The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was a sweatshop where hundreds of young women, most of them immigrants, slaved over sewing machines and work tables to make the popular blouses known as shirtwaists. When the fire started the women couldn’t get out, since the sweatshop owner had locked the doors. Fire hoses were too short to reach the highest floors where the fire raged. The trapped employees crowded onto a flimsy fire escape, which then collapsed under the weight. Desperately, with the wall of flames behind them, women started leaping to their deaths. A total of 146 garment workers died that day, most of them young women.

The Triangle fire was a watershed event. Labor laws, the women’s movement, public safety—all were transformed by the disaster.

Cornell University has an excellent resource site about the fire: Remembering the Triangle Factory Fire. It includes a photo archive (with graphic images, so be warned).

The Triangle fire had a galvanizing effect on Frances Perkins, who went on to become the first female Secretary of Labor (and the first female Cabinet member, period). Perkins was the architect of much of the New Deal, including Social Security.

Thanks to DC Spotlight and Ms. Thompson for this wonderful piece. Here’s the video portion of the interview included with the article:

No, he wasn’t.

It is ironic that the proponents of this idea, such as Maryland Senator Mike Miller, cast themselves as the guardians of truth, conscientiously defending the past from revisionists who want to “rewrite history.” Ironic because their version of John Hanson is a myth.

The real story goes like this: John Hanson was a delegate from Maryland to the Continental Congress in the early 1780s. As you no doubt recall from high school history class, the Continental Congress was the convention of representatives from the thirteen colonies (later states) which served as a very loose government from 1774 to 1789. This was before the Constitution was adopted, before our republic was actually founded.

Anyway, in 1781 John Hanson was elected president—literally, the presiding officer—of the Congress. That was his title: “president of Congress.” This was not in any sense an executive position; it was a parliamentary role. Hanson was the ninth president of Congress since its inception in 1774, and the third man to occupy the seat following the ratification of the Articles of Confederation in March 1881. He wasn’t the “President of the United States” any more than his predecessor Thomas McKean or his successor Elias Boudinot was. A total of fifteen men served terms as president of Congress, and the reason we don’t remember their names is because the job wasn’t all that important. This was by design: Americans were terrified of central government and abhorred anything that smelled remotely like a dictatorship. They were almost neurotic about it, in fact. The president of Congress simply wasn’t allowed to have any power.

As historian Edmund Burnett explained in his 1941 study of the Continental Congress, “the presidents of Congress were almost solely presiding officers, possessing scarcely a shred of executive or administrative functions.” Calvin C. Jillson and Rick K. Wilson, authors of Congressional Dynamics: Structure, Coordination, and Choice in the First American Congress, 1774-1789, are even more blunt. In their chapter on the role of the president of Congress, they refer to the “fundamental irrelevance” of the job. The president of Congress had no power or decision-making authority at all; he was there to preside over meetings and sign papers.

John Hanson found the work tedious. Within eight days of taking office he was writing to his son-in-law that he wanted to resign. This was a phenomenon that would be repeated throughout the life of the increasingly irrelevant and dysfunctional Continental Congress: delegates avoided attending the sessions whenever possible, and even the men elected president preferred to stay home (one of Hanson’s successors actually stayed at a friend’s house for six weeks and told Congress to write him if they needed anything). Hanson stuck it out from a sense of duty, though, and served his full one-year term. He did, however, succeed in transferring many of his paperwork responsibilities to the secretary of Congress.

So how did the story get started that John Hanson was the first President of the United States?

The origin of the legend seems to lie with one George Adolphus Hanson, a 19th century amateur genealogist and booster of anyone and everyone named Hanson. His work was full of mistakes (he thought John Hanson was of Swedish extraction, for example) and embellishments so rich they seem almost hallucinatory. He magnified John Hanson’s brief term presiding over Congress into a glittering career, with Hanson one of the pillars of the Revolution and a key architect of the new nation. The story was picked up and given wider currency by a journalist named Seymour Wemyss Smith, who argued that the real father of our country wasn’t George Washington, but John Hanson. When Smith’s fact-challenged book, John Hanson, Our First President, was published in 1932, Carnegie Magazine dismissed it as a “preposterous” rewriting of history. Which it was.

