Monday, July 27, 2020

George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin) 1804-1876

George Sand (née Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin) (1804-1876) shone brightly as one of very few 19th century female authors. Born into a world where only men could be writers, she often imitated them in dress and manner by wearing pants and smoking cigars. She relentlessly pursued of her wants: writing, lovers, and family. Along with novels, she wrote urging reforms to better the lives of the poor and working class, gain suffrage for men and women, and capture equal rights for women. 


Early in her life, she inherited her grandmother’s estate, Nohant, in Central France. Married only once, she took many lovers, including Frederic Chopin, with whom she had a nine-year affair. They shared a passion for the arts—he for the piano and she for literature—although their discussions traveled far and wide. That bond kept them together well beyond Chopin’s “usefulness” as a satisfying companion due to his debilitating tuberculosis. Although their breakup was harsh and long in coming, Sand tended to him while together as she would any child. Toward the end, she resented the encumbrance and freely admitted to several dalliances. 


When he was sick unto death in Majorca, he composed music imbued with the very fragrance of Paradise. I am so used to seeing him lost in the clouds that it doesn’t seem to me as if life or death means anything to him. He himself really doesn’t know on what planet he is living, and has no awareness of life as we conceive and experience it,” said Sand.


She wrote every night from midnight to six a.m., slept till noon, then took care of her children. Such a dedicated schedule resulted in many novels, plays, an autobiography, political tracts, newspaper articles, and several volumes of personal correspondence. She risked societal ridicule for doing what she wanted but is still revered in France today. Independent, gifted, and willful, she brooked no nonsense when it came to her friendships or criticism of her works. 


In The Education of Delhomme, George Sand is the monarch’s bête noire because he believes her writings are fomenting rebellion among the working class. So great is the king’s fear of further turmoil that he orders his henchman to hire the main character, Beaulieu Delhomme, to spy on her. The enmity between Delhomme and Sand springs from other reasons, but her values of fairness and an unerring focus on aiding the oppressed help her overcome such discord.




This title is scheduled for release on Nov. 17, 2020.


Author
Nancy Burkhalter


Nancy Burkhalter is an educator, writer, journalist, linguist and piano tuner. She holds a master’s degree in journalism and English education as well as a doctorate in linguistics from the University of New Mexico. She has taught composition for many years in the U.S., Germany, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Her overseas work led to an interest in comparative education, especially critical thinking. Both observations and research resulted in her book and blog, Critical Thinking Now. In 2019, she was a recipient of Go Back, Give Back, a fellowship through the State Department to train teachers in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Burkhalter’s upcoming novel, The Education of Delhomme: Chopin, Sand, and La France, tells the story of Beaulieu Delhomme, a fictional piano tuner for the famed French pianist Frédéric Chopin.

Nancy Burkhalter resides in Edmonds, Washington.


Monday, July 20, 2020

Those Not-So Wicked Sporting Ladies of the Wicked West - Pearl DeVere


A hundred years ago they were known as soiled doves, frail sisters, bawds, painted ladies, scarlet women, fille de joie, molls, courtesans, concubines, sporting woman, denizens, strumpets, adventuresses, working girls, tarts, unfortunates, the demimonde, the tenderloin, shady ladies, jezebels, harridans and harlots, among many other names, and more often than not, were residents of a brothel, red-light district, parlor house, seraglio, hog ranch, crib, harem, the Line, whorehouse, bordello, or a bawdy house.  Many of these ladies of the night had fallen unintentionally – and many intentionally -- into the sporting life as it was typically known, wishing to obscure their true names, origins and backstories, making it virtually impossible to ever reliably unravel their individual and occasionally, lurid histories.

In most western frontier towns where men significantly outnumbered women -- a ratio of at least 20 to 1 and typically far greater -- prostitutes were considered an essential, though certainly not warmly embraced, necessity by their conservative female counterparts.  Decent married women were willing to put up with prostitutes to keep those randy single men away from their own otherwise puritanical daughters until those men managed to firmly affix a wedding ring on their daughters’ hand.  All a young girl had was her reputation and, as was well known, if that evaporated even by innuendo, she was most likely ruined for the rest of her life as borne out in literature by Jane Austen, Henry James, Edith Wharton and countless other authors of the day.

