Gender History

Early New Paltz Women Subject of Sat Talk

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The Second Saturdays Lecture Series at Historic Huguenot Street in New Paltz continues tomorrow, Saturday, September 11th with a talk entitled, “Early Women of New Paltz.” The talk will focus on the often untold role of women in colonial-era New York. Included will be an exploration of the differences between Dutch law and custom and English law, and how women were impacted by these differences. Richard Heyl de Ortiz of Historic Huguenot Street, who will be the presenter, created this talk for the organization’s recent Gathering event – a “family reunion” of descendants of the early families of New Paltz.

“This talk was well-received at the Gathering. Our history is so often told through the eyes of men or through their lives and stories. The enthusiasm of those in the audience for this fresh, more complete perspective was exciting. For this reason, we decided to offer this talk as part of our Second Saturdays series.” says Heyl de Ortiz. As was done at the Gathering, the stories of three extraordinary Hudson Valley women from the eighteenth century will be the centerpiece of the talk. Their lives and experiences will be used to highlight the challenges faced and opportunities enjoyed by women during this period.

“Early Women of New Paltz” will be offered at 7pm on Saturday, September 11th in the DuBois Fort Visitor Center, which is located at 81 Huguenot Street in downtown New Paltz. Refreshments will be served. Admission is $8, or $6 for Friends of Huguenot Street. For more information, visit www.huguenotstreet.org or call (845) 255-1889.

Historic Huguenot Street (HHS), located on the banks of the Wallkill River, is the reason that New Paltz is the funky, free-spirited town it is today. Here a small group of French-speaking Huguenots settled in 1678. Today, just steps from downtown New Paltz, the site features seven stone houses dating to 1705, a burying ground and a reconstructed 1717 stone church – all in their original village setting. HHS offers six acres of landscaped green space and public programming to the local community and visitors from around the world.

Illustration: The house in Guilford, just south of New Paltz, from which the widow Elsie Schoonmaker Hasbrouck ran a large farm, raised ten children and speculated in real estate during the eighteenth century. Hasbrouck will be one of the subjects of Saturday’s talk. Image by Alfred Hasbrouck from the collection of Historic Huguenot Street.

Women and Divorce: 19th Century Outrage-21st Century Strategies

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The Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society, in collaboration with co-sponsors Adrienne Rothstein Grace, Certified Financial Planner, and the Western New York Women’s Bar Association, will present &#8220Women and Divorce: 19th Century Outrage/21st Century Strategies,&#8221 an evening of speakers on the topic of the changing rights and history of women and divorce in New York State on Thursday, August 26, at 7 p.m.
at the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society, 25 Nottingham Court (at Elmwood Ave.).

Keynote speaker Dr. Ilyon Woo is the author of The Great Divorce: A Nineteenth-Century Mother’s Extraordinary Fight against Her Husband, the Shakers, and Her Times (Atlantic Monthly Press). The book tells the story of Eunice Hawley Chapman, whose husband left her, taking their children, and joined the Shakers, a reclusive religious sect. At the time, a married woman in her circumstances had few rights and no legal identity. Chapman sought unprecedented intervention, and fought hard for the return of her children, rallying even the State legislature. Dr. Woo will speak on the topics addressed in her book. She will also sign copies of the book, which is available in the Museum’s gift shop

Attorney Carol A. Condon will address present-day New York State divorce law. New York is the last state in America to consider putting no-fault divorce laws on its books. Condon is a member of the Family Law Committee of the Bar Association of Erie County, and of the New York State Bar Association. She is a frequent speaker and author on topics related to divorce and family law. Condon is the past president of the Western New York Chapter of the Women’s Bar Association of the State of New York.

Co-sponsor Adrienne Rothstein Grace, Certified Financial Planner and Certified Divorce Financial Analyst, will present information specifically on the topic of divorce financial planning. Rothstein Grace has a widely varied background in financial services. She is currently with Mass Mutual/The Buffalo Agency. In concert with attorneys and mediators, Rothstein Grace helps clients in divorce gain clear ideas of their financial position, outline different settlement scenarios, and forecast long term effects.