The point here isn’t to belittle the memory of John Hanson or any of the other men who served as presidents of Congress. The issue is one of historical accuracy. The government under the Articles of Confederation was hamstrung and ineffectual, and men who might have become leaders—such as the presidents of Congress—were prevented from exercising their talents. After all, it was this fundamental failure of government that led the Founders to scrap the whole shebang and start all over again with the Constitution.

John Hanson was a fine patriot and a dedicated public servant. He deserves to be honored for his accomplishments. But he wasn’t the first President of the United States, and wishing won’t make it so.

(Actually, right now every day is Harriet Tubman Day here at EVE, what with the Maryland legislature considering the bill to put Tubman in Statuary Hall. And this would be a perfect time to call some committee members.)

Here’s the bill signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1990:

PUBLIC LAW 101-252 –MAR. 13, 1990 104 STAT. 99

Joint Resolution
To designate March 10, 1990, as “Harriet Tubman Day”

Whereas Harriet Ross Tubman was born into slavery in Bucktown, Maryland, in or around the year 1820;

Whereas she escaped slavery in 1849 and became a “conductor” on the Underground Railroad;

Whereas she undertook a reported nineteen trips as a conductor, endeavoring despite great hardship and great danger to lead hundreds of slaves to freedom;

Whereas Harriet Tubman became an eloquent and effective speaker on behalf of the movement to abolish slavery;

Whereas she served in the Civil War as a soldier, spy, nurse, scout, and cook, and as a leader in working with newly freed slaves;

Whereas after the War, she continued to fight for human dignity, human rights, opportunity, and justice; and

Whereas Harriet Tubman—whose courageous and dedicated pursuit of the promise of American ideals and common principles of humanity continues to serve and inspire all people who cherish freedom—died at her home in Auburn, New York, on March 10, 1913; Now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That March 10, 1990 be designated as “Harriet Tubman Day,” to be observed by the people of the United States with appropriate ceremonies and activities.

Approved March 13, 1990.

LEGISLATIVE HISTORY – S.J. Res. 257
Congressional record, Vol. 136 (1990):
Mar. 6, considered and passed Senate.
Mar. 7, considered and passed House.

IWD.com has an excellent timeline of the history of Women’s Day. The page also includes a video from Russia which highlights how the observance there has morphed into a kind of cross between Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day.

In other countries, though, Women’s Day still carries political significance:

The National Women’s History Museum offers a more in-depth look at the evolution of the March 8 observance:

Mercy Otis Warren, circa 1763, oil on canvas, by John Singleton Copley.

If she were a man, Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) would almost certainly be remembered as one of our nation’s most influential Founders. Called the “Conscience of the American Revolution” as well as the “Mother of the Bill of Rights,” she was an intellectual powerhouse whose sheer genius compelled respect. John Adams remarked that she possessed an intellect which “[God] bestows on few of the human race,” and that “of all the geniuses which have yet arisen in America, there has been none superior.” Thomas Jefferson said simply, “I have long possessed evidence of her high station in the ranks of genius.” Neither of these men believed in rights for women, of course; but this particular woman they couldn’t dismiss. She was just too smart.

Mercy Otis was born into the Massachusetts intelligentsia, and her whole family was wrapped up in revolutionary fervor. Her brother, James Otis, was the firebrand who came up with the “no taxation without representation” slogan. Her husband, James Warren, was one of the Sons of Liberty and later served as Paymaster General of the Continental Army. The Warren home was a meeting place for patriots throughout the Revolutionary era, and Mercy and James were close friends of John and Abigail Adams.

Mercy herself contributed to the cause with sharply-written plays and extremely persuasive pamphlets. As a woman, she took care to remain anonymous and allow the public to imagine a male author behind the pungent prose. Privately, though, she was well-known to the other intellectual leaders of the Revolution. She regularly advised and corresponded with John Adams, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and George Washington.

