Deborah Stephens was the first female firefighter in the Saginaw Valley region. Stephens faced a lot of challenges being the first female fire fighter. She first joined the Saginaw Fire Department because it looked like a good and interesting job. Having taken a degree from Mississippi State University, she wasn't able to find a full-time teaching job in the area and had worked in various fields. When she joined the department, a Saginaw News reporter quoted her as saying that all she wanted to do was fight fires, not carry a torch for equal rights." (Saginaw News, 2/20/1990) Asked about that statement in 2014, Stephens said that she was happy to have represented females well. That she always tried to set a good standard through continuous improvement and keeping up a good image.
Although an educated and hard-working professional, it was difficult for Stephens to fit into the boys club. As she stated in a 2014 interview, "It doesn't matter how you try to fit in, there is always someone who thinks you should be at home baking cookies." Resentment of her hiring as a result of affirmative action marked the beginning of her career. Physically and mentally, Stephens knew she could do the job, but had to counter those who thought that women weren't strong enough or wouldn't be able to handle the horrors of the job. She stated that she wasn't afraid to do the job, but she was appropriately "cautious"—a good trait in a person who is running into a burning building where other people's lives are at stake. Even though she had all the proper training, she know that she had to "try harder" than a man would. At the time that she was hired, she told a Saginaw News reporter, "I'm going to have to prove myself every day. But whatever I do, I try to do my best." (Saginaw News, 2/20/1990) Doing her best was exactly what Stephens did and earned her a life-long career on the fire department and promotion in 2005 to the officer position of lieutenant. After twenty-two years on the department, she retired. The door that she opened continues to help women. When Ona Hoard became the first female captain in the area, she credited Stephens' mentorship. Women like Deborah Stephens remind us how important it is to have role models and that more women need to continue to integrate the firefighting profession so that young girls have a picture of who they want to emulate and someone to help show them the ropes.
De Ruiz, Dana Catherine and Richard Larios. La Causa: The Migrant Farmworkers' Story. (Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 1992).
Dunne, John Gregory. Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike. (Farrar, 1976).
Dolores Huerta: Civil Rights Icon
National Parks Service
Smithsonian Website
Video on Huerta
Also see, National Women's History Museum: http://www.nwhm.org/education-resources/biography/biographies/dolores-fernandez-huerta/
Dolores Huerta Foundation: http://doloreshuerta.org/dolores-huerta/
Beasley, Maurine H. Eleanor Roosevelt: Transformative First Lady (University Press of Kansas,2010).
Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884–1933. (Viking, 1992).
Goodwin, Doris Kearns. No Ordinary Time. (Simon & Schuster, 1994).
Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project: http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/
Speeches: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/eleanorrooseveltdeclarationhumanrights.htm
Autobiography: https://archive.org/details/thisismyhistory008124mbp
Biographical Information: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_36.html
Letters, 1850-1884: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4079307/
Elizabeth Blackwell Collection on New York Heritage Digital Archive: http://nyheritage.nnyln.net/cdm/search/collection/sunyup01/searchterm/elizabeth%20blackwell/field/relatig/mode/exact/conn/and/order/title/ad/asc
Writings: http://biodiversitylibrary.org/creator/706#/titles
Kroeger, Brooke. Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist. (New York: Times Books, 1994).
Nellie Bly--a Resource Website: http://www.nellieblyonline.com/
National Women's History Museum: http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/youngandbrave/bly.html
Biography.com website on Nellie Bly: http://www.biography.com/people/nellie-bly-9216680#synopsis
Emma Goldman: A Documentary History Of The American Years, Volume 1 – Made for America, 1890–1901. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Emma Goldman: A Documentary History Of The American Years, Volume 2 – Making Speech Free, 1902–1909. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
Emma Goldman: A Documentary History of the American Years, Volume 3 – Light and Shadows, 1910–1916. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Goldman authored many works. Following are some digital archives that hold her work.
Emma Goldman Papers: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman/
Jewish Women's Archive: http://jwa.org/womenofvalor/goldman
Gutenberg Press: http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/g#a840
The Anarchist Library: http://theanarchistlibrary.org/authors/emma-goldman
Asch, Chris Myers. The Senator and the Sharecropper: the Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer. (The New Press, 2008).
Nash, Jere and Andy Taggart. Mississippi Politics: the Struggle for Power, 1976-2008.(University of Mississippi Press, 2007).
Keller, Emily. Frances Perkins: First Woman Cabinet Member. (Morgan Reynolds Publishing, 2006).
Pasachoff, Naomi. Frances Perkins: Champion of the New Deal. (Oxford University Press, 1999).
Perkins, Frances. The Roosevelt I Knew. (Penguin Group, 1946).
