ASHOKA | Morgan Dixon and National GirlTrek

Trekking for Health - Morgan Dixon 

At the Ashoka Support Network dinner yesterday, I spoke with Morgan Dixon, the newest of the Ashoka Fellows. She has a compelling story, and a plan for a national GirlTrek event on October 16.

I see a lot of similarities between Morgan and her predecessor activist 100 years ago, Inez Milholland:

• Morgan is smart. She says she was the first in her class to graduate from college. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Southern California and then went on to get a Master of Education Policy and Leadership at Seton Hall. 
• Morgan is a street organizer. Inspired by her sister and other members of her family. She says she is also inspired by Ella Baker and Septima Poinsette Clark, both of whom worked on civil rights issues with Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP.
• Morgan is a leader. She founded GirlTrek with her sister in Teaneck, N.J., and previously served as director of leadership development for one of the largest charter school networks in the country, Achievement First. Before Achievement First, Morgan directed the development and start-up of six public schools in NYC for St. Hope and the Urban Assembly, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 
• Morgan is a communicator. She began her career with Teach For America as a high school history teacher in Atlanta, GA, and later as a school administrator in Newark, NJ. Morgan was awarded Teach For America's 2012 Social Innovation Award.  
• She is a popular speaker. She was recognized by the Awesome Foundation as a leader to watch. She recently addressed students at Yale and Princeton and opened the 2012 summit for the National Outdoor Leadership School.

She told me that she started GirlTrek two years ago because she was heartbroken that so many black women die of preventable diseases. She says that four out of five African American women are overweight and half of them are obese. Yet 70 percent of them are the breadwinners in the family. (I haven't checked any of these numbers, but they sound right.)

Morgan is trying to draw attention to the need for a change in diet and need for exercise through walks for black women's health. GirlTrek supports African American women and girls' living healthier lives by walking.

 GirlTrek, based in Washington, D.C. supports more than 15,000 walkers and is operated with the help of 300 volunteers and 145,000 supporters. GirlTrek aims to mobilize one million supporters to lead a "walking revolution for better health" in high-need communities across America. GirlTrek's health movement relies on telling stories, providing active role models, organizing in the street, partnering with other organizations and just making the case to the media.

Morgan will keep them all moving by example and exhortation.

Comment

Morgan exemplifies the front edge of the woman's movement that dates itself back to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, and got itself renewed energy in the 1913 march sponsored by the National Woman's Party in Washington, which Inez Milholland led on horseback.

I was at the centennial march last year and have already commented that it was composed 95 percent of Deltas,  from all over the country. The Delta Sigma Theta sorority had just been founded at Howard University in 1913 is the activist sorority that Inez championed to be part of the Washington march.

xBOISSEVAIN | Eugen (Superseded)

Eugen Boissevain
Married well, and then again.
First Inéz, for the women's vote,
Then 'twas Edna, the poet we quote.
(Clerihew by JT Marlin.)

This post has been superseded by this one. This post is kept up solely to maintain links.

INEZ | Milholland Chair, Essex County

At the Essex County Historical Society in Lewis, NY, a
group is studying the lives of Inez Milholland and
 other locals to understand their contributions to history.

In Essex County, NY a chair is dedicated to the memory of Inez Milholland at the end of 2013 (I just ran across the video).

Vida ("Tubby") and sis Inez Milholland
 in 1913. Vida carried on with suffrage
work after Inez's death in 1916.

The ceremony consisted of the reading of a speech by Inez Milholland that she gave when she was 25 and was a newly minted lawyer from NYU, where a Professor at the Law School occupies the Inez Milholland Chair. The 9-minute reading of the speech was recorded and may be seen here.

The video is easy to hear and follow, and Inez's words are well put together. But as a visual it has little to offer after one spends a minute looking at the layout of the office and the audience.

It might be better done as a dramatization.  Or with photos of Inez. Or something else. Anything would be better than a talking head.

This reminds me of a Duke who was asked to be the final judge in a competition for the best singer in his duchy. He was finally presented with two winners from the semi-finals and his job was to pick the best of the two. The first one sang for about 20 seconds and the Duke put his hand in the air and stood up.  "STOP...," he said.  "...Give the prize to the other one."

March 25 - Happy Birthday, Gloria Steinem, 80

Happy birthday, Gloria Steinem.

