Bold Spirit
Page 18
10. P. Glad, McKinley, Bryan and the People (New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1964).
11. L. Ashby, William Jennings Bryan: Champion of Democracy (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 57.
12. Ibid., 62.
13. Ibid., 64.
14. Ibid., 61.
15. “Women Walkers,” p. 4.
11 | “NEW WOMEN’S” ACTIONS
AND OLD VICTORIAN ATTITUDES
1. “Untitled,” Greeley Tribune, September 3, 1896, p. 1.
2. Ibid.
3. “Women Walkers Reach Plymouth,” Plymouth Republic, November 19, 1896, p. 6.
4. “Walking to Win,” Des Moines Register, October 17, 1896, p. 2.
5. “Coast to Coast,” Minneapolis Times, June 2, 1897, p. 5.
6. Linda Hasselstrom, Gaydell Collier, and Nancy Curtis, Leaning into the Wind (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997), 18.
7. “Fair Tramps from the West,” Lebanon Evening News, December 19, 1896, p. 1.
8. “Came from Spokane Afoot,” New York Times, December 24, 1896, p. 9.
9. J. Frost et al., “Why Did Colorado Suffragists Succeed in Winning the Right to Vote in 1893 and Not in 1877?” http://womhist.binghamton.edu/colosuff/intro.htm [June 2002].
10. Dictionary of American History, Rev. Ed., s.v. “Cripple Creek Strikes.”
11. “Women Walkers Reach Plymouth,” p. 6.
12. “Walked from Pacific Coast,” New York Twice-a-Week World, December 24, 1896, p. 6.
13. Dahn Shaulis, “Pedestriennes: Newsworthy but Controversial Women in Sporting Entertainment,” Journal of Sport History 26 (1), Spring 1999: 32. See this extensive research on the international phenomenon of nineteenth-century women walkers that demonstrated their strength and endurance through sporting contests and their eventual marginalization after years of competition because Victorian beliefs conflicted with the development of physical culture for women. In Shaulis’s journal article, he references Estby’s walk across America and refers to one other female pedestrian, Spanish immigrant Zoe Gayton, who achieved a transcontinental walk from California to New York accompanied by two men in 1891. For her achievement, she won a $2000 wager (New York Times, March 28, 1891).
14. Women’s Journal, December 30, 1876, p. 421.
15. “Pedestriennes,” 41.
16. Chicago Tribune, March 11, 1879, p. 9.
17. “Pedestriennes,” 43.
18. S. Stage, Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women’s Medicine (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979).
19. H. Green, The Light in the Home (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 117.
20. P. Vertinksy, “Feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Pursuit of Health and Physical Fitness as a Strategy for Emancipation,” Journal of Sport History 16 (1), 1989: 13. This was also known as the “Age of the Womb” by some doctors who were quite concerned over women’s nervous ailments. As Dr. George Beard wrote in 1879, “It seems almost impossible for any woman to suffer from general neurasthenia without developing sooner or later some trouble of the womb or of the ovary.” When Helga needed to testify of her “problems to the womb” at her trial after the debilitating fall on Riverside Ave., her actions showed that a “semi-invalid” condition held no status for a busy mother. The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892 creatively portrays the effects of the medical treatment given to wealthier women who required complete bed rest.
21. From a November 15, 1884, letter from Jane Addams to her stepbrother George, in G. Diliberto, A Useful Woman (New York: Scribner, 1999), 110.
22. J.J. Lorence, Enduring Visions Reading (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1993), 85.
23. “Women Walkers Reach Plymouth Saturday Night,” Plymouth Republic, November 19, 1896, p. 6.
24. Ibid.
12 | AN ELECTRIFYING PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
1. L. Ashby, William Jennings Bryan: Champion of Democracy (Boston, Mass.: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 62.
2. P. Glad, McKinley, Bryan and the People (New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1964), 176.
3. L Ashby, William Jennings Bryan, 64.
4. Ibid., 41–71.
5. Ibid., 53.
6. R. Edwards and S. DeFeo, “1896: The Presidential Campaign. Cartoons & Commentary,” http://iberia.vassar.edu/1896/1896home.html [June 2002].
7. L. Ashby, William Jennings Bryan, 69.
8. “Women Walkers,” Minneapolis Tribune, June 2, 1897, p. 4.