“The rights of the individual should be the primary object of all governments.”
                                                                                          —Mercy Otis Warren

Perhaps her most critical contribution came after the Revolution, when the young nation was considering the newly drafted Constitution. Mercy was staunchly opposed to ratification—because the Constitution, as written, contained no guarantee of individual rights. She penned the highly influential Observations on the New Constitution, which was circulated throughout the thirteen states. In it she argued that the Constitution should be amended to spell out specific guarantees, including freedom of speech and of the press, the right to trial by jury, and protection from unreasonable search and seizure. The subsequent Bill of Rights owed much to her suggestions.

Mercy capped her writing career in 1805 with the three-volume History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution, her eyewitness account of the War of Independence and its aftermath. President Thomas Jefferson ordered copies for himself and his entire Cabinet.

Further reading:

• The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation, by Nancy Rubin Stuart
• A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution, by Rosemarie Zagarri
• Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation, by Cokie Roberts

No portraits of Eliza Lucas Pinckney are known to exist; this illustration was made for American Spirit magazine.

Before cotton, there was indigo. The source of South Carolina’s wealth and a mainstay of the American colonial economy before the Revolution, the indigo industry was the brainchild of Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793). She was one of the greatest agricultural innovators of colonial America.

The daughter of a British officer in the West Indies, Eliza Lucas was put in charge of her father’s three South Carolina plantations at the remarkable age of sixteen. Colonel Lucas obviously recognized that his daughter was a prodigy, and the ambitious young woman did not disappoint. Eliza loved botany and was fascinated by agricultural experimentation. She thought in terms of the big picture: she knew that South Carolina needed a cash crop to complement rice, and she saw that the burgeoning world trade in textiles was creating new markets for dyes. Using indigo seeds her father sent her from the West Indies, she embarked on a series of agricultural experiments in growing the new crop. Once she had succeeded in developing a strain of indigo that could be grown commercially in Carolina, she set about mastering the process of rendering and manufacturing the all-important dye.

By 1744, Eliza was ready to share her seeds and her knowledge with other South Carolina planters. The result was an agricultural revolution. In 1745-1746, South Carolina exported 5,000 pounds of indigo dye. By 1748, that number had jumped to 134,118 pounds. By 1775—the eve of American independence—South Carolina was exporting more than a million pounds of indigo every year.

Eliza was reluctant to marry, and understandably so. A married woman in colonial South Carolina had absolutely no legal or property rights; in legal terms she did not even exist, being totally subsumed under her husband’s authority. Eliza needed a husband who, like her father, would tolerate her agricultural and business pursuits. The man she finally settled on, Charles Pinckney, was a trusted family friend. It was a good choice: the marriage was a success, and Eliza continued to manage plantations and develop new crops.

Eliza raised her children according to the Enlightenment theories of John Locke, and her sons went on to become prominent figures in the Revolution and early republic. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney was a signer of the Constitution and Minister to France; Thomas Pinckney served as Governor of South Carolina, Minister to Great Britain, and special envoy to Spain. Eliza’s daughter Harriott was a distinguished planter and, like her brothers and mother, an ardent patriot. Eliza herself was so highly regarded that George Washington asked to serve as a pallbearer at her funeral.

There is a dark side to this story. As with the other southern cash crops—tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton—indigo took a horrific toll on the slaves who worked the plantations. The Slavery in America website explores this aspect in The Devil’s Blue Dye: Indigo and Slavery.

Further reading:

• Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1739-1762: Intriguing Letters by One of Colonial America’s Most Accomplished Women, by Eliza Lucas Pinckney
• Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation, by Cokie Roberts
• South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Volume 1, by Marjorie Julian Spruill, Valinda W. Littlefield, and Joan Marie Johnson
• Outrageous Women of Colonial America, by Mary Rodd Furbee

Anne Hutchinson defied the Puritan leaders of Massachusetts.