You are what Inez Milholland might have turned out to be if she had lived longer and had been born later.

Inez Milholland was called by the Editorial Board of The New York Times "the fairest of the Amazons" in 1913.

You were similarly called by The Washington Post columnist Maxine Cheshire  “the miniskirted pinup girl of the intelligentsia."

I got the Cheshire quote from Gail Collins's report on Gloria Steinem's 80th birthday. She noted that Steinem is in Botswana to celebrate her 80th.

Steinem's 40th and subsequent-decade birthdays have been well publicized because she wanted to lead other women by example, and not show fear in the face of aging. She has done this.

How much do women need men?

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

Steinem was born this day in Toledo, Ohio. Her father was an antique dealer and a summer resort operator who traveled around in a trailer, looking for new business ideas. She said of her parents:

[Dad] was always going to make a movie, or cut a record, or start a new hotel, or come up with a new orange drink. [Mom was] an invalid who lay in bed with eyes closed and lips moving in occasional response to voices only she could hear; a woman to whom I brought an endless stream of toast and coffee, bologna sandwiches, and dime pies.

In this environment, Steinem had poor grades, says Garrison Keillor, but she managed to get into Smith based on her entrance exams. After college, she made her name as a journalist with a piece called "I was a Playboy Bunny" (1963), about working "undercover" at the Manhattan Playboy Club. She went on to found Ms. Magazine in 1972. It sold out its first print run of 300,000 copies in eight days. Steinem has written several books about the inequities women face in the modern world, including Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983) and Revolution from Within (1992).

INEZ | Graveyard Meeting, June 1908

Graveyard where Vassar suffragists met. Photo from the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial Newsletter.

When Inez Milholland was a student at Vassar, she requested use of the Vassar chapel for a suffrage meeting.

But President James Monroe Taylor forbade it. So the meeting was held at a public graveyard across the street from Vassar.

Taylor was outraged at the "exploitation" of Vassar for political purposes and said he would expel any student who attended.

But word got out and the meeting on June 8, 1908 attracted about 40 Vassar undergraduates, ten alumnae, Harriot Stanton Blatch (Elizabeth Cady Stanton's daughter) - who was organizing the event as part of a trolley ride down the East Coast - and others from outside the Vassar community including two men.

This meeting established the Vassar Votes for Women Club, which continued to meet off-campus under Milholland's leadership.

Her opening remarks at this meeting were in part: "How can we enjoy a comfortable life when young girls are chained to their machines in factories? Sisterhood with other women is more important to me than a Vassar diploma. . . . Only when women vote, will they breathe free." Source:  Boissevain Family Website.

TRIANGLE FIRE | Mar. 25–103rd Anniversary (Comment)

Frances Perkins as a member of the
[Triangle] Factory Investigation
Commission, 1911.

Mar. 21, 2014–The following report on the "Mink Brigade" appears in the latest Department of Labor Newsletter, just posted.

Frances Perkins is rightly heralded as the visionary behind some of the most far-reaching labor reforms in American history, but throughout her long career as a leading voice for social change, she was never alone.

Perkins was a member of a long line of women, from Jane Addams to Eleanor Roosevelt, who took up the cause of women's rights in the workplace and led a swelling social movement that amplified the call for a voice for working people at the highest levels of government. 

The movement was galvanized on March 25, 1911, when a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan caused the deaths of 123 women and 23 men. 

Perkins witnessed the fire, and in its aftermath, stood in solidarity with the workers who rose up, many of them women of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, to call for change. 

Perkins was among a group of women [suffragists - including Inez Milholland and some Vassar colleagues] that became known, mockingly, as "the Mink Brigade" — a reference to their patrician roots. It included women from families of prominent industrialists, such as Anne Morgan (daughter of J.P. Morgan) and Alva Belmont.