9. Ibid.
10. “Mrs. William J. Bryan,” New York Sunday World, August 23, 1896, p. 17.
11. “Women Walkers,” p. 4.
12. “More Pedestrians,” Des Moines Leader, October 15, 1896, p. 5.
13. “Walking to Win $10,000,” Des Moines Register, October 17, 1896, p. 2.
14. Ibid.
15. “They are Here,” Daily Iowa Capital, October 17, 1896, p. 5.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. “Two Women Afoot,” Davenport Democrat, October 24, 1896, p. 1.
13 | EARNING THEIR OWN WAY
1. “Two Women Tramps,” Lebanon Daily News, December 19, 1896, p. 1.
2. P. Glad, McKinley, Bryan, and the People: Critical Periods of History (New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1964).
3. Ibid., 179.
4. Ibid., 170.
5. L. Ashby, William Jennings Bryan: Champion of Democracy (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), 67.
6. Ibid., 67.
7. Ibid., 41.
8. “Are Tramping to New York,” Chicago Evening Post, November 7, 1896, p. 1.
9. Ibid.
10. C. Schwantes, Coxey’s Army: An American Odyssey (Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1994), 13.
11. “Diphtheria in Chicago,” New York Twice-a-Week World, November 23, 1896, p. 1.
12. G. Diliberto, A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams (New York: Scribner, 1999), 17. Also, see Ronald White and C. Howard Hopkin’s Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America (Temple University Press, 1975).
13. “Walk for $10,000,” Chicago Journal, November 7, 1896, p. 1.
14. Ibid.
15. “Women Walkers Reach Plymouth Saturday Night,” Plymouth Republic, November 19, 1896, p. 6.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. “Walking for Pay,” Fort Wayne Sentinel, November 18, 1896, p. 1.
19. Ibid.
20. “On a Long Walk,” Idaho Daily Statesman, June 5, 1896, p. 3.
14 | A RUSH TO THE FINISH
1. “Mother and Daughter,” Ohio State Journal, November 24, 1896, p. 3.
2. H.W. Brands, The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 160–176.
3. C. Schwantes, Coxey’s Army: An American Odyssey (Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1994), 45.
4. Ibid., 55.
5. Ibid., 237–38.
6. H.W. Brands, The Reckless Decade, 173.
7. C. Schwantes, Coxey’s Army, 177–185.
8. Ibid., 260.
9. “Women Walkers,” Minneapolis Tribune, June 2, 1897, p. 4.
10. “Coast to Coast,” Minneapolis Times, June 2, 1897, p. 5.
11. “The White House: First Ladies’ Gallery,” http://www.white-house.gov/history/firstladies [2002].
12. “Coast to Coast,” Minneapolis Times; Darillyn Bahr, “Coast to Coast,” School Research Report, Wilbur, Wash., 1977.
13. “Spokane Callers at McKinleys,” Spokesman-Review, December 1, 1896.
14. Ibid.
15. “A Long, Long Walk,” Alliance Daily Review, November 30, 1896, p. 4.
16. Ibid.
15 | THE IMPOSSIBLE HAPPENS
1. “Walking for $10,000,” Harrisburg Telegraph, December 5, 1896, p. 1.
2. “Fair Tramps from the West,” Lebanon Evening News, December 19, 1896, p. 1.
3. “Walked from Pacific Coast,” New York Twice-a-Week World, December 24, 1896, p. 6.
4. Ibid.
<
br /> 5. “Two Women Tramps,” Lebanon Daily News, December 19, 1896, p. 2.
6. “Afoot from Spokane,” Reading Times, December 19, 1896, p. 2.
7. Ibid.
8. “Walked from Pacific Coast,” p. 6.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. “Came from Spokane Afoot,” New York Times, December 24, 1896, p. 9.
12. “Two Women’s Long Tramp,” New York Herald, December 23, 1896, p. 10.
13. “The Estby’s Reach New York,” Spokesman-Review, December 24, 1896, p. 2.
14. “Mrs. Estby and Her Daughter Walked Armed from Spokane,” World, December 25, 1896, p. 2.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
16 | HEARTBREAK AT THE
MICA CREEK HOMESTEAD
1. Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 236.
2. Ibid., 234.
3. “Coast to Coast,” Minneapolis Times, June 2, 1897, p. 4.
