Women’s History Tour�The Women of New York who Made History��
By Hank Orenstein, Licensed NYC Sightseeing Guide
Licensed Associate Real Estate Broker, The Corcoran Group
hankorenstein@gmail.com hank.Orenstein@corcoran.com
646-596-3005
© Hank Orenstein 2023
I. Some Important Dates for Women’s Rights
II. Some Important Dates for Women’s Rights
The Haudenosaunee Iroquois Women
Poster by the Syracuse Cultural Workers
https://www.syracuseculturalworkers.com/
Early women’s rights pioneers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage were aware of the rights that American Indian women of upstate New York enjoyed.
The Haudenosaunee Iroquois Women
Imagine that women have the responsibility to choose all political representatives, removing from office anyone who did not address the wishes and needs of the people while looking to the seventh generation ahead. Imagine women living in a world free from violence committed against them, having the final say in matters of war and peace, and having the absolute right to their own bodies. In this society, imagine that women are also responsible for planning the spiritual ceremonies and have economic independence from men. Haudenosaunee women have had this authority—and more—for centuries before Europeans came to North America.
primary source: nyheritage.com: (this page, 8-14, 16)
When women in New York State began to organize for their rights in 1848, they took their cue from the nearby native communities. Haudenosaunee women ignited the revolutionary vision of early feminists by providing a model of freedom and agency. Euro-American women were inspired by the Native American women’s control of their bodies and property, religious voice, custody of their children, satisfying work, and absence of rape and domestic violence. Finally, they saw political equality in action, as clan mothers nominated the chiefs, held them in position, and removed them, if necessary. Everyone had a voice in decisions, women and men equally.
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The first convention in the country called exclusively to discuss the need for women’s rights was held in Seneca Falls on July 19–20, 1848. Lucretia Coffin Mott joined her sister, Martha Coffin Wright and Quaker friends Mary Ann M'Clintock and Jane Hunt, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton for tea on July 9 at the home of Jane Hunt in nearby Waterloo.
The women decided to hold a women's rights convention while Mott was visiting. Their announcement, calling for a discussion of the “social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman," appeared two days later in the Seneca County Courier and was reprinted in other area papers, including Frederick Douglass's North Star.
The two-day convention resulted in the adoption of two documents, the Declaration of Sentiments and an accompanying list of resolutions. Drafted by the Quaker women and Stanton, the documents were discussed and modified by the convention before being adopted. The most contentious resolution was women’s right to vote.
Frederick Douglass, the only African-American present, argued so convincingly for its inclusion that the suffrage resolution was adopted. The convention adjourned to meet again in Rochester two weeks later. This culmination of all the women’s previous work launched the organized women’s rights movement and led to other local conventions and yearly national women’s rights conventions beginning in 1850.
1848 Women's Rights Convention �in Seneca Falls and Rochester
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Ernestine Rose (1810-1892)
Civil Disobedience by Voting (1868-1873)
When each of the states wrote their constitutions after the American Revolution, suffrage for women and African-American men became outlawed. When New York State adopted its first constitution in 1777 it became illegal for women to vote. “To vote is a man’s duty and a woman’s crime,” said New York State Woman Suffrage Association president Lillie Devereux Blake.
In November 1872, Susan B. Anthony cast a vote in her hometown of Rochester, NY, and was subsequently arrested and tried in 1873. While Susan B. Anthony’s voting trial is the one most publicized, women throughout New York State and the nation committed civil disobedience by voting as early as 1868 – four years before Anthony.
Women unsuccessfully attempted to vote in Nyack, Fayetteville, New York City, Mount Vernon, Brooklyn, and Oswego between 1868 and 1873. Some actually cast their ballots, like Schenectady women in 1868 and women in Ithaca in 1870 who voted in local elections about erecting waterworks.
Fifteen Newport women voted in a local election to help elect a temperance slate of officers in 1871. Matilda Joslyn Gage attempted to vote in Fayetteville that same year. In addition to Susan B. Anthony, thirteen other women voted in the the 8th Ward in Rochester in the November 1872 election, as well as several women in the 17th Ward in New York City.
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Tax Protest (1873)
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Suffragists publicly demonstrated for their rights in many ways. When the nation prepared to celebrate its Centennial in July 1876, the National Woman Suffrage Association ceremonially impeached the government for its treatment of women and issued a Declaration of the Rights of Women.
