1968: The Year That Changed America (by Stephanie Williams)

 

                        Davis Hall, Wellesley College October 1966

I'm eighteen years old in 1968, a sophomore at Wellesley College. As girls of the time, our childhood had been spent in the sheltered 1950s. We were demure, conservative, and gently reared. We arrived at college to be educated in the liberal arts—as the world began to change around us. 

 

We were rule-bound: curfew at 11 pm, men permitted in your room only on Sunday afternoons, dress code for football games requiring suits, heels and white gloves. Sunday mornings, girls poured over the engagement columns in the New York Times. But three undercurrents were rising—women's rights, civil rights, and the war in Vietnam—and 1968 would be the year they crashed together.

 

Winter: hope rises
It is election year.

By early 1968, almost half a million American troops were fighting in Vietnam. Every month 40,000 boys were being drafted. Undergraduates could still defer, but draft deferments for graduate students had just been cancelled. The system protected the privileged—those who could afford four years of college—while working-class boys were sent to war. The men we knew were drawing closer to being drafted.

 

Eugene McCarthy campaign poster 1968

All of us were canvassing the streets of New Hampshire in support of Eugene McCarthy—a Democratic senator from Minnesota challenging President Lyndon Johnson on a peace platform. Through mushy snow, we knocked on doors, handed out leaflets for McCarthy. On March 12, he secured 42.4% of the vote to Johnson's 49.5%. The primary should have been a shoe-in for Johnson. We were jubilant. Days later, Bobby Kennedy, much more well known, who'd watched from the sidelines, declared his candidacy.

Two weeks later, on Sunday evening, March 31, President Johnson delivered his famous address to the nation, withdrawing from the race. He declared he would not seek the nomination and would begin to de-escalate the war by halting the bombing of North Vietnam. He invited Hanoi to join him in moves towards peace. The next day he announced he would meet Bobby Kennedy and work together towards national unity. By Wednesday, the North Vietnamese were ready to talk peace.

It was all wonderful for 24 hours.

Spring: everything shatters

On Thursday, April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Johnson cancelled his flight to Hawaii. Hanoi cancelled plans for talks. Fierce riots broke out in Washington, Baltimore, New York, Boston. All the momentum toward peace—gone in an instant.

The weather was beautiful that spring of '68, but the violence kept escalating. At Columbia University in New York, 1,000 students invaded five campus buildings protesting the university's involvement in weapons research and plans to encroach on Harlem. Police were called. The campus exploded. Unrest spread to Chicago, to Paris and the Sorbonne.

Columbia protests, April 1968
Hugh Rogers Photography/ /Columbia College Today

 Night after night on TV, grainy scenes from the jungle showed wounded men on stretchers being run to hovering helicopters. Footage came straight from the battlefield, uncensored, deeply traumatizing. The crump of bombs, the walls of flame cascading over grassy villages. Wailing children fleeing barefoot. The war was morally indefensible, and we were culpable.

 

Guiding a medivac helicopter to pick up casualties, near Hue, April 1968
AP Art Greenspan/Alamy

Not long after Christmas the year before, I'd had breakfast with Hillary Rodham, who lived across the hall from me. She was talking about the National Organization for Women, formed just the previous October.

"What do you think," Hillary said to me, "should Wellesley join?"

"I think the basic question is: are we feminists?"

I suppose I am fortunate to have first heard the term from Hillary Rodham Clinton.

By the following spring, something had shifted in us. We realized we had been raised in a world that turned entirely on men and their view of things. The childhood activities thought appropriate for boys rather than girls. The stories and films in which the male is in charge, noble and dominant; the female a possession, passive, unable to negotiate the world alone. We were waking up.

Summer: the second assassination

We had hardly got home for the summer holidays when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 5.

Two murders in two months. Two leaders who represented hope for peace and civil rights, gone. The violence wasn't theoretical anymore—it was consuming the people trying to end it.

August: Chicago

My roommate Anne traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Everyone knew the city was armed to the hilt. A peaceful anti-war demonstration was planned for the last afternoon. Young men offered up draft cards like communion chalices to burn before the crowd. The crowd chanted, "Hell no, we won't go."

Burning a draft card, Grant Park, 28 August 1968.
Anne Trebilcock

 Kennedy's assassination had left nearly 400 delegates uncommitted. McCarthy was still in the race. But Johnson's favorite, Hubert Humphrey, was trying to pave a middle way. By nightfall, it was cold. Everyone knew the Convention had slipped away from the peace candidates. The Vietnam war would go on. Nothing would change.