Once a woman had crossed over that line, society tended to lump loose women into a single mold.  Certainly all of them had to maintain a shrewd edge, but they were quite diverse in terms of temperament, education, worldliness, scientific and entrepreneurial endeavors. 

Of these so-called fallen women, it’s interesting to note that the madams, or owners, of many brothels, were wealthy, powerful and quite influential individuals whose brothels became centers of community, arts and culture in western towns.  Some of the most powerful madams were serious patronesses of art, music and education, as well as being philanthropists and major real estate moguls.

Being a madam was one of the few actual “careers” afforded a woman in the 19th Century -- the earliest prototype we have of a career woman, in fact!  Madams (and other wealthy prostitutes) donated money to charities, hospitals, churches, schools, cared for the impoverished and sick, and housed the homeless when no one else could be bothered. They were involved with helping fund many cities’ initial infrastructures of gas, telephone and electric lines as well as owning mining claims, stocks, investing in municipal bonds, even jumping into the fray to keep banks afloat during challenging financial years. There was a huge demand for their money, but the women themselves, as well as their children, were forever shunned by society.

According to June Willson Read’s biography “Frontier Madam: The Life of Dell Burke, Lady of Lusk”, huge financial contributions by Dell Burke, a madam in Lusk, Wyoming, created infrastructures such as railroads, waterworks and electric lines through that part of the state.  Several biographers have mentioned Josephine “Chicago Joe” Hensley (or Airey), a madam in Helena, Montana who had a weekly payroll of $1,000 for numerous businesses she owned outside that of her brothel’s, paid hefty taxes on more than $200,000 in real estate holdings, and also contributed huge sums to many charities and political candidates, although she was never allowed to attend any of their meetings or even be introduced to anyone involved in those important enterprises.  According to Anne Seagraves’ book “Soiled Doves: Prostitution in the Early West”, “these enterprising women, who played an important role within their communities, were never invited to join or attend a commercial club.  They were not accepted by society, and in most cases, were not even protected by the law due to their profession.”

Mattie Silks, a wealthy Denver brothel owner, claimed that she had become a madam simply as a successful business venture and that she had never worked as a prostitute.  This claim was quite interestingly never disputed.   And Georgia Lee, a Fairbanks, Alaska prostitute, was quietly involved in funding many civic affairs and co-founded the Fairbanks branch of the Humane Society according to “Good Time Girls of the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush” by Lael Morgan. 

Another well known beautiful face who was a particular enigma was Etta Place, who for those of us enamored many years ago with Paul Newman and Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid”, was either a high-class parlor attraction at Fanny Porter’s infamous house in Hell’s Half Acre in San Antonio, Texas, or she was a sedate schoolteacher in a one-room rural schoolhouse, helping to mastermind many of the infamous duos’ train robberies, something of a Robin Hood operation, according to Michael Rutter’s “Boudoirs to Brothels – the Intimate World of Wild West Women”. A young lady who led an incredibly complex double life, the beautiful Etta Place quite skillfully disappeared without a trace in the early 1900s.

Many prostitutes had exceptional nursing and mid-wife skills, often obtained by necessity, along with vast knowledge of herbs, medicinal concoctions and other healing remedies.  Occasionally they were clandestinely called upon to assist a married woman experiencing a difficult childbirth, but that same woman would turn her head the opposite direction afterwards if she encountered the prostitute on the street, refusing to acknowledge an acquaintance.  Additionally, women were not allowed any form of birth control (which was often unreliable anyway) and some prostitutes were quietly skilled abortionists, even aiding “respectable women” who wished to end an ill-timed pregnancy.  In the years between 1850 and 1870, one historian estimated that one abortion was performed for every five or six live births in America. 

Although she later denied it, Margaret Mitchell originally claimed that her fictional character of Belle Watling in “Gone with the Wind” was based on a madam in Lexington, Kentucky known as Belle Brezing, who died just after the movie’s 1939 release.  Ms. Mitchell’s husband was from Lexington and familiar with Belle Brezing’s checkered history, including the fact that the woman was quite well known as an excellent nurse.  In both the book and the movie, Belle Watling indeed claims to be a nurse and donates a rich purse filled with gold coins to the rapidly failing Confederate cause through Melanie Wilkes, the only married woman within the group willing to be seen accepting such a windfall from one of Atlanta’s most notorious madams.

