Caroline Bartlett Crane had been a school teacher, a principal, a journalist, a city editor (at the time, the only woman in America to hold such a position) and a homesteader before coming to Michigan in 1889 to assume the pastorship of the First Unitarian Church in Kalamazoo. In Michigan, she continued her wide-ranging activities as a speaker, in particular with the Women’s Suffrage Movement, where she worked closely with both Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw. As an ordained minister, one of the first in Michigan, she also worked to organize kindergartens, and manual training schools. She was minister of the People’s Church of Kalamazoo (1894) and employed the offices of the church to further many of her social concerns. For example, she offered African Americans in the community a meeting place for their literary club. She also advocated prison reform, women’s property rights and was a strong opponent of capital punishment.

One of Caroline Bartlett Crane’s major contributions was as a civic sanitarian. She visited, inspected, and reported on sewage disposal, garbage collection, water systems, and related matters in 62 locations in 14 states over the years, and her bill to regulate sanitary conditions in meat processing plants and dairies, adopted by the Michigan Legislature in 1903, was considered a model of its kind. She founded the Women’s Civic Improvement League, served as consultant to the federal government’s Packing House Commission, worked to devise pure food laws, and chaired the Michigan Women’s Committee of the U.S. Council on National Defense during the first World War.

As chairperson of the local Better Homes of America Committee, Bartlett Crane also designed and directed the building of a model five-room house which won a national contest in 1924 over the entries of more than a thousand communities. She described the house in a book called Everyman’s House which was published in 1925. At the time of her death in 1935, Bartlett Crane was known as “America’s Housekeeper.” 

Source: The Michigan Womens Historical Center and Hall of Fame.  

Aviator Hazel Ying Lee was the first Chinese American woman to fly for the US military, and one of two Chinese American women to serve in the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during WWII.

She was born in Portland, Oregon, became a licensed pilot in 1932. After becoming a member of the WASP, she flew fighter aircraft to their destinations as they poured out of American factories.  Hazel wrote her sister: "Flying Pursuit [fighter aircraft] keeps me very busy; we are on a 7 day work week."

On Thanksgiving Day 1944, while piloting a P-63 Fighter, Hazel Ying Lee was killed in a mid-air collision during a snowstorm. She was 32 years old.   She was one of 38 WASPs who died in the service of their country

Please visit the National Womens History Museum for more information on the Women Airforce Service Pilots.  

Mildred Ryder, better known as Peace Pilgrim, was born today in 1908. Beginning in 1953, she spent 28 years walking across the United States with few possessions and no money to her name. The back of her tunic read: “25,000 miles on foot for peace.” (Photo: NPR)

Ms. Ryder was an American non-denominational spiritual teacher,mystic, pacifist and activist.  In 1952, she became the first woman to walk the entire length of the Appalachian Trail in one season. 

On July 7, 1981, while being driven from the Chicago area to a speaking engagement near Knox, Indiana, Peace Pilgrim was killed in an automobile accident. At the time of her death, she was crossing the United States for the seventh time. After her death, her body was cremated, and her ashes were interred in a family plot near Egg Harbor City, New Jersey.

Her Legacy 

Friends of Peace Pilgrim is an all-volunteer non-profit organization dedicated to making information about the life and message of Peace Pilgrim available freely to all who ask. Since 1983 they have published and distributed over 400,000 copies of the book, Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, and over one-and-a-half-million copies of the booklet, Steps Toward Inner Peace. Books and booklets have been sent to over 100 countries. The book has been translated into twelve languages and the booklet into over 20 languages.

Peace Pilgrim Park in Egg Harbor City, New Jersey
In 2005 Peace Pilgrim Park was created in her hometown of Egg Harbor City, New Jersey on part of the site of the former Neutral Water Health Resort Sanitarium. Since 2007 an annual Peace Pilgrim Celebration has been observed in the park and at sites throughout Egg Harbor City on September 20–22th. 

*Information source: Wikipedia

Nadine Gordimer, a Nobel Prize-winning author famed for her portrayals of South Africa under apartheid, died Sunday, July 13th. She was 90.

Gordimer was considered a modern literary genius, an important chronicler of the injustices of racial segregation along with other white writers such as Athol Fugard and J.M. Coetzee.  She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. 

According to NPR's article, Ms. Gordimer was one of the first people activist Nelson Mandela wanted to see upon his release from prison in 1990. A copy of her 1979 novel Burger's Daughter, which explored the family life of the children of revolutionaries, had been smuggled into his hands while he was imprisoned.

"Human beings must live in the world of ideas," Gordimer said in an interview with The Paris Review 35 years ago. "This dimension in the human psyche is very important."

Gordimer was born in 1923 in South Africa of immigrant Jewish parents, her mother English and her father a Lithuanian who had fled the pogroms of his home country. She began writing early and published her first short story when she was 15.

On the occasion of what would have been her 85th birthday had her bright light not been snuffed out by hatred, we remember Anne Frank, who was born on June 12, 1929.   Her story of two years in hiding with her family in an Amsterdam attic during the Nazi occupation has been translated into 67 languages and read by thirty million people. The family was subsequently discovered and Anne and her sister perished in the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp. 

We pay homage to this courageous and eloquent young woman whose short life has inspired so many by sharing some of her words:

More information about Anne Frank and the Anne Frank House, where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis for two years before they were discovered and transferred to concentration camps. 