The event is $7.00- Free to Historical Society and Western New York Women’s Bar Association members. For more information log on to www.buffalohistory.org, e-mail [email protected], or call 873-9644 x319.

Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition

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During Prohibition my grandfather’s brother Denis Warren, a veteran of some of the bloodiest American battles of World War One, was left for dead on the side of Route 9N south of Port Henry on Lake Champlain. He was in the second of two cars of friends returning from Montreal with a small supply of beer. Going through Port Henry local customs agents gave chase and the car he was in hit a rock cut and he was badly injured in the accident. Figuring his was dead, or nearly so, and worried he would go to prison, one of Denis’s best friends rolled him under the guardrail, climbed into the other car, and sped off.

Joe Kennedy, never really enthusiastic about World War One, spent the war as an assistant general-manager of Bethlehem Steel and used the opportunity to buddy up to Franklin D. Roosevelt who was then Assistant Secretary of the Navy. During Prohibition Kennedy went to England and with the help of FDR’s eldest son James Roosevelt secured the exclusive American rights for Gordon’s Dry Gin and Dewar’s Scotch. Contrary to rumors, Kennedy wasn’t a bootlegger, he imported his British booze legally under a permit to distribute medical alcohol. Kennedy was of course, the father of John F. Kennedy.

The story of these two Irish-Americans serves as a kind of microcosm of the story of Prohibition, when all of America seemed upside down. &#8220In almost every respect imaginable, Prohibition was a failure,&#8221 Daniel Okrent writes in Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. &#8220It deprived the government of revenue, stripped the gears of the political system, and imposed profound limitations on individual rights. It fostered a culture of bribery, blackmail, and official corruption. It also maimed and murdered, its excesses apparent in deaths by poison, by the brutality of ill-trained, improperly supervised enforcement officers, and by unfortunate proximity to mob gun battles.&#8221

The medical exemption to Prohibition, along with the sacramental wine exemption, and the fruit exemption for homemade wine and cider, meant that Prohibition was fairly doomed from the start according to Okrent. In fact it’s a wonder that Prohibition even got started. In the late nineteenth century drinking was at an all time high, a central part of American life. But immigration was also at an all time high, along with the Protestant Christian reformers, xenophobia, and racism. An unlikely alliance emerged to battle &#8220Demon Rum&#8221 that included racists (including the Klan), progressives, suffragists, and populists.

Okrent lays out the story of this coalition in a readable way, avoiding much of the political minutiae, while still illuminating the personalities &#8211 people like Mother Thompson, Frances Willard, axe-wielding Carry Nation, bible-thumping Billy Sunday, William Jennings Bryan (who helped bring the Democratic party on board), Wayne Wheeler (the long-forgotten man considered the father of Prohibition), and Mabel Willebrandt (the Assistant US Attorney General despised by the nation’s drinkers).

The usual suspects are all here: the rise of organized crime from scattered minor street gangs, the rum runners contributions to boat design, the rise of Sam Bronfman’s Seagrams empire. The most interesting parts of the book however, detail how leading suffragists sought the vote after being denied leadership positions in the temperance movement and then used that vote to secure first the income tax (considered crucial to weaning the government off the alcohol excise tax teet) and finally Prohibition. Okrent also clearly presents the brewers’ failure to band together with the distillers, and their lack of action against the Prohibitionist until it was too late. Mostly German-Americans, World War One sealed their fates.

