It was Labor Day weekend. Jo Ann and Tom, true loves who had found each other later in life, were having a romantic end of summer weekend with their some of their best friends at one of the favorite places, Block Island, a small, laid back out-of-the-way place just off the coast of Rhode…
Category: Women
The Year was 1873
Margaret was four and Emma was fourteen when the U.S. Congress passed Anthony Conmstock’s 1873 Comstock Law, the “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use.” It would put both Emma and Margaret in jail. Both women ended up in New York City. Emma came from Russia and then…
The Year was 1902
Selma Leeman: A Finnish-American Immigrant Girl’s Success Story From guest contributor Bruce Matson Selma Liimatainen started life in the small Village of Kivijärvi, Finland in 1889. As an 11-year-old, she arrived in America in 1902. Selma Sofia (she later changed her last name to Leeman) came to Quincy, Massachusetts to join her father and her…
The Year was 1986
What do you do when you can’t sleep? You read novels. And what do you do when you want to encourage authors to write more novels? You buy a 13th century castle in Scotland and set up a writers’ retreat – all expenses paid. Doreen Mary English did just this. Born in England in 1915…
The Year was 1917
This was the year the unthinkable happened – a woman ran for Congress. And won! The state was Montana and the woman was Republican Jeannette Rankin. Her achievement was monumental because she was a lobbyist for the suffrage movement. In fact, because she had pushed Montana to give women the vote in 1914, they could…