Pearl DeVere, who was the madam of the Old Homestead brothel in Cripple Creek, Colorado, like so many others of the demimonde, wove multiple stories about her early life that makes it impossible to verify any of the tales. Not even a verifiable photograph of the young woman exists.  Born in Evansville, Indiana in 1859 as Eliza Martin into what certainly appears to have been a well-to-do family, exactly what led her into the world of prostitution is somewhat mysterious, based on the many different tales that Pearl herself fabricated over her short life.  She arrived in Cripple Creek possibly via Denver, around the time of the 1893 repeal of the Silver Act and set herself up quickly in the “trade” in the newly booming mining town.  Her sophistication, remarkable intelligence, and appreciation of fine arts and culture helped her build one of the most influential brothels in the country.

So who was Pearl DeVere? Unless you’re from Colorado, have studied the Cripple Creek gold rush or have actually visited Cripple Creek and maybe participated in the annual Pearl DeVere bed race or some other quaint festival, you’ve probably never even heard of this woman.  And, as we’ve so often heard in recent years, history is really just “his” story and rarely also “her” story, particularly with respect to “career” women and their contributions to our past.

Mabel Barbee Lee’s memoir, “Cripple Creek Days”, published in 1958, was drawn from her recollections as a very young child having grown up in the region. In the acknowledgements Ms. Lee mentions that one of her neighbor’s names, Molly Letts, was a pseudonym in her book because she had been a former prostitute and even after fifty years had ensued, she refused to let the woman’s reputation be sullied.  

Without question, however, at age 11, Mabel’s recollections of Pearl DeVere were firmly stamped on her memory, even though Mabel’s timelines appear to be a little fuzzy on occasion.  In mining camps very few women had beautiful stylish clothes or jewelry or immodest displays of wealth, certainly very impressionable items for a pre-teen.  Pearl was an excellent dress designer and wore her creations perfectly over her marvelously sculpted physique.  At age 31 she was a beautiful girl with red hair, bright flashing eyes and a slender build sporting gorgeous tight-fitting clothes and it was said that she never wore the same outfit twice.  She was strong-willed, shrewd, very well read, eloquent, and a very smart businesswoman. 

According to Janet Lecompte’s introduction in “Emily: The Diary of a Hard-Worked Woman”, a journal by a 42-year-old Denver divorcee: “In 1890 the average working woman in the United States had started to work at age 15 and was now 22, earning less than $6 a week for a 12-hour day.  In Denver, 15% of all women worked in 1890, most of them as domestic help, laundresses, or seamstresses, some making as much as $4-$6 per week.”  Unlike out East, there were very few factories or mills.  A miner’s wages typically brought a working man $3 per day for a nine-hour day.  By contrast, a wealthy man booking a stylish young courtesan’s company at the Old Homestead was shelling out $250 for the evening and had to book well in advance!  One can easily see the attraction for a young cultured woman such as Pearl to have built such an empire!

Mabel Barbee Lee goes on to say in her memoir: “Pearl DeVere became my secret sorrow, the heroine of my fondest daydreams, mysterious, fascinating and forbidden.” Even some fifty years afterwards, Mabel vividly recalled hearing a gramophone playing from the Old Homestead’s windows, an expensive toy back in those days, and distinctly remembers the many details of Pearl’s unusual New Orleans’ early jazz style funeral cortege. Accounts of the Old Homestead’s opulent parlor with a telephone, expensive Turkish carpets, chandeliers and the unheard of extravagance of two bathtubs also fill Mabel’s remembrances.  These finer houses demanded an almost European-like adherence to order, an essential step towards our country’s slowly working its way towards the civil society we’ve attempted to establish since that time.

Along with so many others of the demimonde, Pearl’s contributions to the economic and political movements of the era were obscured as we’ve followed “his” story through our country’s development.  However, such acknowledgement is richly deserved and a sad omission. These enterprising women’s contributions are long forgotten – or in many cases, were never even recognized.  But silently, all around us, as our first “career” women, their intriguing legacies live on.