Anne Hutchinson (c. 1591-1643) was at the center of the first great theological crisis in Puritan New England: the Antinomian Controversy. A brilliant and outspoken woman who refused to bow to male supremacy, Hutchinson challenged the tyrannical Puritan government and championed freedom of conscience. She has been called the first feminist in the New World, but she was also a model for the religious and civil liberty of all citizens.

The short essay about Hutchinson in Harvard Magazine is excellent, as is the following brief biography from the Library of Congress:

Although her exact birth date is uncertain, on July 20, 1591, the infant Anne Marbury was baptized in Alford, Lincolnshire, England. The first female religious leader among North America’s early European settlers, Anne Marbury Hutchinson was the daughter of an outspoken clergyman silenced for criticizing the Church of England. Better educated than most men of the day, she spent her youth immersed in her father’s library.

At twenty-one, Anne Marbury married William Hutchinson and began bearing the first of their fourteen children. The Hutchinsons became adherents of the preaching and teachings of John Cotton, a Puritan minister who left England for America. In 1634, the Hutchinson family followed Cotton to New England, where religious and political authority overlapped.

Serving as a skilled herbalist and midwife in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Anne Hutchinson began meeting with other women for prayer and religious discussion. Her charisma and intelligence soon also drew men, including ministers and magistrates, to her gatherings, where she developed an emphasis on the individual’s relationship with God, stressing personal revelation over institutionalized observances and absolute reliance on God’s grace rather than on good works as the means to salvation. Hutchinson’s views challenged religious orthodoxy, while her growing power as a female spiritual leader threatened established gender roles.

Called for a civil trial before the General Court of Massachusetts in November 1637, Hutchinson ably defended herself against charges that she had defamed the colony’s ministers and as a woman had dared to teach men. Her extensive knowledge of Scripture, her eloquence, and her intelligence allowed Hutchinson to debate with more skill than her accusers. Yet because Hutchinson claimed direct revelation from God and argued that “laws, commands, rules, and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway,” she was convicted and banished from the colony, a sentence confirmed along with formal excommunication in the ecclesiastical trial that followed.

Refusing to recant, Hutchinson accepted exile and in 1638 migrated with her family to Roger Williams’ new colony of Rhode Island, where she helped found the town of Portsmouth. After her husband died in 1642, Hutchinson moved to Dutch territory near Long Island Sound (an area now known as Co-op City, along New York’s Hutchinson River Parkway, which is named for Anne Hutchinson). There in 1643 Hutchinson and all but one of her younger children were killed by Siwanoy Indians, possibly with the encouragement of Puritan authorities. “Proud Jezebel has at last been cast down,” was the supposed comment of Hutchinson’s nemesis, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop.

Further Reading:

• American Jezebel: The Uncommon Life of Anne Hutchinson, the Woman Who Defied the Puritans, by Eve LaPlante

This engraving is the only known portrait of Pocahontas rendered from life. During her stay in England in 1616, Dutch engraver Simon van de Passe captured her likeness. She was about 21.

Pocahontas (c. 1596-1617) stands at the beginning of written Anglo-American history. She welcomed the English to Jamestown, acted as peacemaker between her tribe and the newcomers, married one of the colonists, and even represented her people in England. But who was she really?

Thanks to Disney, most people think of Pocahontas as a cartoon princess in a buckskin mini-dress who falls in love with Captain John Smith. The truth is quite different. Pocahontas was an eleven-year-old child when the English arrived in 1607, John Smith was a crude and violent adventurer, and there was no love affair between them. Even the story about Pocahontas saving Smith’s life was probably false; historians (both Anglo and Native) strongly suspect Smith invented the tale much later.

Pocahontas’s real name was Matoaka—Pocahontas was a nickname—and she was the daughter of the man known as Powhatan, the paramount chief of the Powhatan Indians. She was certainly a highly privileged little person, but not exactly a princess in the European sense. Powhatan society was matrilineal, so power passed from the chief to his sister’s children, not to his own offspring. (Women could also be chiefs; this was not a patriarchal society.)

