jobs. Well-educated women might teach or serve as a governess or companion; some women work in fairly good paying jobs as printers, teachers, and telegraphers. A relatively small number of woman run their own business or are writers; about ten percent of working women are employed in an office, and a small number of women are shop clerks. Most poor women do domestic or farm work or work in factories; even some poor married women work by taking in washing, sewing, or boarders.

Since the advent of the industrial revolution when Eli Whitney conceived the concepts of mass production and interchangeable parts and in 1818 invented a milling machine, spinning and weaving (done at home by men, women, and children in the 1700's) is now done in factories, mostly by miserably overworked women. And still at the end of the 19th Century only about 3.3 percent of the 4 million women working in factories or other nonagricultural jobs belong to trade unions leaving them vulnerable to long hours and low pay. As Louisville prepares itself for its 1899 New Year's Eve Celebration, we on our carpet pass silently unseen on our way to important events elsewhere.

We arrive in the year 1912 and move low along the sidewalk in New York's Lower East Side just behind a woman in a nurse's uniform. She disappears into a doorway; we follow. Margaret Sanger is caring for a woman in a small, bleak apartment who as she suffers from flu is trying to care for her eight children, the smallest just a toddler crawling on the floor.

After doing what she can for the woman, Sanger walks down the steps back to the sidewalk, her thoughts focused on an article she plans to write about sex education and women's health. It's for a new column she has begun writing for the New York Call, titled "What Every Girl Should Know". She sadly remembers for a moment her mother who died prematurely at age 50 of tuberculosis, but also believes Sanger of the struggle to raise Sanger and her ten brothers and sisters.

Four years pass swiftly to 1916, and Sanger is turning a key to unlock the door to the nation's first birth control clinic located in Brooklyn. She has no idea it will be raided in nine days, and that she will spend 30 days in jail for having opened the clinic. She won't be deterred, however, and will finally go on to establish the American Birth Control League which will evolve into Planned Parenthood. (If enough time passes that some day the earth carries more than six billion people on her soil then Sanger's vision will perhaps be even more keenly appreciated.)

There's a hubbub down below, crowds in the street and banners bobbing above smart, eye defining hats. We descend to briefly read the banner headline on an August 26, 1920 banner headline: "19th Amendment Ratified!! Women Win the Right to Vote!!" Unfortunately, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton died a few years too soon to participate in this moment, in 19 and 19, but somewhere they must have been enjoying the wind in their face on an easy, downhill slope.

Do you hear something? A syncopated rhythm of jazz music bubbles up to greet us like a champagne fountain…whoops, got the fringe on our carpet wet. Flappers in their short dresses up to their knees, wearing makeup and smoking cigarettes in sleek holders are dancing and acting, well, a bit unladylike. A tourist tosses a wrinkled copy of a September 9, 1925 New Republic on a divan in the Seelbach Hotel lobby.

She was considering an article she had just read by Bruce Bliven in which he quotes a fictional 'Flapper Jane': "Women have come down off the pedestal lately. Maybe it goes with independence, earning your own living and voting and all that…Women still want to be loved," goes on Jane, warming to her theme, "but they want it on a 50-50 basis, which includes being admired for the qualities they really possess". The tourist, pushing back her bobbed hair and considering the article as she descends the Seelbach Hotel stairwell, turns her head only slightly, startled by vaunted voices in high-spirited debate, as she's passed by Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald as they head for the dance floor.

Our carpet makes a wide loop and we take a sudden breath and blink. We're suddenly surrounded by the commotion of New York City. A jaunty hat tipped to one side nods like the bouncing ball to lyrics of city streets and a typewriter clacking---The Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston has been working at her desk all day on her first book, "Jonah's Gourd Vine" about a small, all-black Florida town much like Eatonville where she grew up. Neale briskly crosses the street, the buildings around her playing defense for the sun as it darts past the horizon. She's on her way to have drinks and later dinner with other black artists of the movement such as Langston Hughes and Jessie Fauset. Bleeping horns sound in the distance as our carpet makes a wide upside down loop and crosses state lines.

It's now oddly quiet below, and we're passing long lines of men and women receiving assistance or bread because they've lost their jobs. It's the 1930's Depression Era of America. Many women back in Louisville work in factories such as the Fowler Tie Factory or Brown and Williamson Cigarette Factory, but our carpet has taken us to Texas.

Thousands of workers from the Southern Pecan Shelling Company are on strike and are congregated outside the building around a small, 20-year-old Mexican woman in a cotton shirtwaist dress. Management, taking advantage of ailing times and vulnerable workers, has cut pay one cent per pound of shelled pecans. Emma Tenayuca, a member of the labor movement since she was 16 years old, will go on to become a highly respected unionist, one day to form two local chapters of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union.