From NPR's Story:   

Poet, performer and political activist Maya Angelou has died after a long illness at her home in Winston Salem, N.C. She was 86. Born in St. Louis in 1928, Angelou grew up in a segregated society which she worked to change during the civil rights era. Angelou, who refused to speak for much of her childhood, revealed the scars of her past in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first of a series of memoirs.

Growing up in St. Louis, Mo., and Stamps, Ark., she was Marguerite Johnson. It was her brother who first called her Maya and the name stuck. Later she added the Angelou, a version of her first husband's name.

Angelou left a troubled childhood and the segregated world of Arkansas behind and began a career as a dancer and singer. She toured Europe in the1950s with a production of Porgy and Bess, studied dance with Martha Graham and performed with Alvin Ailey on television. In 1957 she recorded an album called "Calypso Lady."

"I was known as Miss Calypso, and when I'd forget the lyric, I would tell the audience, 'I seem to have forgotten the lyric.' Now I will dance. And I would move around a bit," she recalled with a laugh during a 2008 interview with NPR.

"She really believed that life was a banquet," says Patrik Henry Bass, an editor at Essence Magazine. When he read Angelou's memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, he saw parallels in his own life in a small town in North Carolina. He says everyone in the African American community looked up to her; she was a celebrity but she was one of them. He remembers seeing her on television and hearing her speak.

"When we think of her, we often think about her books, of course, and her poems," he says. "But in the African American community certainly, we heard so much of her work recited, so I think about her voice. You would hear that voice, and that voice would capture a humanity, and that voice would calm you in so many ways through some of the most significant challenges."

Film director John Singleton grew up in a very different part of the country. But he remembers the effect Angelou's poem "Still I Rise" had on him as a kid. It begins:

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Joanne Braxton, a professor at the College of William and Mary, says Angelou's willingness to reveal the sexual abuse she suffered as a child in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was unprecedented at the time. The critical acclaim and popularity of the book opened doors for both African American and female writers.

"Maya Angelou brought about a paradigm shift in American literature and culture," Braxton says. "So that the works, the gifts, the talents of women writers, including women writers of color, could be brought to the foreground and appreciated. She created an audience by her stunning example."

For Braxton, the world will never be quite the same without Angelou.

"I love her," she says. "She's beloved by many, including many, many people who have never met her in person, and who will never meet her in person — but she has extended herself that way, so that her touch extends beyond her physical embrace. That is truly a gift, and we are truly blessed to have known her through her presence and her work."

Angelou once said she believed that "life loves the liver of it" and she did live it, to the fullest.

1.  Disguised as men, women fought in nearly every major Civil          War battle.
2.  Women’s military jobs weren’t for sissies.
3.  Even civilian women died for war efforts.
4.  Hundreds of civilian women piloted military aircraft during              WWII.
5.  Women’s military accomplishments kept proving naysayers          wrong.

Margaret (Zane) Fleming and 12 other Army nurses with the 1st MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) landed on the beach at Inchon, Korea, on Sept. 15, 1950. Because mobile and evacuation hospitals followed the troops and extremely fluid battle lines, Army nurses often found themselves closer to the front than anticipated. As the 1st MASH moved from Inchon to Pusan with the 7th Infantry Division, they came under attack in the early morning of Oct. 9, 1950. During the battle, the nurses retreated to a roadside ditch. "The whole sky was lit up by gunfire and burning vehicles," reported Chief Nurse MAJ Eunice Coleman. "About sun up we got out of the ditch and started treating the wounded. All that day we worked on the roadside operating and treating for shock. We lost eight men and a number of supply vehicles." After the ambush, the nurses began calling themselves "The Lucky Thirteen."

Jeanne (Hamby) Gang, a Piedmont, CA, native wanted to join the Navy Women’s Reserve (WAVES) during World War II, but was told that she was "too near-sighted." Instead, she joined the American Red Cross but was considered "too young" for overseas assignment, so she served as a recreational and social staff aide in Army and Navy hospitals in her home state. When the Korean War broke out, she volunteered for the Army Special Services and was sent to Germany for two years, where her first assignment was at the 7th Army Headquarters’ Pyramid Service Club. Gang then helped open the service club at Wharton Barracks in Heilbronn.

Ladda Tammy Duckworth was born on March 12, 1968 in Bangkok, Thailand, the daughter of a US Marine, Frank, and his wife Lamai, a Thai native.  She was educated at George Washington University, University of Hawaii and Northern Illinois University. 

An Iraq War veteran, Tammy Duckworth served as a US Army helicopter pilot and suffered severe combat wounds, losing both of her legs and damaging her right arm. She was the first female double amputee from the war.  Having received a medical waiver, she continues to serve as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Illinois Army National Guard along with her husband, Major Bryan W. Bowlsbey, a signal officer and fellow Iraq War veteran.  Ms. Duckworth helped establish the "Intrepid Foundation" and is involved in its fundraising to build a rehabilitation center for other injured veterans.  Ms. Duckworth called for improvements in veterans health care and mandatory funding of veterans' health care, rather than discretionary funding that could change with political winds; she also wants improvements in transition assistance for those returning to civilian life, particularly for those with disabilities. Duckworth also wanted the Department of Veterans Affairs to hire more veterans as doctors and nurses because they understand what combat veterans face, and she wants the VA to prepare for the possibility of severe respiratory problems in the future for Iraq war veterans.  

Tammy Duckworth has served as the US Representative for Illinois's 8th congressional district since 2013.