Gage, Anthony, Blake, and Sara Spencer, using the tickets permitted to them to attend the ceremony, gave a copy of the Declaration to the chairman and left the building, scattering copies of the Declaration throughout the shocked audience. They then appropriated an empty bandstand outside and read the Declaration aloud, after which they adjourned to the First Unitarian Church for a five-hour meeting with speeches and music.
Public Demonstrations
Matilda Josyln Gage
�Running for Office�
Women could not vote, but they could petition local, state, and federal governments to change the laws. They could also run for public office. Elizabeth Cady Stanton announced herself as a Congressional candidate in 1866 while New York stockbroker Victoria Woodhull became the Equal Rights Party candidate for President in 1872. While Woodhull never carried out a campaign, Syracuse University alumna Belva Lockwood campaigned as the Equal Rights Party presidential candidate in 1884 and again in 1888. Woman suffrage was a central feature of the new party's platform. The election results showed Lockwood with 4,149 popular votes and the entire electoral vote of Indiana, cast by the Democratic electors of that state as a joke.
Women in New York won the right to vote in school board elections in 1880, and had the most success winning office when they ran for school board positions. Usually women’s campaigns for political offices met with less success. The first two women elected to the New York State Assembly were Ida Sammis, a Suffolk County Republican known for her involvement in the woman suffrage movement and as a prohibitionist, and New York County Democrat Mary Lilly. They began their terms of office in 1919.
�Early Cooperation Between Black and White Women�
The struggle against the institution of slavery served as a catalyst that brought abolitionists and women's rights activists together. However, the issue of race would eventually cause divisiveness in the suffrage movement. Race was as much of an issue for suffragists as it was for most people during the 1840s-1910s.
After the Civil War, the abolition and women’s rights movements continued to work together, now in a combined organization. The American Equal Rights Association, established in 1866 to promote universal suffrage, hired African American women speakers such as Louisa Matilda Jacobs to speak to audiences around New York State and beyond to convince them of the need for black men and all women to have the right to vote.
After outlawing slavery with the 13th amendment, the United States Congress identified citizens as only men in the 14th amendment and enfranchised African American men with the 15th amendment, excluding women – white and black.
After outlawing slavery with the 13th amendment, the United States Congress identified citizens as only men in the 14th amendment and enfranchised African American men with the 15th amendment, excluding women – white and black.
Divided over whether to support these advances for African American men at the expense of all women, the American Equal Rights Association split into two groups in 1869: the National Woman Suffrage Association, headquartered in New York by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association, headquartered in Boston by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell. This split marks a difference in ideology.
The NWSA opposed the 15th amendment (giving black men the vote) unless women were included. The AWSA, on the other hand, championed it. African Americans ended up in both organizations. Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, the Purvis family and Charlotte E. Ray joined with the National Woman Suffrage Association while Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin aligned with the American Woman Suffrage Association.
�Colored Woman’s Equal Suffrage League of Brooklyn�
Most of the black women who belonged to suffrage clubs did not confine their activism to the suffrage movement. Sarah Smith Garnet, the first black woman principal in New York City, her sister, Susan Smith McKinney Steward, the first black woman licensed to practice medicine in New York, helped to form the Equal Suffrage League in the late 1880s. Members engaged in any number of benevolent activities, including support for Harriet Tubman’s Old Age Home in Auburn and the Colored Orphan Asylum.
Many of the members, like Charlotte Ray, the first black female lawyer in the United States, were firsts in their professions. When their membership outgrew private homes, they found other places to meet, such as at the YMCA. When Garnet stepped down, Verina Morton-Jones, the first black woman to become a medical doctor in Mississippi, took over as president of the suffrage league after establishing a practice in Brooklyn. She also helped found the Lincoln Settlement House, just one example of the broad range of black women’s social advocacy.
Charlotte Ray: courtesy of blackfacts.com
�Parades�
Suffragists organized parades during the final two decades of the movement. The parades symbolized greater confidence in the righteousness of the goals of the suffrage movement, solidarity with like minded women, and a willingness to expose oneself to public critique. Parades drew large crowds, with many men jeering at the women for their boldness in publicly displaying themselves.
Beginning in 1913, women annually organized huge parades in New York State, at first in New York City along Fifth Avenue. The idea came from Harriot Stanton Blatch, a daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who observed similar displays during her years living in England where the suffrage movement was a great deal more radical.
Women coordinated their garments, hats, and sashes and marched in contingents of professions such as doctors, lawyers, and teachers, often accompanied by bands playing music. Parades became very popular, and thousands of people came to watch the women marching.
�Women’s Suffrage Parade of 1912�Union Square�
photo: National Archives and Records Administration
�Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856-1940)�
The daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was the main organizer of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention for women’s rights, Harriot Stanton Blatch, had offices in Union Square. She was instrumental in helping New York State pass voting rights for women. She founded the Equity League of Self-Supporting Women (later named the Women’s Political Union) and worked with both working class and society women in her organizing efforts which included marches, rallies, leafletting, education and working with legislators and other organizations.
Blatch was instrumental in New York State granting the right of women to vote in 1917, which paved the way for other states to follow suit and then ultimately the passage of the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920 which gave women the right to vote.
Read more about Harriot Stanton Blatch here:
Photo courtesy of Encyclopedia Brittanica Inc.
�Winning the Vote in New York State�
After a long and persistent struggle, when women in New York State won the right to vote in 1917, they changed the national political landscape. New York was not the first state to give women the vote, but it was a tipping point for the suffrage movement. New York, the most populous state, was the also the first Eastern state to approve women’s suffrage and helped pave the way for other states to follow suit.
In August 1920, the 19th Amendment granted women the right to vote. It is also important to note that while legally entitled to vote, black women were effectively denied voting rights in numerous Southern states until 1965.
Now: Let’s Take a Tour of Sites Around NYC…
Margaret Sanger Residence/�Office of the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau �17 West 16th Street
Sanger, a trained nurse, opened up the first birth control clinic in the United States in 1916 (Brooklyn). Her collaborative efforts led to the FDA approval of Enovid, the first oral contraceptive for women in 1960. Sanger (1879-1966), was born in Corning New York to a Catholic Irish-American family and was the 6th of 11 surviving children. She is considered the founding mother of what became Planned Parenthood and also coined the term birth control. There have been recent controversies regarding her being part of the eugenics movement and Planned Parenthood has removed her name from their clinics.
You can read up on it here: https://time.com/5869743/planned-parenthood-margaret-sanger/
Photo by Ariel Boverman
Eva LaGallienne / Civic Repertory Theatre Site�107 West 14th Street (demolished)
Photos: en.wikipedia.org; building photo Berenice Abbot (1936)
Edith O’Hara / 13th Street Repertory Theatre�(1917-2020 / 50 West 13th Street)
http://www.13thstreetrep.org/documentary.html
Willa Cather’s Home�5 Bank Street
City and Country School�146 West 13th Street
Learn more about the school:
https://www.cityandcountry.org/about-us/
Uta Hagen and Yoko Ono on Bank Street�HB Studios at 120 Bank Street – Greenwich Village/West Village
Uta Hagen (1919 – 2004) and her husband Herbert Bergof founded the HB Studios in 1945 and it is still one of the premiere training programs for actors. Uta Hagen herself was an accomplished and talented actress, played Blanche in the Broadway production of Streetcar Named Desire. The school, which features the Uta Hagen Institute, has trained many important actors including Anne Bancroft, Candace Bergen, Clare Danes, Jack Lemmon, John Leguizamo, Gene Wilder, Cynthia Nixon, Lily Tomlin, Al Pacino, F. Murray Abraham, Sigourney Weaver, Faye Dunaway, Lee Grant, Matthew Broderick, Whoopi Goldberg, Alfred Molina and Jeff Bridges.
105 Bank Street, Yoko Ono and John Lennon. Prior to moving into The Dakota on Central Park West, John and Yoko rented an apartment on the top floor of this small building from 1971-1973. Yoko Ono, a longtime visual artist, musician and peace activist, helped establish Strawberry Fields in Central Park and led the effort to preserve John Lennon’s legacy. Yoko grew up in Japan and witnessed the bombing of Tokyo during WW2.
Jane Jacob’s Home�555 Hudson Street
Jane Jacobs photo: archive.curbed.com/Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images
Building photo: www.6sqft.com
Cherry Lane Theatre� 38 Commerce Street
Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Home� 75 1/2 Bedford Street
Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch / Greenwich House�(1867-1951) 27 Barrow Street Greenwich Village
Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch (1867-1951) was the first director of Greenwich House when it opened its doors in 1902, a settlement house that is still in operation. She was influential in most of the great reforms of her era: the opening of public schools as social centers; nursery schools; widow’s pensions; women’s suffrage; affordable quality housing; tenant’s rights, child care; old age poverty and dock conditions.
Photo by member Ronda
She lived in the neighborhood and also was a early member of the Women’s Trade Union League and the Consumer League.
Young Mary Kingsbury: Courtesy of the Greenwich House Photographs Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University https://socialwelfare.library.vcu.edu/
�The Settlement House Movement�Watch the documentary: https://www.pbs.org/video/treasures-new-york-settlement-houses/��
Graduates of leading women’s colleges founded College Settlement on Rivington Street. In 1887, at a reunion of Smith College graduates, several women who had seen settlements in operation in England discussed opening one in the U.S. Soon they organized the College Settlement Association to raise funds and support for the venture. Chapters of the association were established at Smith, Wellesley, Vassar, Bryn Mawr, and Harvard Annex (Radcliffe). In the fall of 1889, seven women moved into the College Settlement on the Lower East Side. The association later launched settlements in several other American cities. The College Settlement in New York exemplified the leading role of women in this movement. It also provided a place for many leading reformers to begin their careers. Lillian Wald lived there while she made plans to organize the Henry Street Settlement. Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch served as head worker there. Eleanor Roosevelt also volunteered at the College Settlement.
By the 1920s, however, the settlement seemed obsolete. Based on the reforms the organization had advocated, a public bath, public playground, and public library were all now available nearby. In 1930 the College Settlement closed its doors and moved uptown to operate as an art studio.
Lillian Wald/The Henry Street Settlement
On a rainy March morning in 1893, the life of a young nurse named Lillian Wald changed forever. Wald was giving a lesson in bed-making at a school on the Lower East Side when a young girl appeared and hurriedly requested that Wald attend to her sick mother. Following the girl over broken roadways, “dirty mattresses,” and “heaps of refuse”; passing “reeking” tenement houses, “odorous fish stands,” and “evil-smelling, uncovered garbage cans,” Wald finally arrived at the crowded apartment where a woman had hemorrhaged during childbirth. Seeing the woman’s “wretched” and “pitiful” state and providing aid to a family with nowhere else to turn had a profound effect on Wald. “Within a half an hour” of coming to this woman’s assistance, Wald later wrote, she had determined that she would move to the Lower East Side.
Wald’s response to this experience—what she called her “baptism of fire”—is telling. Not only did she want to work to assist families like this one, but she also wanted to live among them. Within six months Wald and her fellow nurse Mary Brewster had rented an apartment on Jefferson Street and begun a mission to provide health care to their new community. In 1895 Wald and her nurses’ settlement moved into a house on Henry Street purchased for her by philanthropist Jacob Schiff. The organization, taking its name from its new address, would become known as the Henry Street Settlement.
This impulse to live among the poor was common to Wald’s generation. It formed the basis of the movement to build settlement houses in poor communities around the world. Established during a period of social, economic, and political reform that historians have termed the Progressive Era, settlements became central to reshaping public policy toward poor families. Today, many of these settlement houses still exist as community-based social-service providers. They no longer house workers seeking to live among the poor and working class, but they continue to serve economically disadvantaged families in a very different economic and social context from that in which they were founded.�
�Billie Holiday (1915-1959)�Café Society Site (now Axis Theatre), the nightclub where Billie first sang “Strange Fruit”in front of an audience. https://www.boweryboyshistory.com/2021/03/friday-night-fever-cafe-society.html�
Raised in Baltimore, Md., In 1929 Billie’s mother Sadie Fagan moved to New York in search of better jobs. She soon joined her there and began showing up at jazz clubs to audition and sing with resident pianists.
She made debuts in obscure Harlem nightclubs, including those on West 133rd and West 132nd Street between 6th and 7th Avenues (today’s Malcom X and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevards) sharing tips with other dancers and comedians on the bill.
At age 18, after gathering more life experience than most adults, Holiday was spotted by producer John Hammond with whom she cut her first record as part of a studio group led by clarinetist Benny Goodman – then on the verge of his own superstardom. From 1935 to 1941 Holiday’s career accelerated, recording hit after hit with pianist/arranger Teddy Wilson.
Billie Holiday
In the 1930’s, during her epic run at Barney Josephson’s Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, she was introduced to the poem “Strange Fruit,” a horrific depiction of lynching in the Southern United States. The music was written just for Billie and it became the hallmark of her concerts. It is considered by scholars to be the first protest song of the civil rights era. The lyric was so controversial that her record label wouldn’t record it. She moved over to the independent Commodore Records where she could record and sing as she pleased. “Strange Fruit” immediately became a cultural spark-point and a hit record as well.
Despite her lack of technical training, Holiday’s uncanny syncopations, her inimitable phrasing and her dramatic intensity made her the outstanding jazz and blues singer of her day. White gardenias, worn in her hair, were her trademark.
Women’s House of Detention Site� 8th Street & 6th Avenue (1931, demolished 1973)
Famous women inmates included Angela Davis, Dorothy Day, Andrea Dworkin, Polly Adler and Ethel Rosenberg.
On the same site, in1927, Mae West was jailed in the earlier Jefferson Market Prison after being arrested on obscenity charges for her performance in her Broadway play Sex.
Barbara Streisand / The Lion �(Location of her first singing gig, 62 West 9th Street (today Italian restaurant Casa Apicii)
She won an amateur contest with a $50 prize and was invited back to perform regularly. She subsequently performed at the nearby Bon Soir, 40 West 8th Street. Streisand has recorded 50 albums and is one of the top selling recording artists in history. She has won 10 Grammy’s and 2 Academy Awards. She got her start here as an 18-year-old from Brooklyn.
Photo by Ariel Boverman
Lorraine Hansberry�11 Waverly Place
Eleanor Roosevelt Apartments �20 East 11th Street & 29 Washington Square West
Former first lady (1933-1945) lived in 2 locations in Greenwich Village. Perhaps the most activist first lady in history, she pushed her husband FDR and worked tirelessly for worker’s rights and civil rights and led the effort to the passage of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Eleanor Roosevelt Statue �72nd Street & Riverside Drive
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney �8 West 8th Street. First location of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
McDougal Alley
photo by Jon Kummer
photo by Cheryl Allison
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney�Washington Heights & Inwood World War I Memorial, Broadway near 168th Street
Emma Lazarus Home �18 West 10th Street
Accomplished poet and essayist Emma, a native New Yorker, wrote the famous poem/sonnet “New Colossus” for the Statue of Liberty. Emma was born in 1849 and was the daughter of a sugar merchant. She was a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was known for her outspokenness as both a woman and a Jewish person.
"The New Colossus"��Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,�With conquering limbs astride from land to land;�Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand�A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame�Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name�Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand�Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command�The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.�"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she�With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,�Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,�The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.�Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,�I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Link to exhibit at the Center for Jewish History, 15 W. 16th St.
https://www.cjh.org/visit/exhibit-info/emmas-sitting-room
Image: https://jwa.org/womenofvalor/lazarus
Bella Abzug‘s Village Apartment� 37 Bank Street abd 2 Fifth Avenue
Bella photo: Library of Congress: Arch photo by Ariel Boverman
Famously outspoken attorney, raised in The Bronx, served as a Congress member and helped found the National Women’s Political Caucus with Gloria Steinham and Betty Friedan, as well as Women’s Strike for Peace. In 1975 she introduced the first Gay Rights Bill in congress, and she worked tirelessly for women’s rights. She was fond of saying, “A Women’s Place is in the House….The House of Representatives.”
Triangle Shirtwaist Company Building�23-29 Washington Place at Greene Street (East of Washington Square Park)
Factory fire that killed 146 young women and girls on March 25, 1911. As a consequence, women and men trade unionists pushed for better working conditions and protections.
Frances Perkins (1992-1965) witnessed the tragedy as a young professional, dedicated her life to improving working conditions for all people. She became the first woman cabinet member when FDR appointed her Secretary of Labor in 1933, a post she held until 1945. She was instrumental in the New Deal programs, especially in the creation of Social Security as she has been called “the mother of Social Security.”