Also illuminating is Okrent’s telling of how the Eighteenth Amendment, which along with the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery is the only constitutional amendment to deal with personal property and the only one to have been repealed, came to be reversed. Last Call chalks it up to a few primary factors. The ease of access to booze which was no longer regulated, and so could be found everywhere, not just at bars (the old joke went &#8220Remember before Prohibition? When you couldn’t get a drink on Sunday?&#8221). The presidential campaign of solidly wet New York Governor Al Smith (defeated by mostly dry anti-Catholics) that changed the political mood of the country’s immigrants [video]. The Great Depression, and the need for the billions in excise tax (which helped fund the New Deal) that gave Repeal a push. But the biggest factor was perhaps the right-wing wealthy anti-tax (and future anti-Roosevelt) Pierre S. DuPont who believed so profoundly that Repeal would mean an elimination of the income tax that he bankrolled the fight himself. Fundamentally though, it was the Democratic title-wave that swept FDR into office [music] that changed the make-up of the Congress that allowed the crucial Repeal vote.

Okrent avoids the obvious comparisons to today’s Drug War, but even the causal reader, can’t miss them. The seemingly limitless supply, the institutionalized hypocrisy of legal tobacco and alcohol while pot smokers go to overcrowded prisons. The overzealous and expensive enforcement on the one hand (particularly in the inner cities), alongside marijuana buyers clubs and lax enforcement that amounts to a defacto local option.

It took about 10 years to understand that Prohibition only increased lawlessness, corruption, greed, and violence. Last Call leaves the astute reader wondering how long it will take us to come to the same conclusion about the War on Drugs.

Note: Books noticed on this site have been provided by the publishers. Purchases made through this Amazon link help support this site.

Mothers: Free Admission to Fenimore, Farmers’ Museum Sunday

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In recognition of Mother’s Day, all mothers and grandmothers will receive free admission to the Fenimore Art Museum and The Farmers’ Museum on Sunday, May 9.

Visitors can start the day at the Fenimore Art Museum by taking in one of the new exhibitions, such as Empire Waists, Bustles and Lace: A Century of New York Fashion &#8211 an exciting exhibition of the Museum’s collection of historic dresses. The exhibition includes the oldest known example of a dress with a label, stunning examples of Empire, Romantic and Civil War era dresses and turn-of-the-20th century items. Afterwards, visitors can enjoy lunch on the terrace overlooking Otsego Lake and then stroll across to The Farmers’ Museum to visit the baby lambs and ride on The Empire State Carousel.

About the Fenimore Art Museum

The Fenimore Art Museum, located on the shores of Otsego Lake &#8212- James Fenimore Cooper’s “Glimmerglass Lake” &#8212- in historic Cooperstown, New York, features a wide-ranging collection of American art including: folk art- important American 18th- and 19th-century landscape, genre, and portrait paintings- an extensive collection of domestic artifacts- more than 125,000 historical photographs representing the technical developments made in photography and providing extensive visual documentation of the region’s unique history- and the renowned Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art comprising more than 800 art objects representative of a broad geographic range of North American Indian cultures, from the Northwest Coast, Eastern Woodlands, Plains, Southwest, Great Lakes, and Prairie regions. Founded in 1945, the Fenimore Art Museum is NYSHA’s showcase museum.

About The Farmers’ Museum

As one of the oldest rural life museums in the country, The Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York, provides visitors with a unique opportunity to experience 19th-century rural and village life first-hand through authentic demonstrations and interpretative exhibits. The museum, founded in 1943, comprises a Colonial Revival stone barn listed on the National Register for Historic Places, a recreated historic village circa 1845, a late- nineteenth-century Country Fair featuring The Empire State Carousel, and a working farmstead. Through its 19th-century village and farm, the museum preserves important examples of upstate New York architecture, early agricultural tools and equipment, and heritage livestock. The Farmers’ Museum’s outstanding collection of more than 23,000 items encompasses significant historic objects ranging from butter molds to carriages, and hand planes to plows. The museum also presents a broad range of interactive educational programs for school groups, families, and adults that explore and preserve the rich agricultural history of the region.

Lecture: Sex and the City: The Early Years

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In 1633, Griet Reyniers invented the role of the Manhattan woman on the prowl, personifying the bawdy world the Dutch created when they settled in the Hudson Valley and surrounding region. On May 14th, Bill Greer explores this world in his talk “Sex and the City: The Early Years” as part of the New York State Library’s noontime programs.