 Photos courtesy Charlotte Bumgarner, owner of The Old Homestead Museum, Cripple Creek CO
 
(1)   Pearl DeVere’s grave marker – so many admirers originally placed jewelry around the heart-shaped stone that unfortunately the gifts stained the marble and a fence has now been erected around the tombstone to deflect such well-meaning, but destructive additions.  Appropriately, however, a pearl necklace remains.
 
(2)   Lil Lovell – a beautiful prostitute in Denver who may have originally worked at the Old Homestead according to “Brothels, Bordellos, and Bad Girls - Prostitution in Colorado, 1860-1930” written by Jan MacKell Collins.

The above biography was written by Mim Eichman, the author of A Sparrow Alone. 

Mim Eichmann’s debut historical fiction novel “A Sparrow Alone” – a provocative coming-of-age saga of female empowerment during the 1890s Cripple Creek, CO gold rush -- was published on April 15, 2020 by Living Springs Publishers of Centennial, CO. Ms. Eichmann is a professional musician, singer/songwriter and choreographer living in the Chicago area. Her author website is: www.mimeichmann.com.
 

Monday, July 13, 2020

The Pioneer Women of California - Ellen VanValkenburgh, Emily Williams, and Eva VanValkenburg


Left to Right:  Eva, Emily, Elle 

Before California became a state, pioneers from all over the world brought their dreams of the future there. It was a time of opportunity for everyone willing to work. Women were no different. Even though it wasn’t called women’s rights at the time, many women in early California fought for their own futures and affected the futures of all who came after. Three of these women are featured in my historical novel Under the Almond Trees.

Ellen VanValkenburgh came West from New York during the Gold Rush. She and her sister sailed not around the horn but upriver through Nicaragua, then overland to the Pacific on muleback. Her journal from that trip is extraordinary. They even wore bloomers when riding the mules! In California, Ellen married Henry VanValkenburgh. They lived in Santa Cruz, where Henry owned a paper mill on the San Lorenzo River. When he was killed by a falling tree branch in 1862, Ellen took over the running of his business. She was pregnant with their third child at the time. Running a business gave her civic awareness and she desperately wanted to vote on legislation that affected business. In 1872, she sued the county of Santa Cruz to be able to vote. The essence of her argument was that under the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution, many American women like herself were granted citizenship, and therefore, the rights of citizenship which included voting. In the official court decision, it explained that the amendment did not apply to women. California women did not get the vote until 1911.

Emily Williams was the sister of Ellen’s daughter-in-law. She grew up in San Jose, California, in the early 1900s. Her dream was to be an architect, but women were not allowed licenses at that time. In addition, her father did not approve. After he passed away, Emily used her inheritance to attend a college to become an architect. She applied for an architect’s license but was denied. Julia Morgan studied in Paris and developed a reputation there, so the state of California granted her a license in 1904. Emily was not to be deterred. Without a license, Emily was limited to small structures so she and her life partner, Lillian Palmer, built houses in San Francisco, San Jose, and Pacific Grove. Lillian was a coppersmith who created amazing light fixtures. Emily designed the houses. The first house they built together still stands in Pacific Grove. 

Eva VanValkenburgh was Ellen’s granddaughter. She was raised with an appreciation for the strong women in her family and their independent spirits. Growing up in Inverness, California, she was a solitary child who took to photography. She sold postcards at the local store. Instead of going into photography professionally, though, she decided to marry and have a family. The traditional choices she made served her well until her daughter wanted to go to college. Eva’s husband refused to pay for it. She opened a photography business to earn the money herself.

These three women embody different facets of opportunities for women. Ellen’s focus was political, Emily’s career, and Eva’s family. They fought to make their own life choices work for them, and in doing so they helped ensure that future generations would have the same rights.



Under the Almond Trees is the story of three ordinary women in California who lived extraordinary lives. 

It starts with a falling tree branch that kills Ellen VanValkenburgh’s husband in 1862, forcing her to assume leadership of his paper mill, something women weren’t allowed to do. Women weren’t allowed to vote yet, either. Ellen decided that had to change, and became a suffragette.

In 1901, Emily Williams, Ellen’s daughter-in-law, became an architect – very much against her family’s wishes. No one would hire a woman, but Emily would not be deterred. She and her life partner Lillian set out to build homes themselves.