4. Ibid.
5. “Auction,” Standard Union, January 12, 1897, p. 1.
6. “Walked Here from Spokane: Mrs. Estby Tells a Harrowing Tale of Eight Years of Tribulation,” Sun, May 2, 1897, p. 1.
7. Arlene Coulson, “Research Notes on Helga Estby’s Family,” Whitworth College History Project, 1986.
8. “Walked Here from Spokane,” p. 1.
9. Ida Estby, Oral History at Cheney Cowles Museum, Spokane, Wash., 1973.
10. “Letters,” Family Artifacts, 1893.
11. R.N. Tooker, The Disease of Children and their Homeopathic Treatment: Textbook for Students, Colleges, and Practitioners, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Gross & Delbridge Company, 1898).
12. Thelma Portch, first interview by author, Almira, Wash., 1983.
13. Ibid.
14. “Women Travelers Ask for Aid,” New York Daily Tribune, May 2, 1897, p. 8.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. “Walked Here from Spokane,” p. 1.
19. T. Portch, first interview.
17 | HOMEWARD BOUND
1. “Coast to Coast,” Minneapolis Times, June 2, 1897, p. 4.
2. Ibid.
3. “Women Walkers,” Minneapolis Tribune, June 2, 1897, p. 4.
4. “Coast to Coast,” p. 4.
5. “Women Walkers,” p. 4
6. Ibid.
7. “Women Walkers,” p. 4.
8. “Coast to Coast,” p. 4.
10. Ibid.
11. “Women Walkers,” p. 4.
12. “Coast to Coast,” p. 4.
13. “On a Long Walk,” Idaho Daily Statesman, June 3, 1896, p. 3.
14. R.C. Sahr, Consumer Price Index Conversion Factors: 1800–2012. Political Science Department, Oregon State University, April 2, 2002.
15. “Two Women’s Long Walk,” San Francisco Examiner, May 5, 1896, p. 3.
16. “Are Walking for Wages,” Walla Walla Union, May 17, 1896, p. 4.
17. “Fair Tramps from West,” Lebanon Daily News, December 19, 1896, p. 1.
18. Lyndia Carter, “Ogden Defeats Salt Lake City in a War of the Wheels,” History Blazer, http://historytogo.utah.gov/ogdenwheels.html [December, 1996].
19. The mention of any Spokane connection has been discovered in only two newspapers in Indiana, and only one mentions a “wealthy Spokane suffragette”; all other newspaper accounts refer to a New York or eastern sponsor or “parties.” Women in the Washington Territory received the right to vote in 1883, but lost this when Washington became a state in 1888. Interest in women’s suffrage came in waves after this, with very limited interest before 1898 and a great surge beginning in 1907, which Helga supported. However, prior to 1896, some women committed to the temperance movement also met occasionally on the suffrage issue. One potential contact in Spokane was Dr. Mary Latham who testified in the lawsuit against the city during Helga’s illness. As early as 1890, Dr. Latham wrote a letter to the editor of the Spokesman-Review that referred to a request to promote suffrage in Spokane from a national leader of suffrage, Matilda Joslyn Gage. A prominent physician, married to another physician, she could have qualified as “wealthy” in Helga’s eyes. She had professional contacts in the East and could have connected Helga to the New York sponsor, however, no records indicate she continued as an active suffragette. Often women committed to women’s suffrage before 1898 waged their battles in the fashion of a “Still Hunt,” a private campaign that was not easily visible to outsiders. This tactic, advocated openly by prominent Pacific Northwest suffragist Abigail Scott Duniway, provided a discreet method of promoting women’s rights to the ballot. But it also leads to an incomplete record of local suffragettes. Nancy Engle’s excellent doctoral research on Spokane suffragettes speaks to this issue (“Debating Suffrage? The ‘Still Hunt’ in Spokane, 1898” in an April 27, 2001, paper). The most famous wealthy suffragette from Spokane, May Arkwright Hutton, gained enormous riches from her silver mining claims, but in 1896 she still lived in Wallace, Idaho, and had not yet struck it rich. The reference to Spokane may have been a reporting error, although it is conceivable that a woman in Spokane connected her to an Eastern party.
