Alex's This and That

Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale was the founder of modern nursing. She was born into a wealthy family in 1820 and in her early 20’s, showed no real desire to marry and live as women were supposed to do. She already wanted to study nursing, and she did so. She felt God had called her to serve others and that women were equal to men, an idea certainly lacking in the Victorian era.

She is most noted for her work in the Crimean War. She arrived to filthy, dark tents with high rates of infection. In fact, disease and infection was killing many more soldiers than war wounds were. In October 1854, she and 38 volunteer nurses that she had personally trained landed in the Crimea and in November they arrived at the hospital at Scutari. She found indifferent care, a shortage of medicines, unhygienic conditions and no place for food preparation. Mass infections were common under such conditions and mortality rates were high.

At her request, a civilian financed prefabricated hospital was sent and became Renkioi Hospital. She had the Sanitary commission come in and flush the sewers as well as repair the ventilation. She implemented handwashing and other clean practices and the death rate dropped from over 40% to around 2%.

She was often referred to as the lady of the lamp because she would check patients at night carrying a lamp from bed to bed. From the London times: She is a "ministering angel" without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.

Back in England, she carried on with her crusade of cleanliness and training nurses in the care of patients. Many of her nurses ended up running hospital all over. She even trained Linda Richards, who became the first such trained nurse in the US and pioneered proper nursing in the US and japan.

Her Nightingale School for Nursing is now the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery at King’s College London. She founded the Nightingale Pledge that is a modified version of the Hippocratic
Oath.

If a patient is cold, if a patient is feverish, if a patient is faint, if he is sick after taking food, if he has a bed-sore, it is generally the fault not of the disease, but of the nursing.
Florence Nightingale

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Jacqueline Bouvier was born in 1929 in New York into wealth and privilege. She went to the finest schools and knew the best people, went to college and majored in French then married and up and coming senator from Massachusetts. He was elected president then assassinated. She married a rich Greek then edited books after he died…

Sounds so trite, doesn’t it?

Those things are all true but Jackie was much more than that.

She was a lovely confident child who loved reading, riding and her father most of all. He doted on her as well. When she started school, she tended to misbehave quite a lot. Her mother attributed this to boredom as she finished her work quickly then found something else to do.

Her father was an alcoholic and womanizer and her parents soon divorced. Their wealth took a hit following the stock market problems of 1929. Her mother remarried Hugh Auchincloss, giving her three stepsiblings in addition to her own sister Lee. She was fond of her stepfather, who gave the family stability again. She graduated at the top of her class at Miss Porters’ school.

She attended Vassar, where she excelled but did not become involved in life at the school, instead going to her Manhattan home on weekends, where she was named debutante of the year. She spent her junior year in France then transferred to George Washington College in DC for her final year, graduating with a degree in French literature. She worked for the Washington Times-Herald after college.

In 1952, she was introduced to the senate hopeful from Massachusetts at a dinner party. He was handsome, witty and very charming. He was John Fitzgerald Kennedy. They dated and he proposed, which she accepted after an assignment covering the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. They announced their engagement in June of 1953. They married in September.


Life was not always easy for the senator and his bride. John suffered from Addison’s disease as well injuries in WWII and had extremely dangerous spinal surgery in 1954 and Jackie herself suffered one miscarriage and one stillborn birth during the next few years.

Caroline was born in 1957 and Jackie posed with her and Jack on the cover of Life magazine during his 1958 senatorial campaign. She was an asset to his reelection campaign even though she was shy and disliked the crowds. The crowds liked her.

John ran for president in 1960 and Jackie, who was pregnant again, did not travel with him. She did write a syndicated newspaper column called The Campaign Wife. People became very interested in the beautiful, throaty voiced candidates wife. She became a fashion icon though she downplayed, preferring to be noticed for her aid in his campaign.

Jack won the election. Two weeks later, John Kennedy, Jr. was born. Jackie did not like to talk to the press and she wanted to control their access to the children as well.


Jackie decided to give the White House a restoration and make it as grand as it had once been, remodeling the family quarters first then the rest of the house. They sold White House guidebooks to help finance this very pricy undertaking. She tracked down many historical furnishings that had been removed or sold and restored many of those to the house as well.

On November 21, 1963, John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas Texas. Jackie began the effort to make sure that he was remembered when she orchestrated the funeral modeled after that of Abraham Lincoln and in the coming days and months, she would weave the Camelot myth in interviews with Theodore H. White.

In 1968, she married Aristotle Onassis, a Greek shipping tycoon. He was able to protect her and her children from what she perceived as threats. She kept up her friendship with Ted Kennedy as well. After Onassis died, she returned to live in the US.