Using art, literature and folklore, Bill will discuss the Dutch culture of the era and the libertine characters like Griet who transplanted it to the Hudson Valley. The wanton ways of these early settlers helped fuel a conflict between the people and their rulers, a conflict many historians argue laid the foundation for the freedom-loving society that America became.

Bill is the author of The Mevrouw Who Saved Manhattan, a novel of New Amsterdam. De Halve Maen, Journal of the Holland Society, describes the book as a “romp through the history of New Netherland that would surely have Petrus Stuyvesant complaining about the riot transpiring between its pages.” He is a trustee and the Treasurer of the New Netherland Institute, a nonprofit organization supporting research and education in Dutch-American history. The Institute currently is working with the New York State Office of Cultural Education to establish the New Netherland Research Center in Albany.

The talk will be in the Huxley Theater on the first floor of the Cultural Education Center, home of the New York State Library, Museum and Archives, at 310 Madison Avenue, Empire State Plaza, Albany, NY. It will run from 12:15 to 1:15 on Friday, May 14th. The program is free and attendees are invited to bring lunch.

Adirondack History Center Annouces 2010 Schedule

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The Adirondack History Center Museum, located in the old school building at the corner of Route 9N and Hand Avenue in Elizabethtown, Essex County, has announced it’s 2010 Season of events and exhibits.

In addition to the season’s events, the museum displays artifacts from over two centuries of life in Essex County and the central Adirondacks. The diverse collection includes 18th century artifacts, an 1887 Concord stagecoach, an iron bobsled from the 1932 Olympic Games, a 58 foot Fire Observation Tower to climb, a colonial garden patterned after the gardens of Hampton Court, England and Colonial Williamsburg, and more.

The Museum is open 10am &#8211 5pm, 7 days a week from late May through mid-October. The Brewster Library is open all year by appointment only. Admission: Adults $5, Seniors $4, Students $2. Ages 6 and under are free.

The 2010 Schedule includes:

Exhibits

A Sign of the Times May 29- October 31

Curators have mined the museum’s collection, scoured the region, and called upon the citizens of Essex County to gather SIGNS! The exhibit focuses on SIGNS &#8211 all things that convey ideas, information, commands, designations or directions. Displayed wall to wall and ceiling to floor this exhibit prompts the viewer to discuss and ponder facts, purposes, qualities, and gestures conveyed by signs.

Swan Furniture June 19 – October 31

This exhibit highlights the Swans and their craftsmanship as important symbols of Westport and Wadhams cultural heritage. The furniture places the Swans into historical context as representatives of our human landscape. A unique blend of pieces provides visitors an opportunity to reflect on the furniture as art objects and artifacts in a museum setting.

ACNA Cover Art Show Sept. 20 – October 31

The 23rd year of the Arts Council for the Northern Adirondacks (ACNA) Cover Art Show featuring local artists. Thirty donated artworks for a Silent Auction are included in the exhibition. The winning Cover Art show piece is to be raffled at &#8220Field, Forest and Stream Day&#8221 on September 25th, 2010.

Events

Can History be Reconciled? A Conversation on Compassion & Courage

July 9, 4pm

Whether we’re reading the esoteric histories of others or dealing with our own, some issues are difficult to grasp and process. Don Papson, President of the North Country Underground Railroad Historical Association, will engage the audience in a discussion on compassion and courage in light of oppression, slavery and liberation.

Lecture: Captain Brown’s Birthday Party by Amy Godine

July 11, 4 pm

From 1922 into the 1960s, black pilgrims from northern cities joined ranks with white Adirondackers to honor the May 9 birthday of the militant abolitionist John Brown with speeches, concerts, sermons and prayers, earning Lake Placid a reputation as an oasis of interracial tranquility in the age of Jim Crow. How was each group able to find common cause in John Brown? How did each group use the other to promote its own agenda? And whose version of John Brown prevails at his home and gravesite in North Elba, a state-managed historic site since 1897? Join us to hear Historian Amy Godine answer these questions and examine the struggle it both enabled and concealed over John Brown’s public image and the meaning of freedom itself.