Frances Perkins Center: http://francesperkinscenter.org/
Lecture by Frances Perkins: http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/trianglefire/primary/lectures/FrancesPerkinsLecture.html?CFID=32089813&CFTOKEN=87545756&jsessionid=f0303f8dc2238566af60247d1a173f85b692
Columbia University Oral History on Frances Perkins: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/digital/collections/nny/perkinsf/index.html
Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo y Calderon (known throughout her life as Frida Kahlo) was raised in a suburb of Mexico City to a mestiza mother and a German father. In 1922, Frida entered the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (National Preparatory School) in Mexico City; the school served as a preparatory college for university and rated as the best educational institute in Mexico. While there Kahlo encountered a group called the “Cachuchas” (named after the peaked caps the members wore as a badge). In the group, they studied and supported the socialist-nationalist ideas of the Minister of Public Education, Jose Vasconcelos. On September 17, 1925, Kahlo’s life was altered--while on her way home from school she was involved in a bus accident when the vehicle collided with a tram. The accident killed several people and left Kahlo severely injured. A metal handrail had impaled her pelvis. It was unknown if Frida would live, doctors confined her to bed for four months. She persevered and a year later doctors discovered several displaced vertebrae, leading to Kahlo wearing a plaster corset for nine months and multiple surgeries throughout her life. While immobile in bed, Kahlo poured her emotions and boredom into art, which would be her rise toward fame and rebirth.[1]
Living in a patriarchal society, Kahlo broke social norms and the popular Mexican muralist muralists movement with her small and medium-sized paintings. She often drew herself because she was the subject she knew best. In her portraits, Kahlo would cast herself against reflections that represented not only her loneliness but also the female body and female sexuality. In the 1950s, Diego Rivera (a famous Mexican muralist and husband of Kahlo) acknowledged her as “the first woman in the history of art to treat, with absolute and uncompromising honest…impassive cruelty, those general and specific themes which exclusively affected women”. Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits helped her to shape the idea of her own person and discovery of her own identity through her art[2]. Kahlo also went back to her revolutionary roots by joining the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) in 1927.
Through the Communist Party she met Diego Rivera—a celebrated Mexican artist. They married in 1929. They spent the 30s traveling the States and Mexico. Kahlo suffered multiple miscarriages and grew very depressed. In 1933, she went back home to Mexico. She wanted to be submerged in her art, but health issues faltered her success. Her relationship with Rivera was troubled as well due to Rivera’s repeated affairs with other women. Rivera and Kahlo went through periods of separation but joined together to petition the Mexican government to grant asylum to Leon Trotsky (who had been expelled from Norway because of the pressure from Russia). In 1937, Trotsky and his wife, Natalia, received asylum and stayed at Kahlo’s Casa de Azul. Frida’s artistic ability soon rocked to stardom as she traveled to New York and Paris for her own art exhibits in 1938-1939. During that period she divorced Rivera. In 1940, Rivera and Kahlo remarried though in Mexico.
Frida Kahlo harnessed her pain—both emotional and physical—to make provocative art that recast stereotypes of women. She was a financially and emotionally independent woman at time where marriage and male headship were prized. She owned her political spirit when women were told to be apolitical beings.
[1] Andrea Kettenmann, Frida Kahlo (1907-1954): Pain and Passion (Los Angeles, C.A.: Taschen,1992),7-20.
[2] Elizabeth Garber,” Art Critics on Frida Kahlo: A Comparison of Feminist and Non-Feminist Voices”, Art Education 45 (1992): 42.Deffebach, Nancy. Maria Izquierdo & Frida Kahlo: Challenging Visions in Modern Mexican Art. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2015.
Garber, Elizabeth. “Art Critics on Frida Kahlo: A comparison of Feminist and Non-Feminist Voices.” Art Education 45, no. 2 (1992): 42-49.
Grimberg, Salomon. Frida Kahlo: The Still Lifes. New York, NY: Merrell Publishers Limited, 2008.
Kettenmann, Andrea. Frida Kahlo (1907-1954): Pain and Passion. Los Angeles, CA: Taschen, 1992.
Mirkin, Dina Comisarenco. “To Paint the Unspeakable: Mexican Female Artist’ Iconography of the 1930s and Early 1940s.” Woman’s Art Journal 29, no. 1 (2008): 21-32.
Prignitz-Poda, Helga. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection & 20th Century Mexican Art from the Stanley and Pearl Goodman Collection. New York, NY: Skira Rizzoli Publications Inc, 2015.
Rosenthal, Mark. Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo in Detroit. Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Art, 2015.
Udall, Sharyn R. “Frida Kahlo’s Mexican Body: History, Identity, and Artistic Aspiration.” Woman’s Art Journal 24, no. 2 (2003-2004): 10-18.
Primary Sources
Complete Works of Frida Kahlo: http://www.frida-kahlo-foundation.org/the-complete-works.html
Frida Kahlo and Contemporary Thoughts: http://www.fridakahlo.it/