As a child Pocahontas was very friendly to the English colonists at Jamestown, making a strong impression with her high spirits, generosity, and poise. When she reached marriageable age she wedded a Powhatan man named Kocoum. According to the oral history preserved by the Mattaponi tribe (descendants of the Powhatans), she bore a child referred to as Little Kocoum.

In 1613, when relations between the English and the Powhatans had deteriorated, the colonists kidnapped Pocahontas (now a young wife and mother) and held her for ransom. During her captivity Pocahontas was baptized a Christian and arrangements were made for her to marry colonist John Rolfe. The details of all this are murky in the extreme. The traditional English version of the story—Pocahontas converts, falls in love, Kocoum vanishes into thin air—is bland and romantic. The Mattaponi oral history, in contrast, is harrowing. According to the Mattaponis, Pocahontas was raped by her English captors and was already pregnant when Rolfe married her. Kocoum was murdered by the English at the same time Pocahontas was abducted. Not exactly a Disney movie.

As for Pocahontas’s marriage to John Rolfe, modern Anglo and Native historians agree that it was a political union. Pocahontas’s role was to be a diplomat for her people, and her marriage to Rolfe was designed to establish and preserve peace between the English and the Indians. Which it did: the resulting “Peace of Pocahontas” lasted until her death.

In 1616 Pocahontas traveled to England with her husband John Rolfe, their son, and several other Powhatan Indians. She was presented to the king, made the rounds of society, and even sat for her portrait. Tragically, Pocahontas died after a sudden illness just as the party was preparing to sail back to America. She was 21.

Further Reading:

• The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History, by Dr. Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star”
• Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown, by Helen C. Rountree
• Before and After Jamestown: Virginia’s Powhatans and Their Predecessors, by Helen C. Rountree
• Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries, by Helen C. Rountree

The Agricultural Revolution: life at Çatal Hüyük (illustration by Jaume Bosch Martínez)

March is Women’s History Month, and here on the EVE blog we’ll be celebrating with posts about famous and not-so-famous women in history. But I’d like to start off with a nod to a group of very important women whose names we’ll never know, but to whom we owe everything: the foremothers who invented the very foundations of human civilization.

When I was a kid, it was commonplace to hear boys say silly things like, “Women have never invented anything!” It’s still pretty common, in fact, if a cursory glance at various internet forums is any indication. Even adults who really, really ought to know better can fall into the trap: as recently as 2007, a remarkably ill-informed psychologist gave a talk at the APA convention asserting that men have invented virtually everything in the entire history of human existence (technology, art, science, religion, medicine, trade, etc.), while women’s contribution has consisted of…giving birth.

So let’s set the record straight. Modern anthropologists and prehistorians believe that it was women who invented most of the foundational technologies of human civilization. The evidence for this comes from multiple lines of inquiry: archaeology (what do bones and artifacts tell us?), history (what was the situation when the first records were made?), ethnography (how have people in various farming and foraging cultures organized their lives?), mythology (what do stories and legends say about who invented what?), and even primatology (what can we learn from our primate cousins about how archaic hominids may have behaved?). The striking thing is that all of the evidence from all these directions points to the same conclusion: that it was women who were at the cutting edge of the earliest human technologies. It was women who invented agriculture, women who domesticated plants, women who invented the hoe and irrigation and the first plow. Women are also widely credited with the invention of the fiber arts (spinning, weaving, basketry), pottery, and the vast number of technologies associated with food preparation and cooking. And that’s not all: strong arguments have been made placing women at the forefront of medicine (plant-based!), art, construction techniques, the development of the wheel, and even—in deep, deep prehistory—the taming of fire.

So while we’re thinking about women’s history this month, let’s bear in mind that the story didn’t just start a couple of centuries ago. Women were, in every sense, the mothers of civilization. Their ingenuity made our world possible.

Further reading:

• The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory, by J. M. Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page
• Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology, by Autumn Stanley
• Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber
• Gender in Archaeology: Analyzing Power and Prestige, by Sarah Milledge Nelson