Fundraiser: Elizabethtown Historic Slide Show for the Town Hall Stained Glass Window Project

July 18, 4 pm

Back with added photographs and materials, local historian, Margaret Bartley, is offering the Elizabethtown Historic Slide Show for a second year as part of the Elizabethtown Day celebration. Proceeds from this event benefit the restoration of the Elizabethtown Town Hall stained glass windows, a project of Historic Pleasant Valley and the Essex County Historical Society. Any and all donations are welcome.

Museum Benefit: Come as you ART

July 24, 8pm

An evening of dance, delicacies, and expressive dress. Design and create your own clothing. Let your artistic side or a work of art inspire your attire. Music provided by the Chrome Cowboys.

Performance: Bits & Pieces

About a Bridge

Fridays: July 30, Aug 6 & 13, 11am / Sunday August 1, 4pm

This theatrical elegy weaves together voices from the life of the Champlain Bridge.

Lecture: Asanath Nicholson: Adirondack Teacher and World Humanitarian by Maureen Murphy

August 8, 4 pm

Maureen Murphy, Professor of Curriculum and Teaching in the School of Education in Health and Human Services at Hofstra University conveys the history of Asenath Hatch Nicholson, an early 19th century woman, schoolteacher, health reformer, traveler, writer, evangelist, social worker and peace activist. Asenath Hatch Nicholson (1792-1855), born in Chelsea, Vermont, made her way across Lake Champlain to Elizabethtown, New York. At age 21, she started a boarding school on Water Street for students from the town and neighboring farms. While in Elizabethtown, she met her husband Norman Nicholson, a local widower with a young family. The couple moved to New York City where Nicholson became a disciple of the health reformer Sylvester Graham. Nicholson opened a Grahamite boarding house and worked among the poor. After she was widowed, she set out from New York on a fifteen-month visit to Ireland to “investigate the condition of the Irish poor,” reading the Bible to country people, and sharing their hospitality, leaving us with a glimpse of Ireland on the eve of the Great Irish Famine in her book Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger (1847).

Festival: Field, Forest & Stream Sept 25, 10-3:30

A harvest festival sponsored by the Arts Council for the Northern Adirondacks and the Elizabethtown-Lewis Chamber of Commerce featuring demonstrations and exhibits by regional craftspeople, antique dealers, storytellers and musical performances.

Free Access to Women and Social Movements Database

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To celebrate Women’s History Month, the database Women and Social Movements in the United States 1600-2000, Scholar’s Edition, will be freely accessible for the month of March so that anyone with an interest can explore the site’s collection of primary materials and teaching tools. No passwords or fees are required.

WASM Scholar’s edition includes 91 document projects and archives, almost 40,000 pages of full-text sources, a separate database of 90,000 pages of publications of federal, state, and local commissions on the status of women, and the exclusive online edition of the research classic, Notable American Women.

Underground Railroad Association Presents Herstory

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In celebration of Women’s History Month (March), the North Country Underground Railroad Historical Association will host a celebration of the role of women in humanity’s great moments, from Miriam at the Red Sea to Catherine Keese who hid fugitives from slavery in Peru, New York, during the Underground Railroad era. The event will be held March 19, 2010 at 7 pm, at the Peru Community Church, 13 Elm Street, in Clinton County.

The evening will include short presentations on women prominent in the success of the underground railroad and a photo journal of the Keese-Smith barn project narrated by the local restoration, history and archeological specialists who are donating their time and skills to the stabilization.

Music and song will be provided by Sounds of the Northway, a trio of local women: Ann Ruzow Holland, Cathie Davenport and Jennifer Van Benschoten who sing and play guitar, piano, flute and violin.