Jackie worked for Doubleday as an editor and worked to preserve historic sites around NYC. She died of cancer in 1994.

Jackie Kennedy is remembered for her elegance and class.

Susan B. Anthony

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.~
Susan B. Anthony, 1860

There it is, in a nutshell. If you want to change the world, you gotta be all in.

And Susan B. Anthony was that.

She was born into a family of reformers, and she never looked back. Though they were Quakers, her family sometimes disagreed with the strict conservative ways of the Quakers. Her father argued often with the minister and angered fellow parishioners with his modern ideas.

Susan worked for abolition of slavery, temperance and women’s rights, especially women’s suffrage. When her family moved to Rochester, NY, they met other activists and began attending the Unitarian Church. Several suffrage meetings were held there. Susan was headmistress at a school in another town and had moved away. She had begun dressing and speaking in a more modern manner, leaving the Quaker ways behind. She moved back to Rochester when the school closed and took over the farm so her father could pursue activism more.

In 1851, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had spoken at the Seneca Falls Convention for suffrage. The two formed a partnership that lasted many years. Elizabeth wrote the speeches and Susan gave them. This worked well since Elizabeth had seven children to raise. The two spent many years speaking about abolition, voting rights and temperance. Cady even had a room in whatever home she had for Susan and said she actually spent more time with Susan than she did her husband,

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

Anthony voted in the presidential election of 1872 and was tried for illegally voting. Judge Ward Hunt denied her a jury trial, convicted her but never sentenced her, thus blocking any attempt she might make at taking it to a higher court.

A bill for an amendment was introduced in 1878 to give women the right to vote. It was called the Susan B. Anthony amendment and it finally passed in 1920. Let that sink in… 42 years later!

To my mind, Susan B. Anthony is near the top of the list of American freedom fighters in the company of women like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.

If you go to Recommended Books by the Susan B Anthony Museum and House, you will find a list of books about suffrage, Susan B. Anthony and other people who fought for the rights of all Americans to vote.

Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë was one of three English sisters who, despite their secluded lives, wrote amazing books that have remained classic through the years.

The girls were born in a village in Yorkshire. Their father was a minister. Their mother died when they were small. There were 6 children and two died of typhoid when they were young. Their aunt came to help raise the children after their mother died.

They were always well read and often wrote stories based on a set of toy soldiers belonging to their brother. Later Emily and Anne made up their own fictional universe and wrote stories for it.

Emily was the shy sister and preferred to stay home and after a short stint as a teacher, she became the housekeeper at home. She loved walking the moors and spending time alone. She wrote poetry and often shared it with her sister Anne.

Emily kept her poetry in notebooks. Charlotte found the notebooks and insisted that they publish them, along with her poetry and Anne’s as well. Emily refused at first but finally relented. They published them under the name Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, sure that they would not be taken seriously if they were revealed as women.

In 1847, Emily published Wuthering Heights and it was rather scandalous as it was not a garden variety romance but a dark novel of human passion. Ellis Bell was the pen name she used. This was her only novel and one of my favorites. Wuthering heights is considered one of the first modern gothic novels, a new genre for its time.

Emily died shortly after her brother Branwell in 1848.

The sisters from left to right: Anne, Emily, Charlotte – Painted by Branwell Brontë.


The original title page to Wuthering Heights:

Catherine the Great

The first thing I will say is the horse and animal rumors about Catherin the Great are not true. They were made up by those who could not stand the fact that a woman was strong enough to depose her insane husband and run her country for many years much better than he could have. Strong women throughout history have been portrayed as harlots or worse, perverts, when in truth, it was simply the reaction of a male dominated society to female intelligence and strength.

Gets of soapbox

Catherine the Great was born Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst in 1729 to an impoverished Prussian prince. Her named was changed when she married Peter, heir to the Russian throne. She despised him. He was pale and drank too much and played with toy soldiers. She gathered supporters about her and had a coup in mind. Her husband arrested one of her supporters, thus forcing her hand. She deposed her husband and became empress of Russia.

Under Catherine, Russia grew into a huge nation of wealth and power, expanding all the way to Alaska in the Americas and into the modern day Ukraine. It also became a leader in the arts, with Catherine at the helm. She wanted to be seen as an Enlightenment leader. While she modernized Russia and gave it culture and art that it lacked, feudalism was still in existence so the only people actually affected by her enlightenment were the nobility.

She reigned over 30 years and put down several insurrections and died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 67.