By the 1930’s women enjoyed more freedom, including the vote. Even so, Ellen’s granddaughter Eva VanValkenburgh chose a traditional life of marriage and children, even closing her photography business at her husband’s insistence. When he later refused to pay for their daughter’s college education, Eva followed the example of her Aunt Emily and reopened her photography business.


Author
Linda Ulleseit

Linda Ulleseit, born and raised in Saratoga, California, has an MFA in writing from Lindenwood University. She is a member of the Hawaii Writers Guild, Marketing Chair for Women Writing the West, and a founding member of Paper Lantern Writers. Linda is the author of Under the Almond Trees, which was a semifinalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom Creative Writing Contest, and The Aloha Spirit, to be released in 2020. She believes in the unspoken power of women living ordinary lives. Her books are the stories of women in her family who were extraordinary but unsung. She recently retired from teaching elementary school and now enjoys writing full time as well as cooking, leatherworking, reading, gardening, spending time with her family, and taking long walks with her dogs. She currently lives in San Jose with her husband. They have two adult sons and a spoiled yellow Labrador. For more about Linda and her books, visit: ulleseit.com

Monday, July 6, 2020

Tituba - The First Witch of Salem

Ask just about anyone what they know about Salem in colonial Massachusetts and the most common answer is the witch hunts. But in the middle and late 1600s people knew Salem Town for its shipping. It was the first large seaport in the Massachusetts Bay colony. Salem seafarers and merchants played an important role as the Puritans grew wealth through trade between the mother country and the colony. As the town grew wealthier, it expanded as newcomers arrived and moved inland to establish fertile farms to feed the coastal population. Salem farms, also called Salem Village was established on the outskirts of the harbor town. And that village became ground zero for the first witchcraft accusations in 1692 after people accused an enslaved woman named Tituba of serving the devil by hurting children. Tituba’s owner was the village minister. Her alleged first victims were her master’s children Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, along with a neighbor child, Ann Putnam, Jr.

The history books and records tell us what Tituba said and did after they arrested and charged her. But there is no information, not an inkling, of what she was like as a human being. 

Most of the others involved in the Salem tragedy, those afflicted by witches, the judges, witnesses and the accused, have modern descendants scattered around the globe. For many of the descendants, it seems to be a mark of pride when they identify an ancestor involved in the Salem witchcraft story. Tituba is an exception because no one knows what happened to her.   

Court records show the how and why Tituba was charged. They show she at first denied the crime until she was “interrogated”. And after they persuaded her to confess, she surprised them all by naming two other women as fellow witches, servants of the devil. In subsequent court hearings Tituba called out the existence of more witches, some of them flying in from distant Boston!

The written documentation lays out the latent fears the Puritan colonists lived with. Those fears in some combination lead to the hysteria that drove hundreds of accusations, dozens of trials, and 19 hangings of innocent people during six months of infamy.

They have preserved sworn depositions and court transcripts in museums and universities. And although the records detail the kangaroo court proceedings, and their rush to judgement with imaginary visions of specters as valid evidence, many questions remain. Historians still comb through occasional newly discovered information. And even so, after analyzing village, town, and colonial government records, parish records and sermon books, the root causes of the events remain shrouded in mystery. 

The elusive woman of color, Tituba, who opened the door to the wild accusations of neighbor against neighbor remains a mystery too. No one preserved records of an uneducated slave, one considered by most to be less than fully human. 

Enter the novelist. Without clear evidence of Tituba’s origins and her character, creative fiction can fill the void of a memorable woman erased from history. Her name, Tituba, roughly translated from the west African Yoruba language means one who appeases.  Why would an appeaser turn on her masters, then? Dave Tamanini offers his own provocative tale of what happened and why with a bit of magic thrown in.


Amazon

IndieBound

Barnes and Noble

For Dave, it took a while to become a fiction author. Born in the northeastern coal region of Pennsylvania, he lived a nomadic childhood while growing up in a U.S. Army family. He was the first to head off to college. And after earning a B.A. degree at the University of Maryland, he landed a job as a civil rights investigator of race and gender discrimination. That work in the legal field led to the University of Detroit Law School and then private law practice for over thirty years. There is no better work than lawyering to prepare for writing fiction, he says. You get to help clients from all walks of life and learn about human strength, frailty… and hypocrisy.  

 You can reach Dave at: www.DaveTamaniniAuthor.com or Facebook

 


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