We're now being transported on radio waves to the 1940's as women turn the knob past crackling static to WHAS on the dial to listen to President Franklin Roosevelt update them on World War II. When not writing letters to their boyfriends or husbands fighting in Europe, these women are perhaps wearing heavy work boots and goggles at Naval Ordnance making war munitions. Other women (about 13,000 from America) enlisted in the Navy and Marine Corps and are the first women in the U.S. who have been awarded some military rank and status.

Women, however, have been serving in wars since the American Revolution. In fact, Dr. Mary Walker, an early suffragette (and a proponent of comfortable clothes for women), was a surgeon in the Civil War and cared for female prisoners in Louisville. She later was a prisoner of war in a southern prison, and was awarded our nations highest honor, the Medal of Honor.

The smell of Rice Krispy Treats envelopes our carpet, and we descend to grab a few from the green, Fiesta Ware plate almost knocking over a gold, metal tumbler of grape Kool-Aid onto the silver chrome kitchen table. The calendar hanging on the wall says 1950---the men (and women) have come home from WWII and the women have come home from their jobs. Subdivisions and new highways branch out below us like grapes and stems, and a bustling, prosperous new life is devoured by American families, but mothers as they push their children in swings at Cherokee, Iroquois, and Shawnee Parks seem happy, but also somewhat preoccupied. Perhaps they're remembering the noontime whistle for lunch and end-of-a-week paycheck that was a taste of things to come.

Our carpet keeps pace with a city bus as it lumbers down Fourth Street toward the downtown Louisville shopping district---1960---Stewart's Dry Goods and Kaufmann's Department Store. We peek through the bus window and several women have their noses in a book---"The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan. Millions of American women will read over the next few years these fertile pages that will sprout the modern feminist movement. Friedan's book voices the vague yearning that many women feel for satisfaction and monetary rewards at jobs outside of, and in addition to, the realm of home and family.

Dangling, beaded earrings dance as women nod in earnest at a gathering as they listen to Gloria Steinem ask, "If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?". As a writer and journalist, Steinem fights for such women's issues as equal pay for equal work, passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Steinem has witnessed changes during this decade such as the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the marketing of the birth control pill, and the congressional approval of the Civil Rights Act which forbids discrimination on the grounds of sex. Suddenly women are experiencing new freedom and control of their reproductive futures--- deciding when and whether to have children---as well as their working life.

Incense and folk music wafts up to our carpet as we watch a 20-year-old student finishes her class project. Maya Ying Lin, the campus of the Yale School of Architecture outside her window, puts the finishing touches on her design for the Vietnam Memorial as she decides to submit it for consideration to honor the veterans who had sacrificed, suffered, and died. She had a vision for her birth of her creation of a mirror-like black wall, a part of the park's surrounding landscape and making visitors "feel safe", listing the names of those who had died and reflecting the faces of those visited. Lin is a woman working, creating, and committing to the world using not only pen and paper, but also the tools of freedom and equality.

We're suddenly blinded by dizzying lights from a faceted, rotating ball attached to the ceiling and veer our carpet narrowly missing the DJ's booth where the pulsating tempo of a disco beat accelerates our lives. Woman are now living our liberation designing our lives and careers with new issues on the horizon of glass ceilings, day care walls, and jogging paths.

It's a bumpy ride on conflicting currents as we move through the 80's and into the 1990's. Women are balancing relationships with the men in our lives, our children, volunteer activities, sports, special interests, and exploration of our brave new world, and it seems that as this millennium comes to a close a new quest presents itself---a need for balance, peace, and spirituality. Women are pulling out their compass, and just as our brains form new pathways in response to sensory exposure and challenge, we are seeking new directions and paths.

Sculptor, Glenna Goodacre, 60, (who also created the Vietnam Women's Memorial) is the first woman to design an U.S. coin. She has given us a new $1 gold-colored coin (it will replace the Susan B. Anthony coin) with a portrait of Sacajawea, her eyes calm and confident, with her child carried on her back. This Shoshone Indian woman led explorers Lewis and Clark through the American wilderness from 1804 to 1806. Perhaps she will do the same for us. Whew, "we've come a long way, baby" in the last…whooosh…was that a Powder Puff Girl? Anyway… so much can happen when queens and settlers, Viking women and First Ladies, writers, guides, and witches, nurses, mothers, and workers, ladies, flappers and belles in everyday moments with bad hair, good intentions, keen intellect, hard times, and steady hearts, many times but not always right, but certainly always a force, help build nothing smaller than a world.

As our magic carpet hovers in the night sky, we look down into the crystalline air twinkling with festive early spring stars, and we turn back and marvel at the last 1005 years---what we've seen and done and been. In the next important moment, we look ahead, take a breath, and gust forward along the new century taking with us talents, tools, and our lessons learned to work beside men, opening doors to miraculous new possibilities.

--By Karen Gossett