You can read her own memoirs in Memoirs of Empress Catherine the Great, translated from the original French.
Robert K. Massie wrote Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman. Massie is a Pulitzer Prize winner and also wrote Nicholas and Alexandra about the last Czar of Russia and the Russian revolution.
The Great imperial Crown

Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart is most famous for being lost on her around the world flight but she was much more than that. She was an aviation pioneer and an advocate for women pilots as well.

Amelia was born in Kansas and always had a sense of adventure. Her father was an alcoholic and the family was sometimes in financial straits but she and her sister, by all accounts, had a happy child hood. Her mother finally left her father over his drinking and moved her and her sister several times.

Amelia’s academic career was spotty, mostly due to finances.

She worked as a nurse during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 and fell very ill herself with the flu and an ongoing sinus problem that kept her down for a year. She ended up having her sinuses drained and had problems the rest of her life with Sinuses and often had to wear a small drain.

She had her first plane ride in 1920 and she later said, “"By the time I had got two or three hundred feet [60–90 m] off the ground, I knew I had to fly.”

She did all sorts of jobs to earn enough money for her first flying lesson and then she bought a small plane. After she lost a little inheritance she had on some bad investments, she sold her plane and she and her mother traveled to Boston, where she did lots of different jobs.

She stayed interested in aviation and soon, she had earned a bit of celebrity, she was offered the chance to fly Lindbergh’s route across the Atlantic. She took it even though she was just a passenger on this flight. She later said she was ‘just baggage, like a sack of potatoes.”

She traded on her resemblance to Lindbergh and became quite a celebrity with her own line of products and endorsements. She had always made her own comfortable clothing and now she had a line of clothes for the more active lifestyle like hers. All these endorsements help finance her flying career.

She met and married the publisher, George Putnam and their ‘open marriage’ was detailed in a letter she sent to him on their wedding day. It was sort of a ‘love the one you’re with’ arrangement.
Amelia in formal attie:


She flew solo across the Atlantic in 1934, the first woman to do so but she landed in Northern Ireland rather than France. She also flew solo from Honolulu to California, becoming the aviator to fly solo from Hawaii to the mainland.

IN 1937, she made two attempts to circumnavigate the globe. She had to give up the first time because her plane was damaged. Her second attempt in July ended in her being lost at sea. She was supposed to land on Howland Island but she never made it. Several Ham radio operators talked to her or heard her but then the transmissions stopped and she was gone.

There were many idea about what happened to her: she was a spy who defected to Japan, she was a prisoner of the Japanese, she was lost at sea…

IN the last few weeks, Forensic Journal has reported that a bone found on Nikumaroro was porbably that of Amelia Earhart and she basically ran out of gas and crash landed. Several other items have been found on the island over the years that suggest they crashed there, Amelia’s brand of freckle cream, among them.

Though she was no beauty, she was a dashing figure in her leather bomber jacket and aviator hat. I think perhaps that is best how to remember her.

Michelle Obama


On January 20, 2009, Michelle Robinson Obama became the first African American First Lady when her husband, Barack Obama, became the first African American president. I personally found her quite charming. I loved seeing her strength as she got out of the car and walked with her husband down the street to the White House.

I remember watching a NASCAR race on TV at Homestead Florida at which Mrs. Obama and Jill Biden were grand marshals to promote their Joining Forces, an initiative to promote jobs for returning vets. They were booed and I felt ashamed of Americans for being such backwards, racist morons.

Michelle was born in Chicago in 1964. Both sides of her family descended from slaves in the south, mostly South Carolina and Georgia. After high school, she followed her brother to Princeton. Some of her teachers in school had urged her NOT to set her goals to high but she ignored them. She later said this was the first time she’d felt singled out for her race. She graduated from Princeton and went to Harvard Law.

She met Barack Obama when he was a summer associate at her law firm and they dated 2 years before marrying and they have two daughters.

Michelle has made several moving speeches in support of her husband and other Democratic candidates, as well her own projects: Veterans’ jobs, fitness for children including an organic garden and beehives on the white House lawn. There are some who have called on her to run for president in 2020.

As she is such an intelligent, articulate woman, I hope we have not seen the last of her.

Two portraits as First Lady:


The Obamas:


And finally from the 2016 Democratic Convention:

Cleopatra

Cleopatra was the last of the Ptolemy rulers in Egypt. She was a direct descendent of Ptolemy I, alexander the Great’s general who became pharaoh after the death of Alexander. The ruling family of Egypt was Macedonian and Greek was the spoken language.

She was born in 69 BC. Her parents were siblings and little is known of her mother. She co-ruled Egypt with her father and then her brother-husband. This was during the time of the rise of the Roman Empire. She and her brother(who was backed by Roman general, Gabiniani) struggled for the throne and he deposed her.