The cost will be $10 for adults, $8 for children and seniors. Proceeds will provide the materials necessary for the stabilization of Peru’s most recognized Underground Railroad hiding place, the Stephen Keese-Smith barn, located at the former Stafford property on Union Road. All labor is being donated for this project.

Illustration: Catherine Keese, Peru NY Abolitionist.

NYS Museum: Womens History Exhibit During March

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In celebration of Women’s History Month, the New York State Museum will open a small exhibition March 1 featuring artifacts and images from the woman’s suffrage movement of the early 20th century. &#8220Women Who Rocked the Vote&#8221 will be open through March in the Museum’s front lobby window.

The exhibition chronicles the history of the suffrage movement, which was officially launched when Elizabeth Cady Stanton added the demand for equal suffrage to the Declaration of Sentiments at the first woman’s rights convention in Seneca Falls that she helped organize. Modeled on the Declaration of Independence, the declaration condemned male tyranny. It also claimed for women “all the rights and privileges” of citizenship. News of the convention sparked controversy and helped ignite a national movement.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a large wooden wagon that was once covered in suffrage banners and hand-painted signs as suffrage activists used the wagon as both a prop and a speaker’s platform. There also are historic images and a large painted banner carried in a massive suffrage parade up Fifth Avenue in New York City. The parade came just 10 days before the November 1917 election which gave women the right to vote in New York State. Two years later the state ratified the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution that prohibited sex-based restrictions on the right to vote.

The New York State Museum is a program of the New York State Education Department’s Office of Cultural Education. Founded in 1836, the museum has the longest continuously operating state natural history research and collection survey in the U.S. Located on Madison Avenue in Albany, the Museum is open daily from 9:30 p.m. to 5 p.m. except on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Further information can be obtained by calling (518) 474-5877 or visiting the museum website at www.nysm.nysed.gov.

Photo: Suffrage Parade, NYC 1912

Univ of Rochester to Hold Race and Gender Conference

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The University of Rochester has announced a two-day conference on April 16 and 17, 2010 to celebrate the launching of a new book series by the University of Rochester Press, &#8220Gender and Race in American History.&#8221 The Conference is free and open to the public. The conference organizers include Carol Faulkner (of Syracuse University), Alison M. Parker (of The College at Brockport, SUNY), and Victoria Wolcott (of the University of Rochester).

Featured Speakers will include:

Deborah Gray White (Rutgers University), &#8220What Women Want: The Racial Paradoxes of Post-Modernity.&#8221

Michelle Mitchell (New York University), title TBA

Meredith Clark-Wiltz, Ph.D. Candidate, History Department, Ohio State University, &#8220Persecuting Black Men, Gendering Jury Service: The Interplay between Race and Gender in the NAACP Jury Service Cases of the 1930s.&#8221

Kendra Taira Field, Assistant Professor, U.C. Riverside, &#8220&#8216-You mean Grandma Brown. Grandpa Brown didn’t have no land.’ Race, Gender, and An Intruder of Color in Indian Territory.&#8221

Rashauna Johnson, Ph.D. Candidate, History Department, NYU, &#8220&#8216-Laissez les bon temps rouler!’ and Other Concealments: Households, Taverns, and Irregular Intimacies in Antebellum New Orleans.&#8221

Michelle Kuhl, Assistant Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, &#8220Countable Bodies, Uncountable Crimes: Sexual Assault and the Anti-Lynching Movement.&#8221

Vivian May, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Syracuse University, &#8220Historicizing intersectionality as Theory and Method: Returning to the Work of Anna Julia Cooper.&#8221

Helene Quanquin, Associate Professor, University of Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle, &#8220&#8216-There are Two Great Oceans’: The Slavery Metaphor in the Antebellum Women’s Rights Movement as &#8216-redescription’ of Race and Gender.&#8221

For more information visit:
http://www.rochester.edu/College/humanities/projects/index.php?history&events