Outside in the park, Anne was exhausted. There were so many people. Floodlights glanced off police helmets. All of a sudden—no one knows why—huge armored cars barreled down the street. The National Guard fired tear gas. Police with clubs moved in a line and began to run, swinging left and right. Canisters popped. Smoke rose. The air burned. Sirens wailed. Protesters seized trash cans and hurled them back. Anne's eyes teared up. She couldn't breathe. She covered her mouth and nose with her McCarthy scarf and ran. There was a shriek as a baton cracked hard on someone's head. A girl was dragged by her hair and tossed into a paddy wagon. People were screaming.

All of it, seventeen minutes, was broadcast live on television around the world.

The whole world was watching the American government turn violence on its own citizens who were calling for peace.

Fall: a new view of the world

By fall 1968, there was a new vibe on campus. Hemlines were mid-thigh. Girls went about with no makeup, their hair long and loose. Some Black girls adopted Afros—emulating Angela Davis. Everyone talked of the relief of not wearing bras.

Over the summer a group called Cell 16 had set up a "female liberation front" in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Women had had enough of listening to men on ego trips, of being assigned to take minutes and make coffee, of being treated as objects to be possessed. The scales fell from our eyes. The term male chauvinist was coined. 

In November, the Democrats lost the election. Richard Nixon was elected president. The war would continue.

All the things we had been raised to believe in, all the systems we had taken for granted—the structures of government, not perfect, but relatively benign—all of it now known to be corrupted and degraded. Two-thirds of government resources devoted to war and outer space. Basic human dignity denied to Black citizens. Our own role as women of no consequence. The planet threatened by pollution and nuclear annihilation.

Who could you trust in authority anymore?

The echo across decades

In the winter of 1967, I had stayed with Yale's chaplain, William Sloane Coffin—one of the Freedom Riders arrested in 1961, a man Martin Luther King had bailed out of jail. Over drinks, the talk was electric. About conscience—and the role of civil disobedience.

William Sloane Coffin on his arrest Montgomery Alabama,
25 May 1961

How far are you prepared to let something go before you stand up to be counted?

Looking back across nearly 60 years, I see 1968 as the year America broke open. In twelve months we went from hope to despair, from believing in our institutions to watching them fail us, from trusting authority to questioning everything. We watched two assassinations destroy the peace and civil rights movements' momentum. We watched police violence broadcast into living rooms. We watched a war grind on despite massive opposition.

The patterns feel disturbingly familiar in today's America. Deep divisions. Struggles for civil rights taking new forms. Women fighting again for control over their own bodies. The sense that institutions meant to protect us have been corrupted.

The question Bill Coffin posed that electric night remains: how far are you prepared to let something go before you stand up to be counted?

Each generation must answer for itself.

Stephanie Williams is a historian and writer who lives in north London. 

 
Her latest book, telling the story of her four years as a Canadian, convent-educated girl at an elite American women's college is The Education of Girls -- coming of age in 4 years that changed America, 1966-1970.

 

'A rich and stirring history of a moment when everything was changing for women in higher education.' Hillary Rodham Clinton

Vanished: The Most Mysterious Missing Children Cases from History – By Anna Mazzola

Missing children make headlines: Madeleine McCann, Ben Needham, Jaycee Lee Dugard, Mary Boyle. They also line our bookshelves: The Girl in the Red Coat; What She Knew; Local Girl, Missing; Then She Was Gone.

While we often think of the preoccupation with lost children as being a modern phenomenon, it is in fact an age-old fear, one that is reflected in the lost and abandoned children in fairy tales and myths – Persephone, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, The Snow Queen.

Here I look at some of the infamous cases of missing children throughout history, focussing on cases that remain unsolved or shrouded in mystery.

1. The Lost Children of Hamelin

1592 painting of Pied Piper copied from the glass window of Marktkirche in Hamelin

Many of us remember the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Few are aware that the legend came from a true story, one that is one recorded on the walls of a 16th century building in Hamelin now called The House of the Piper: ‘In the year of 1284, on the day of Saints John and Paul, the 26th of June, 130 children born in Hamelin were seduced by a piper, dressed in all kinds of colours, and lost at the calvary near the koppen.’

The earliest mention of the Pied Piper, in the 1300s, was on a stained-glass window in the Church of Hamelin, which showed a man dressed in colourful clothing leading away a line of children. The earliest written record is from the town chronicles in an entry from 1384 which states: ‘It is 100 years since our children left.’