18 | LOST AND FOUND
1. Arlene Coulson, “Research Notes on Helga Estby’s Family,” Whitworth College History Project, 1986, Death Certificates.
2. Nels Siverson interview, 1986. See also the work of A. Anastasio, “Port Haven: A Changing Northwestern Community,” Institute of Agricultural Sciences, Bulletin 616, Washington State University (1960), 1–44. As late as the 1950s, in research on a Scandinavian community of Poulsbo, Washington, the key importance of family life was cited and there was disapproval of any wife not fulfilling perceived responsibilities. The Norwegian-American literature of the period presented a consistent theme of the patriarchal nature of the husband’s authority in the home (see J.N. Buckely, “Martha Ostenso: A Norwegian-American Immigrant Novelist,” Norwegian-American Studies and Records 28 (1979): 69–81). As one writer noted, “The Scandinavian husband’s authority in both Old- and New-World settings … was dominated by the father, whose authority over both wife and children in the home country was nearly absolute” (79). Ole’s inability to stop his wife’s action could be construed by his neighboring community as “abdicating his headship.”
3. “Walk to New York,” Spokesman-Review, May 5, 1896, p. 5.
4. J.J. Lorence, Enduring Visions Readings (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1993), 83.
5. Darillyn Bahr, “Coast to Coast,” School Research Report, Wilbur, Wash., 1977, 14.
6. Thelma Portch, first and second interview by author, Almira, Wash., 1984, 1986.
7. D.C. Jack, Silencing the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).
8. A. Coulson, “Research Notes,” 1986, Mortgage Book.
9. T. Portch, second interview.
10. D. Bahr, “Coast to Coast,” 16.
11. H. Portch, interview with grandson-in-law by author, Spokane, Wash., 1994.
12. T. Portch, first interview.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Norma Lee, interview with granddaughter by author, Spokane, Wash., 1992.
16. T. Portch, second interview; Wanda Estby Michalek, phone interview with granddaughter-in-law by author, June 25, 1996.
17. D. Bahr, “Coast to Coast.”
18. Doug Bahr, “Grandma Walks from Coast to Coast,” Eighth grade Essay, Wilbur, Wash., 1984.
A REFLECTION ON THE SILENCING OF FAMILY STORIES
1. E. Stone, Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How our Family Stories Shape Us (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1988), 8.
2. Electronic-mail message to author from a confidential source reflecting on the impact of the silencing of family stories, Spokane, Wash., November 15, 2000.
3. See the pivotal work of Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: Norton, 1994) and E. Foner, ed., The New American History (Philadelphia: Temple Univer
sity Press, 1990). The Women’s West Conference in 1983 began a new era of historical inquiry and scholarship that led to the publication of Armitage and Jameson’s The Women’s West (University of Oklahoma, 1987) and a flood of research and publication on women’s lives. This emergence of a new western history now includes previously marginalized women from multicultural backgrounds and offers a far richer picture of women in the American West, as exemplified in the research presented at the Women’s Western History Conference in 2000.
4. J. Rosenblatt, “Charred Manuscripts Tell Zora Neale Hurston’s Poignant and Powerful Story,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, B4–5.
5. H.W. Brands, The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), x.
6. Webster’s New World Dictionary, 3rd College ed., s.v. “shame.”
7. L. Seppa-Salisbury, psychologist, interview by author, 1996.
8. D.C. Jack, Silencing the Self: Women and Depression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 11.
9. Ibid.
10. M. Houston and C. Kramarae, “Speaking from Silence: Methods of Silencing and of Resistance,” Discourse & Society 214 (1991): 388.
11. L. Rosenfeld, “Self-disclosure Avoidance: Why I Am Afraid to Tell You Who I Am,” Communications Monographs 46 (1) (1979): 63–74.
12. D. Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 218, 244.
13. J. Bradshaw, Family Secrets (New York: Bantam, 1995).
14. L. S. Smart, “Parental Bereavement in Anglo American History,” Omega 28 (1): 49–61.
15. M. Vicinus, Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973).
16. L.S. Smart, “Parental Bereavement in Anglo American History,” 57.
17. Thelma Portch, first and second interviews by author, 1984, 1986; Wanda Estby Michalek, interview by author, June 25, 1996.
18. M. Vicinus, Suffer and Be Still.
19. Tillie Olsen, Silences (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1965), 35.
Bibliography