As Perkins ascended to state labor commissioner for New York and then U.S. secretary of labor, she never forgot the women of the Triangle factory and other victims. In 1933, she wrote an influential op-ed calling for a higher minimum wage and increased workplace protections, using the figure of the young woman toiling in a garment factory as her subject and titling it, "The Cost of a Five-Dollar Dress." • Read "The Cost of a Five-Dollar Dress" • View the Centennial Timeline • View the Centennial Video

Comment: I have posted before on the Triangle fire. The landlords at the Triangle building successfully fought civil and criminal suits against them. The laws just did not make them responsible. The same thing may still be seen today in low-wage factories overseas, where labor laws are not on the books or are not enforced. Perkins, as noted above, was galvanized by the Triangle Fire and left the comfort of her patrician family to join the effort to get new legislation passed. When FDR became governor, he brought in Frances Perkins to strengthen labor laws. When he was elected President, he brought her down to have the same impact nationally, with the encouragement of Clara Beyer, who in 1928 was appointed as director of the Children's Bureau of the Labor Department. She played a behind-the-scenes role in getting FDR to appoint Perkins as the first-ever female Cabinet member. Perkins served FDR for more than 12 years, longer than any other subsequent Secretary of Labor (her time with FDR was the same as my father's; he was recruited by Henry Morgenthau at Treasury). The factory owners' lack of accountability for the loss of the lives of 146 workers, mostly very young women, was used as an argument for the need for votes for women. As noted in, for example, the Triangle book by David von Drehle, Inez Milholland was deeply involved in taking the side of workers in the strike against the Triangle Shirtwaist Company, in the two years before the fire.

INEZ | Oct. 21–Forward into Light / Edison Gets Bulb Right

Edison's new bulb.

October 21, 2013 – Today in 1879 Thomas Edison figured out how to make a better electric light bulb, initiating wonderment that produced, among other things, the battle cry for Votes for Women: "Forward into Light."

Since the 1820s, scientists knew that electricity could replace kerosene and gas lamps, but inventors only knew that platinum worked as a filament. Edison discovered that carbonized cotton thread worked better (tungsten turned out later to be even better).

He created the Edison Electric Illuminating Company in 1880 to enable him to bring electricity into people’s homes and businesses like gas and water, under the streets.

Once installation of cables was under way in Manhattan, he invented all the fixtures, sockets, fuses, and meters and then formed manufacturing companies to supply them. Edison's first commercial power plant was in lower Manhattan, at 257 Pearl Street. He needed a densely populated area full of both businesses and residential customers. The area's proximity to financial backers on Wall Street was also helpful. On the day, September 4, 1882, when the Pearl Street Station powered up for the first time, Edison was standing in the offices of investor J.P. Morgan. Edison gave the signal to his chief electrician, who closed the circuit and began the first commercial delivery of electric power. The New York Times, an early customer – reported the next day:

Edison’s central station, at No. 257 Pearl street, was yesterday one of the busiest places down town, and Mr. Edison was by far the busiest man in the station. The giant dynamos were started up at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and, according to Mr. Edison, they will go on forever unless stopped by an earthquake. [...] The electric lamps in THE TIMES Building were as thoroughly tested last evening as any light could be tested in a single evening, and tested by men who have battered their eyes sufficiently by years of night work to know the good and bad points of a lamp, and the decision was unanimously in favor of the Edison electric lamp as against gas.

The new light bulb played several parts in the life of Inez Milholland Boissevain:

• Her father and grandfather were involved in electric utilities in Essex County, NY, where she spent her summers at Meadowmount. The light bulb must have been helpful for growing that business.
• At Vassar, where Inez was in 1905-09, the campus was lit by Welsbach gaslights. These were changed over, slowly, to electric lights.
• Electric lighting came to be associated with enlightenment – a second Renaissance (or as Edna St Vincent Millay's poem spelled it, "Renascence").
• A theme song for the women's movement was "Forward into Light", which was set to music by Charles Ives.
• The banner that Inez Milholland Boissevain carries on horseback in her iconic post-mortem poster reads "Forward into Light".



The light bulb replaced this Welsbach-mantled gas light.

• Inez must have either sung the Ives song, or her sister Vida (who sang professionally for a while) did, at Vassar, and she picked up the theme as a feminist anthem.

The gas companies fought back against the view that gas lights were old-fashioned. They brought out new products and advertising designed to keep people using gas on the grounds of cost, tradition or simplicity.

Electric light did have a negative impact. It meant that people began to sleep less.

Before 1910, people slept an average of nine hours a night.

By the end of the 20th century, average sleep time was reduced to more like seven and a half hours. Under laboratory conditions, people deprived of electric light revert to sleeping nine hours a night.