Although much research has been conducted over the years, there is no agreed explanation as to what happened to the children. Some believe they died of natural causes, were drowned in the nearby river, or were killed in a landslide, with the Pied Piper representing the figure of death. Others say the children may have died of the Black Plague (though the Black Plague didn’t reach Germany until later) or that the story represents mass emigration. Maria J. Pérez Cuervo explores the various theories in her excellent blog piece here.

What is clear is that there were no rats in the original story. They were first added into the story in a 16th century version, and are absent from earlier accounts.

2. The Princes in the Tower 

Edward V of England and Richard of Shrewsbury were 12 and 9 when their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had them locked up in the Tower of London in 1483. This was supposedly in preparation for Edward's forthcoming coronation as king. However, they were taken into the ‘inner apartments of the Tower’ and then were seen less and less frequently. In July 1483 an attempt to rescue them failed. Then they disappeared altogether.

Richard took the throne himself, becoming Richard III, and many believed he had the princes killed in order to secure his hold on the throne. Certainly that was the complexion Shakespeare put on the story. But there are many other potential murderers including Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, or Henry VII. Some have suggested that the princes survived. In 1487, Lambert Simnel initially claimed to be Richard, Duke of York. From 1491 until his capture in 1497, Perkin Warbeck claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, having supposedly escaped to Flanders.

In 1674, workmen at the Tower dug up a wooden box containing two small human skeletons. King Charles II had the bones buried in Westminster Abbey, where they remain, untested. In 1789, workmen carrying out repairs in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, rediscovered and accidentally broke into the vault of Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth Woodville (the parents of the lost princes) discovering a small adjoining vault. This vault was found to contain the coffins of two unidentified children. However, no inspection or examination was carried out and the tomb was resealed. The fate of the princes remains unknown.

3. Virginia Dare and the Lost Colony

Virginia Dare was born in 1587, the first English child born in the New World. Her family was part of a group of 120 Englishmen and women who settled on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now Dare County, North Carolina. A few days after Virginia was born, her grandfather, Governor John White, left for England to obtain more provisions. When he finally returned three years later, Virginia and the entire colony had vanished. Only one clue remained: the word ‘CROATAN’ had been carved on one of the settlement's posts, leading many to believe that the Croatan tribe had kidnapped or killed the settlers.

Governor White and his men continued to search but never found any trace of Virginia or the other settlers. Roanoke Island became known as the Lost Colony.

4. The West Ham Vanishings

During the 1880s and 1890s a series of children and young adults disappeared from the East End of London. The first to vanish was Mary Seward, 14. The second was Eliza Carter, 12, who was reported to have been terrified of a man, or of returning home. The blue dress she had been wearing was recovered from West Ham Park, all of the buttons sliced off, but she was never seen again. The third to disappear was her friend, Clara Sutton. The fourth was Amelia Jeffs, 15, who lived on the same street as Mary Seward. However, Amelia, or “Millie” was found, violated and strangled.

In a 2016 book, Rivals of the Ripper, author Dr Jan Bondeson put forward the theory that a builder named Joseph Roberts, a key suspect in the murder of Amelia Jeffs, was responsible for both the West Ham vanishings and another series of horrible crimes against young girls in Walthamstow in the 1890s.

Others have suggested that, given reports of several strange individuals, including women, in the West Ham vanishings, the abductors may have been human traffickers. No one, however, was ever convicted, and most of the girls were never found. The story was partly the inspiration for my novel, The Story Keeper. 

5. The Strange Case of Bobby Dunbar 

Four year old Bobby Dunbar went missing on a family fishing trip to Swayze Lake, Louisiana, in 1910. After an eight-month nationwide search, investigators believed that they had found the child in Mississippi, in the hands of man called William Cantwell Walters. Dunbar's parents immediately claimed the boy as their missing son. However, both Walters and a woman named Julia Anderson insisted that the boy was in fact Anderson's son. Julia Anderson could not afford a lawyer and had three children out of wedlock, making her an unworthy witness in the eyes of the court, and they eventually found for the Dunbars. Percy and Lessie Dunbar retained custody of the child, who lived out the remainder of his life as Bobby Dunbar.

However, in 2004, DNA profiling established that the boy found with Walters and ‘returned’ to the Dunbars as Bobby had not been a blood relative of the Dunbar family. The fate of the actual Bobby Dunbar remains unknown.

6. Walter Collins: ‘The Changeling’

Nine-year-old Walter Collins was abducted from his home in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles, in 1928. His disappearance received nationwide attention and the LAPD came under increasing public pressure to solve the case.

Five months after the disappearance, a boy claiming to be Walter was found in DeKalb, Illinois and the police organised a public reunion. However, at the reunion, Christine stated that the boy was not her son. Despite the fact that dental records proved the boy was not Walter, the police had Christine Collins committed to a psychiatric hospital for her refusal to say that the child was her son. Only after the boy admitted he was Arthur Hutchins Jr., a runaway from Illinois, did the police release Christine. She went on to win a lawsuit against Captain Jones of LAPD, but he refused to pay up.

Walter Collins, left
Arthur Hutchins Jr, right

Walter was later determined to have been murdered by Gordon Stewart Northcott in what was known as the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders. However, Northcott repeatedly changed his account, and seemed not to know what Walter had been wearing, or the colour of his eyes, leading Christine to believe that her son was still alive. He was never found.

The story formed the basis of the 2008 film Changeling.

7. The Sodder Children of 1945

On Christmas Eve, 1945, a fire destroyed the Sodder home in West Virginia. George Sodder, his wife Jennie, and four of their children escaped. However, the bodies of five other children – Maurice, 14; Martha 12; Louis, 9; Jennie, 8; and Betty, 5 – were never found. No remains were located in the ashes the morning after the fire.

Throughout their lives, the Sodders believed that the five children had survived. They disputed the fire department's finding that the blaze was electrical. They believed that they had been the victims of arson, leading to theories that the children had been taken by the Sicilian Mafia, perhaps in retaliation for George's criticism of Mussolini and the Fascist government of his native Italy. There were various alleged sightings of the children, including a woman who claimed to have seen the missing children peering from a passing car while the fire was still raging, and another woman who said she had seen the children a month after the fire ‘accompanied by two women and two men, all of Italian extraction’.

The Sodder family converted the site of the razed house into a memorial garden to their lost children. Until the late 1980s a billboard remained at the site showing pictures of the five dark-eyed children and offering a reward for information. The Sodder’s one surviving daughter, along with their grandchildren, have continued to publicize the case and to search for answers. See Karen Abbott’s fascinating piece in the Smithsonian for more.

8. The Beaumont Children: Australia’s Lost Family

At 10am on January 26, 1966, Nancy Beaumont kissed her three children  - Jane, 9, Arnna, 7, and Grant, 4 – before they boarded the bus for a short trip to Glenelg beach near Adelaide. She never saw them again.

Witnesses confirmed the children had made it to the beach and reported seeing them with a ‘tall, blonde, thin-faced’ man in his mid-30s. The last known sighting of the children was at 3pm, when they were seen by a postman they knew, walking up the main road in the general direction of their home. They were holding hands and smiling. They were alone.

The search for the children attracted wide media attention, with various suspects, hoaxes, and theories emerging over the years, and still making headlines over 50 years on.

Neither the children nor any of the items they were carrying have ever been found. For many years, their parents, Jim and Nancy Beaumont, remained at their Somerton Park home, hoping that the children would return. However, they later divorced and are now living separately, away from the public gaze. They still believe that their children may be alive.

9. Megumi Yokata: Kidnapped by North Korea

In November 1977, 13-year-old Megumi Yokota went missing while walking home from her school in Niigata on the Sea of Japan coast. Twenty years later, her family were told she had been kidnapped by North Korean agents. In 2002, North Korea confirmed that it had operated an abduction program, stealing people from Japan and forcing them to teach Japanese language and culture to Pyongyang agents.

Five of the kidnapped were released. However, North Korea claimed that another seven abductees had died of illness or in accidents, and that four others had never entered the country. They said that Megumi had committed suicide in 1994, and been cremated.

However, according to Japanese officials, DNA testing on the cremated remains that were sent to the Yokota family showed that they did not belong to Megumi. Further, her death certificate appears to have been falsified.

To this day, her family, and those of the other abductees, are fighting for answers.


__________________________________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, will be published on 26 July 2018.

https://annamazzola.com
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

Cowboys and Indians by Katherine Webb

Yesterday, I finished reading Sebastian Barry's Days Without End, one of the books I was given for Christmas. It is simply breathtaking. The book recently won the Costa Novel of the Year award, and I hope it goes on to win the overall Book of the Year prize too. Every now and then, a historical novel comes along that picks you up and drops you down right in the past, like a perfect magic spell, so that reading it is like being there. Hilary Mantel did it with Wolf Hall; Andrew Miller did it with Pure, and Sebastian Barry does it with this book.

By chance, Barry's setting is one I've long been interested in: The American frontier in the nineteenth century - the 'Wild West', as myth would have it. And what a culture of myth and legend there is, surrounding that extraordinary period. The relentless pursuit of land and better fortune by early European settlers on that continent provides a truly astonishing chapter in the book of human history - but of course it came at immense cost to the indigenous population. I find it hard to read about the shoddy treatment of the American Indians by the settlers without my blood boiling at the injustice of it all. But more of that in a moment.