Julius Caesar came to Egypt after Ptolemy XIII killed Pompey, an enemy of Caesar, in front of his wife and children. This enraged Caesar and he seized Alexandria and set himself as arbiter between the two rulers.

The legend says that Cleopatra had herself rolled up in a rug and delivered to Caesar’s lodging, the only way she knew she could meet with him. He was, apparently quite taken with the young queen and took her as his mistress. She bore a son 9 months after they met and named him Caesarion. Her broether drowned in the Nile and her younger brother became Ptolemy XIV.

She journeyed with Caesar to Rome, where she caused quite a scandal and was there when he died on March 15, 44 BC. She returned to Egypt, killed her younger brother and named her son co-ruler.

IN the following civil wars in Rome, Cleopatra finally met and became lover of Mark Antony. She bore him several children. When Octavian attacked Egypt, Antony was defeated and committed suicide followed by Cleopatra, who supposed died from a asp bite.

Egypt became part of the Roman Empire.

She was very intelligent – speaking 12 languages and being knowledgeable about mathematics and astronomy. Though we think of her as a great beauty, her coins show a manly looking woman. Perhaps these were to make her look stronger as Pharaoh.

Many movies and books have covered the legendary life of Cleopatra, including the extravagantly expensive 1963 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.



This bust of her is from the 1st Century BC and is in the Altes Museum in Berlin.


A coin from Antioch from 36BC with Cleopatra and Antony.

Jane Goodall

At the age of 26, Jane Goodall was in Africa, staying with a friend, when she called up Louis Leakey just to have a chat about animals. Leakey, who was looking for someone to study chimpanzees, had other ideas and the rest, they say is history.

Jane became a secretary but Leakey sent her to Tanzania then to London to study primates. Jane returned to Africa with her mother and two years later(1962), she went Cambridge to study for her PhD. She had neither bachelor’s degree nor master’s degree but earned the PhD. in 1965.

She returned to Tanzania and studied chimps at the Gombe Reserve and began to write and report about them. She learned much in her close contact that was previously unknown.

Jane lived with the chimps, gave them names instead of numbers and did her research in a rather unconventional way. Some have criticized her work as unscientific and not objective enough but she is still one the undisputable experts on chimpanzee behavior. Her work among the chimps has priven to be one of the only ways to genuinely observe their native behavior.

She has written a large number of books for adult and chidlren on many subjects, mostly to do with nature and conservancy and many about her beloved chimps. She also has received many awards for her work with the chimps and with nature conservation. You can find a full list of both here .

The Jane Goodall Archive is at Duke University here in North Carolina. Her voluminous notes are digitized and kept there.

You can read jane’s 1017 message for peace at her website: http://news.janegoodall.org/2017/09/20/dr-jane-goodalls-message-for-peace/
It’s certainly worth a look!

Sacajawea

I have been fascinated by the Corps of Discovery for many years and by Sacajawea ever since I read the biographical novel Sacajawea by Anna Lee Waldo in the early 80s.

She was a woman of the Limhi Band of the Shoshone tribe that lived near the Salmon River in what is now Idaho. She was born in 1788 or so and was kidnapped by the Hidatsa of modern day North Dakota in around 1800. In 1803 or so, she became the wife of a French-Canadian fur trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau, over twenty years her senior. It is said that he either bought her or won her in a card game. She was about 15.

Sent West by Thomas Jefferson to explore the Louisiana Purchase, Merriweather Lewis and William Clark hired her husband and her in 1804 to help translate as they traveled through Indian Territory on their journey to the western sea. Though she did not speak English, she did speak Shoshone. Lewis and Clark knew they’d need horses from the Shoshone to make their way through the Rocky Mountains and they needed someone to talk to the Shoshone.

Sacajawea gave birth to a baby boy on the journey. She provided translations and even met her birth brother among the Shoshone. Her presence also gave the expedition a non-warlike appearance to the native people they met along the way.

Though some movies have portrayed her as lover to one the American explorers, there is no basis in fact for this assumption. She was friendly with Clark but there is no indication of anything more.

The oral story tells that she returned to the far west and lived in Wyoming to an old age. There are historical records that suggest that she died in 1812 of an unknown illness. Her children both became wards of William Clark in 1813 and at the time, both parents had to be dead for such to occur.

Sacajawea has been on coins and has been an icon of the women’s rights movement for many years.

But at the end of the day, she was a child, stolen and enslaved and dead before she was 25 years old. And yet we remember her.

The
Sacajawea Monument in Salmon, Idaho:


A coin with her and her son:


Anna Lee Waldo’s Book: