(in honour of women's herstory month, biographies of some truly remarkable women)
(clicking on the link below will take you to a wonderful interactive site, including a walking tour of women's history in nyc)
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Seven Who Rebelled For All
1. Anna Zenger: Sustainer of Freedom
The Federal Hall Memorial building at 26 Wall Street, on the site of the city hall and jail built in British colonial times, is considered the birthplace of the Constitution's guarantee of a free press. In 1734, a local printer, John Peter Zenger, was arrested on charges of seditious libel because his paper, the New-York Weekly Journal, had offended the royal authorities. Zenger was jailed downstairs here for months while his trial was conducted upstairs. The Journal failed to appear November 18, 1734, immediately after his arrest, but resumed the next week with Anna Catharine Maul Zenger, his wife, getting the issues out on the basis of instructions her husband gave through his cell door. Under Anna Zenger's hand, the Journal carried this account in her husband's voice:
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2. Barbara Ruckle Heck: Demander for Reform
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Barbara Ruckle Heck (1734-1804) is called "the mother of New World Methodism." She helped to found the first Methodist congregation in America, which built a chapel at 44 John Street. The present building is the third church on the site. Born in Ireland to Lutheran parents who had fled religious persecution of Protestants in the German Palatine, Heck grew up in a community deeply influenced by John Wesley and his followers. She became a Methodist at the age of 18. In 1760 she married Paul Heck and set out with a group of Irish Palatines for the New World, settling in New York. Under the leadership of her cousin, Philip Embury, the group tried and failed to create a linen industry. A temporary stay in the city stretched to six years. Discouraged, the group lost its zeal for religion. Heck turned out to be the group's anchor. In 1766, when she found presumed observant Methodist relatives playing cards in her kitchen, she swept the cards from the table and flung them into the fireplace. She then marched the group to Embury's house, saying, "Philip, you must preach to us or we will all go to hell together, and God will require our blood at your hands." Embury countered that he had neither congregation nor preaching house. "Preach in your own house and to your own company," Heck argued. The Wesley Chapel, first in America, was built on this site in 1768. The current building incorporates timbers and stones from the original.
3. Charlotte Temple: Seizer of Imaginations
In the graveyard of Trinity Church at 89 Broadway is a flat brown gravestone with the name "Charlotte Temple" patched onto it. This is an odd literary landmark, linked to the success of an English novel, Charlotte Temple, a Tale of Truth, by Susanna Haswell Rowson, which was published in the United States in 1794. Rowson's hugely successful weeper was evidently based on the ruined life of one Charlotte Stanley, a British woman who was persuaded by a married man to elope with him to America. Abandoned after bearing his child, she died and was purportedly buried in Trinity Churchyard. Who engraved or re-engraved the stone dedicated to the fictitious "Charlotte Temple" is not known. In 2008, Trinity had the stone lifted and discovered nothing but dirt underneath. Here is the burial scene from the novel.
4. Sojourner Truth: Orator for Abolition
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One thing she was sure of – that the precepts, 'Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you,' 'Love your neighbor as yourself,' and so forth, were maxims that had been but little thought of by herself, or practised by those about her. Her next decision was, that she must leave the city; it was no place for her; yea, she felt called in spirit to leave it, and to travel east and lecture. She had never been further east than the city, neither had she any friends there of whom she had particular reason to expect any thing; yet to her it was plain that her mission lay in the east, and that she would find friends there. . . . Having made what preparations for leaving she deemed necessary, which was, to put up a few articles of clothing in a pillow-case, all else being deemed an unnecessary encumbrance--about an hour before she left, she informed Mrs. Whiting, the woman of the house where she was stopping, that her name was no longer Isabella, but SOJOURNER; and that she was going east. And to her inquiry, 'What are you going east for?' her answer was, 'The Spirit Calls me there, and I must go.'
5. Margaret Fuller: Correspondent for Equality
6. Ernestine Rose: Agitator for Property Rights
The Broadway Tabernacle at 340 Broadway was built in 1836 for a major evangelist. Until 1857, the Tabernacle, which could hold 2,400 people, was the city's main meeting hall for suffragists, abolitionists and prohibitionists. A major voice here was Ernestine Rose, recently identified by the Museum of the City of New York as one of the four hundred most influential people in the city's first four hundred years. Susan B. Anthony considered her a main foremother of the U.S. women's rights movement. Rose was a rebel from an early age. Born in Poland the child of a rabbi, she rejected an arranged marriage and sued successfully for her inheritance from her mother. She married a Christian, and came with him to America in 1836. She soon developed a reputation as a pre-eminent and fierce orator, freethinker, nonbeliever and agitator. At the New York State Women's Rights Convention, held in the Broadway Tabernacle in 1853, Rose made married women's property rights her issue. She began with widows:
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7. Elizabeth Jennings: Challenger of Racial Bias
In 1854, Jennings became the first African American to bring a successful lawsuit against race discrimination on public transit in New York City. On a Sunday, on her way to play the organ at church, a conductor on the Third Avenue Railway line tried to eject her because she was riding in a "white-only" car. This was at Pearl Street and Chatham Square. With financial aid from her father, her lawsuit was handled by a noted white firm. She testified vigorously:
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http://www.womensenews.org/opening-the-way-seven-who-rebelled-all