I heartily recommend Barry's new novel to you all, whether you're interested in the history of the USA or not. Whilst his magic trick of sending the reader back in time is one I wish I could emulate with my own fiction, the book is a treasure trove for readers, regardless. There are jewels of prose on every page. To prove it, I am going to open the book at random now, and quote a sentence or two:

'Third day a big thunder storm and it only a huge song singing of our distress. Hard to get the darkness out of your head. Full ten thousand acres of dark blue and black clouds and lightning flinging its sharp yellow paint across the woods and the violent shout and clamour of the thunder. Then a thick deluge to speak of coming death.'

Stunning. Our narrator is Tom McNulty, a young Irish man driven to emigrate by the famine in Ireland, and his narrative describes his life as soldier and settler in the Indian Wars and the American Civil War in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Previously it had been easy for me, when reading about the actions of soldiers and officials in the Indian Wars, to condemn their brutality as a symptom of the racism and greed of a previous generation. Barry's book, however, says important things about what can happen, and what a man will do, if he is made worthless to society, if he has no stake, and no chance of betterment. It says important things about the human heart -  its capacity for love and tenderness as well as the damage done to it by violence and fear. It is an astonishing feat of fiction writing, and brilliant bit of myth-busting for anybody whose mental image of American history comes from Hollywood films.

As I mentioned, I have been interested in early American history for quite some time. I even had a stab at writing about it myself, in my first novel The Legacy, which featured a greenhorn New York girl getting married to a rancher and moving to Oklahoma Territory in the early years of the twentieth century - and all the many and lastingly devastating ways in which she does not cope in her new life. I acquired a number of very good books on the subject of the 'Wild West' as I did my research, and hear are four of the best, in my opinion:

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. Written in 1970, this book perhaps marks the start of the revision of American history. The subtitle, An Indian History of the American West says it all. Brown has written here a damning, heart-breaking history of every bloody battle, every broken promise, every casual cruelty and ignored treaty of the Indian Wars. The terrible inevitability with which an entire race and culture was near eradicated is documented here - whether the Indians were beaten in battle by the sheer numbers of white settlers and soldiers, or were starved, or were herded by treaty to lands they did not know and could not thrive upon. This book exploded the myth of the plucky cowboy protecting his family against the marauding savages. A harrowing but important read. Dee also wrote Wondrous Times on the Frontier, a fascinating collection of anecdotes about life in the early West, told first-hand by the men who were there.

Sand in My Eyes by Seigniora Russell Laune. Something easier to read but just as interesting. This memoir, first published in 1956, tells of Laune's early life in the rural town of Woodward at the turn of the twentieth century. The back of the book praises its exuberant representation of 'the pioneering spirit that civilized the West'... But, of course, Laune is blameless in living her life at the time and in the place she was dealt, as we all generally must. Her memoir moves away from the very early days of settlement to the beginnings of the modern era in what was still very much a spit-and-sawdust town, and gives an engaging portrayal of the trials of domestic life for women back then. Tellingly, it makes almost no mention of the Indians at all, though Woodward was in Oklahoma Territory, which lagged behind the rest of the States, developmentally, because it had remained set aside 'Indian Territory' for several decades - until the pressure of white settlement grew too much.

The Virginian, by Owen Wister. The novel that spawned an entire genre, The Virginian was written in 1902, by which time the West was more or less tamed, no longer a frontier, and the myth of the heroic, gun-toting, ranch-building cowboy had been born. Here we have the strong, silent man, carving his own destiny out of the wilderness; the virtuous, brave woman he loves; the romance of the sweeping landscape, and what I believe to be the first ever depiction of a quick-draw gun duel in the main street of a Western town. Very interesting to see how stories begin to be told, and how they can then grow and spread.

The Real Wild West by Michael Wallis. Published in 1999. This book combines a fascinating history of the vast 101 Ranch in Oklahoma - which at its height covered 110,000 acres, operated its own trains and had its own oil refinery, schools, churches and postal service - with a history of the birth and perpetuation of the myth of the American frontier. The 101 Ranch created the first ever touring 'Wild West Show', which became world famous, and featured real life figures like Geronimo and Buffalo Bill in what must surely, to them, have felt like surreal theatrical representations of their own lives. The book is packed with detail and anecdote, is hugely informative on early settler and farming life, and can be read for sheer enjoyment as well for an insight into the way in which the bloody, difficult history of a nation can have its heartbreak and suffering sanitised, repackaged and sold to the masses.

Victorian Tattooed Ladies: Circus freaks or pioneering feminists? by Katherine Clements

The history of tattooing goes back to prehistory but the English word, in this context, is first attested in the writings of Captain Cook. An entry in Cook’s ship’s log of 1769 refers to male and female ‘tattooed savages’ in Polynesia, proudly displaying their tribal marks: 

"Both sexes paint their Bodys, Tattow, as it is called in their Language. This is done by inlaying the Colour of Black under their skins, in such a manner as to be indelible."

Many of Cook’s men returned to England with tattoos they’d received on their voyages and the practice quickly became a tradition, hence the enduring association with sailors and men of the sea. It might have been common to see crudely inked bodies in the eighteenth century docks and taverns of London and Liverpool, but otherwise tattoos were stigmatised, associated with criminals and prostitution. No respectable woman would have displayed one.

This began to change in the latter half of the nineteenth century when tattoos became fashionable among the upper classes. Notable society figures, including European royals, acquired tattoos, creating something of a fad that wasn’t confined to men.

One magazine of 1898 estimated that a fifth of British landed gentry had tattoos, while the New York Times claimed that many society women had designs in ‘inaccessible places’. Famous beauty, Lady Randolph Churchill (Winston’s mother) was said to sport a serpent wrist tattoo that she covered with bracelets, and some have even suggested that Queen Victoria herself succumbed to the craze.

This cover of the Police Gazette from 1870 shows a well-heeled woman receiving a tattoo in her boudoir – more than a hint of titillation about it. A tattoo might have been a provocative fashion statement for some women, but mostly they were not to be shown in public; they were private and rarely visible.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, a few women found fame and fortune exhibiting their ink in the circuses and freak shows of America.

Tattooed native women had been displayed as circus freaks in America for years, but the earliest known tattooed white woman was Olive Oatman. Her story is a sad one. In the 1850s, during an ill-fated journey to California, Yavapai Indians attacked her family. Only Olive and her sister survived. The girls were rescued and adopted by Mohave Indians, who gave Olive a traditional facial tattoo. Her sister died but Olive lived with the Mohave until she was ransomed some years later. 

Olive Oatman

She soon became a celebrity, touring the country giving lectures about her experiences. People flocked to see the facial markings that, according to Olive, were inflicted without her consent. More recent research suggests her stories may not have been entirely truthful and the tattoo was a sign of willing acceptance among her new Native American family. Later she married, turning her back on her extraordinary past, abandoning the lecture circuit and using veils and make-up to cover the evidence of her time with the Mohave.

Others played on Oatman’s story, and many of the ‘tattooed ladies’ who began performing as circus attractions in the latter half of the nineteenth century claimed to have been captured and forcibly tattooed by native tribes.

One of the best known is Nora Hildebrandt, America’s first professional tattooed lady, who toured with Barnum and Bailey’s circus throughout the 1890’s. Nora claimed to have been held captive for a full year, tortured daily with hours under the needle. She even suggested that the famous chief, Sitting Bull, had been involved. 

Nora Hildebrandt

It soon became evident that this fabricated history, while entertaining, was hardly true: Nora is commonly said to have been the daughter, or wife, of Martin Hildebrandt, an artist who opened the first tattoo parlour in New York City (possibly as early as the 1850s) and was heavily in demand among American Civil War soldiers. But this too is doubtful. Nora was actually born in England and there’s no proof she was either married to or related to Martin. (He’s recorded as married to a woman called Mary, with one son – Frank). Perhaps she took his name in acknowledgement of the art with which he covered her body, but the reasons are lost in almost as much myth and hearsay as Nora’s own stories. 

Nora’s debut was quickly followed by that of Irene Woodward – or La Belle Irene – who billed herself at ‘The Original Tattooed Lady’. She and others often used salacious stories like Hildebrandt’s, to attract and entertain audiences. These women were mostly viewed as risqué circus attractions, little better than those working in peepshows or burlesque follies. Margot Mifflin, author of Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo says:

“The women afforded a peepshow, along with a freak show, because at that time women just didn’t show that much skin publicly, The tattoos gave them a reason to strip down and show their bodies. Certainly a number of people who came to see them were interested in the flesh as much as the art.”

Even so, some of these women became stars. Artoria Gibbons was the highest paid tattooed lady of the 1920s, with a legion of fans, and others, such as Betty Broadbent, went on working as pin-ups and performers right up until the 1960s. It certainly offered a level of fame and financial independence, more so once women became more than just a canvass.

Artoria Gibbons

One of the most enduring, evocative images of early tattooed women is that of Maud Wagner (née Stevens); widely regarded as the first American female tattoo artist.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Maud was a circus performer, making a living as an acrobat and contortionist – hardly a conventional career choice to begin with. While entertaining visitors at the St Louis World Fair she met Gus Wagner, a renowned tattoo artist (and the last to work with old-fashioned needle and ink, rather than a machine). Legend has it that Maud agreed to go on a date with Gus only if he gave her lessons. She learned the art from him, going on to become a circus attraction and respected tattoo artist in her own right. They ran a successful business together and their daughter, Lovetta, continued the tradition, becoming a well-known artist, working up until the 1980s, despite apparently never getting inked herself. I’d love to know how many of Maud’s clients were women.

Maud Wagner in 1911

Margot Mifflin’s book, mentioned above, is one of several that chart the history of tattooing in relation to the female body, the changes in gender prejudices and stigma over the years and the reasons for them. It’s a complicated history that’s synonymous with women’s rights, feminism and the changing representation of women’s bodies. 

Mifflin writes in her introduction to the most recent edition: “Tattoos appeal to contemporary women both as emblems of empowerment in an era of feminist gains and as badges of self-determination at a time when controversies about abortion rights, date rape, and sexual harassment have made them think hard about who controls their bodies—and why.”

I wonder what these tattooed ladies of a century ago would have made of the proliferation of body art that adorns all kinds of women – and men – today. Would they see themselves as pioneers? Even if some of them were motivated by money, renown or simply a passion for the art, they certainly broke the rules, and in doing so, made a statement which was far more subversive – and gutsy – than it is today.

www.katherineclements.co.uk

www.facebook.com/KatherineClementsBooks

@KL_Clements

Amelia Bloomer, by Y S Lee

Last weekend, I travelled to the village of Homer, NY, to do an author visit at the Phillips Free Library. While strolling down Main Street, I was delighted to come across this plaque:

"Childhood home - Amelia Jenks Bloomer - Writer, Speaker & Activist - Temperance, Abolition and Women's Rights - 1818-1894

Amelia Bloomer’s childhood home is still privately occupied (the four Victorian-era mailboxes, two on either side of the door, suggest that the house was converted into flats some time ago) and there wasn’t any further information to be had that day, but it got me wondering.

North Main St, Homer, NY

I’d never given much thought to the American suffragists as individuals. I knew the names of the most famous (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and Victoria Claflin Woodhull, to start with). And I’ve mentioned Bloomer before, most recently in my post about women on bicycles.

Illustration of a woman wearing the Bloomer costume. Image via National Park Service

But looking at her childhood home, I realized I didn’t know much about Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818-1894). Here are some things I’ve learned in the past few days:

- Bloomer had only a few years of formal education, and as a young woman worked as a schoolteacher and a governess.

- She turned to journalism when her husband, Dexter Bloomer, encouraged her to write for his newspaper, the Seneca Falls County Courier.

- She began her public career as a temperance campaigner. Because temperance was a female-driven movement, she was thus exposed to other feminist ideas including women’s suffrage and abolition.

- The American women’s suffrage movement grew quite directly from the abolitionist movement: in 1840, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, they were denied seats on the floor because they were women. In response, they held the first Women’s Rights Convention in 1848 in Seneca Falls, NY. As a consequence, Black abolitionist activists like Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass are also closely linked with women’s suffrage. The 1840s and 1850s must have been a heady time for progressive thinkers in America!

THE LILY - A monthly journal, devoted to Temperance and Literature - Published by a Committee of Ladies.

 - In 1849, Bloomer founded The Lily, the first newspaper published by women for women. (To my knowledge, the first feminist newspaper in England published by a woman was Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon’s English Women’s Journal, founded nearly a decade later in 1858. Please do correct if me I’m misinformed.) The Lily began as a mouthpiece for the temperance movement but soon grew to encompass the matter of women’s rights. Many of its articles about women’s rights and the necessity of legal reform were written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Amelia Bloomer in rational dress, ca. 1852-58. Image via NPS

- Amelia Bloomer didn’t invent the Bloomer costume. The radical “reform dress” came into Bloomer’s life in 1851 when a visiting friend, Elizabeth Smith Miller, wore loose, Turkish-style trousers with a short overskirt to Bloomer’s home in Seneca Falls, NY. Bloomer adored the idea and popularized it – and even published sewing instructions – in The Lily. Circulation swelled from about 500 copies a month to 4000. A few months later, the costume was widely known as the “Bloomer dress”. (No word on whether Elizabeth Smith Miller was relieved or resentful about the mis-naming of her design. Bloomers were so widely ridiculed – its wearers were frequently heckled on the street - that even Amelia Bloomer gave up wearing them in 1859.)

Ted Aub's life-sized bronze sculpture, "When Anthony Met Stanton". Bloomer, at centre, is introducing Susan B. Anthony (left) to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Both Bloomer and Stanton are wearing rational dress. Image via National Park Service.

Bloomer's home in Seneca Falls, NY (where she lived after marriage, now known as Amelia Bloomer House) may have been a stop on the Underground Railroad!

I've a lot more reading ahead of me but I can't help picturing a scene in which Harriet Tubman (a childhood hero of mine) and Amelia Bloomer meet...

A Tyranny of Petticoats, by Y S Lee

Hello, readers. I am tremendously excited to share with you the absolutely glorious cover of Jessica Spotswood's historical anthology, A Tyranny of Petticoats (Candlewick Press, March 2016). Behold!



My friend Cat taught me the phrase "on fleek", and now I just want to walk around now yelling, "It's SO ON FLEEK!"

Here's a bit more about the collection, which combines historical realist and historical fantasy stories:

From an impressive sisterhood of YA writers comes an edge-of-your-seat anthology of historical fiction and fantasy featuring a diverse array of daring heroines.

Crisscross America — on dogsleds and ships, stagecoaches and trains — from pirate ships off the coast of the Carolinas to the peace, love, and protests of 1960s Chicago. Join fifteen of today’s most talented writers of young adult literature on a thrill ride through history with American girls charting their own course. They are monsters and mediums, bodyguards and barkeeps, screenwriters and schoolteachers, heiresses and hobos. They’re making their own way in often-hostile lands, using every weapon in their arsenals, facing down murderers and marriage proposals. And they all have a story to tell.

With stories by:

J. Anderson Coats

Andrea Cremer

Y. S. Lee

Katherine Longshore

Marie Lu

Kekla Magoon

Marissa Meyer

Saundra Mitchell

Beth Revis

Caroline Richmond

Lindsay Smith

Jessica Spotswood

Robin Talley

Leslye Walton

Elizabeth Wein

My ARC arrived in the mail just this week, which means that it's time to proofread my own short story, "The Legendary Garrett Girls", one last time. As regular blog readers know, I really appreciate this last chance to check the story and catch any clangers. Mostly, though, I'm looking forward to read the other 14 short stories in the anthology. Yes, I could have read them earlier in PDF format, but - call me traditional, if you must - I still find curling up with a print book more satisfying.

I am giddy with delight to be part of this sisterhood, and I owe it all to fellow novelist and worshipper-at-the-altar-of-history Stephanie Burgis: she's the one who first suggested to editor Jessica Spotswood that I might want to be involved. THANK YOU, Steph!

This was my first time contributing to a fiction anthology and I learned so much. To begin with, the parameters were incredibly open: a story with a girl protagonist at any time in American history. Indeed, it was so liberating that I felt almost frozen with indecision - until I realized that fourteen other writers were simultaneously staking out their own historical and geographical territories. Suddenly, it felt like the start of an open-water swimming race: fast and splashy.

I've noticed that in my fiction I lean towards borders and margins, both literal and figurative. Sure enough, I first proposed something along the Great Lakes or in the Thousand Islands area - specifically, a midwinter prison escape from Ontario into New York state, over ice and open water. But Jessica suggested something less marginal and more definitively American, so I began to scan my shelves.

Several years ago, I went on a family holiday to Alaska. True to nerd form, the souvenir I brought back was a reprint of a nineteenth century memoir and travel manual, William B. Haskell's Two Years in the Klondike and Alaskan Gold Fields, 1896-1898.



I'd read bits and scraps of it in Alaska, but when I pulled it from the shelf last summer, it fell open to this quotation: "They now say there are more liars to the square inch in Alaska than any place in the world." -- The Seattle Times, August 1897. Clearly, this was fate: I was going to write a story about con artists in the Gold Rush town of Skagway, Alaska.

That story, "The Legendary Garrett Girls", is just one of the fifteen in A Tyranny of Petticoats. Gloating over the table of contents, I'm struck by how diverse our geographical choices are: not just Boston and Los Angeles, but Wyoming and Indiana; Washington, DC and Washington State. It reminds me how relatively little I know of American history.

I can't wait to change that.

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Y S Lee is the author of the award-winning Mary Quinn Mysteries (Walker Books/Candlewick Press). She blogs every Wednesday at www.yslee.com.