Learn more about Frances Perkins here:
Learn more about the tragic fire here:
Learn more about thememorial on the building here:
Photo: enwikipedia.org
Triangle Shirtwaist Company Building �23-29 Washington Place at Greene Street (East of Washington Square Park)
Frances Perkins
Triangle Shirtwaist Company Building�23-29 Washington Place at Greene Street (East of Washington Square Park)
The Uprising of the 20,000: Labor Organizing
Courtesy of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union Archives, Kheel Center, Cornell University/jwa.org
Clara Lemlich, Trade Unionist (1886 -1982)
Clara was a leader of the Uprising of 20,000, the massive strike of shirtwaist workers in New York's garment industry in 1909. Later blacklisted from the industry for her labor union work, she became a member of the Communist Party USA and a consumer activist. In her last years as a nursing home resident, she helped to organize the staff.
Blacklisted from the industry and at odds with the conservative leadership of the ILGWU, Lemlich devoted herself to the campaign for women's suffrage. Like her colleagues Rose Schneiderman and Pauline Newman, Lemlich portrayed women's suffrage as necessary for the improvement of working women's lives, both inside and outside the workplace:
"The manufacturer has a vote; the bosses have votes; the foremen have votes, the inspectors have votes. The working girl has no vote. When she asks to have a building in which she must work made clean and safe, the officials do not have to listen. When she asks not to work such long hours, they do not have to listen. . . . Until the men in the Legislature at Albany represent her as well as the bosses and the foremen, she will not get justice; she will not get fair conditions. That is why the working woman now says that she must have the vote.” (en.wikipedia.org)
Photo: en.wikipedia.org
Beyond Greenwich Village: Special Supplement Around NYC in Celebration of Women’s History
Stella Adler/Yiddish Theatre Walk of Fame (1984) �By the SE corner of Second Avenue @ East 10th Street
Modeled after Hollywood. Stella Adler, famous actress and acting teacher, born in 1901 in NYC to immigrant parents from Odessa. Getting her start in the Yiddish Theatre, she opened her own acting schools in NYC and Los Angeles after having been one of the few American actors to study with renowned Russian actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski.
Adler became known for training actors to research their roles and to use their imagination and knowledge to stimulate emotional experience based on the circumstances of each scene within the play. She also trained actors sensory imagination to help make the characters’ experiences more vivid, with attention to body language and the mastery of vocal and physical aspects of acting. Among her students were Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Robert DeNiro, Lena Horne, and Marlon Brando.
Photo: (en.wikipedia.org)
Yiddish Theatre Walk of Fame (1984) �By the SE corner of Second Avenue @ East 10th Street The 1926 Yiddish Art Theatre
Photo courtesy of the Historic Districts Council/6tocelebrate
The 1926 Yiddish Art Theatre�By the SE corner of Second Avenue @ East 10th Street
Northern Dispensary and the Ottendorfer Branch Library 135 and 137 Second Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets)
Anna Ottendorfer, publisher and philanthropist contributed funds to establish the first free lending library in NYC in 1884, with the German Hospital and Dispensary opening up the same year to minister health care to the poorer immigrants in the neighborhood. By 1887 it was serving 28,000 people per year. Anna had previously funded the opening of a retirement home for German-born women in Astoria, then part of Long Island and also funded the development and expansion of the German Hospital on the Upper East Side, today known as Lenox Hill Hospital.
Anna Ottendorfer ca. 1865: enwikipedia.org
Ellen Stewart / La Mama Experimental Theatre Club �East 4th Street Cultural District Fourth Arts Block�East 4th Street Cultural District (between Bowery & 2nd Ave).
Ellen Stewart (1919-2011) was a dress designer when she started La MaMa in a basement apartment in 1961, a woman entirely without theater experience or even much interest in the theater. But within a few years, and with an indomitable personality, she had become a theater pioneer. Not only did she introduce unusual new work to the stage, she also helped colonize a new territory for the theater, planting a flag in the name of low-budget experimental productions in the East Village of Manhattan and creating the capital of what became known as Off Off Broadway. Among the talent who played at LaMama early in their careers were the Blue Man Group, Sam Shepard, Estelle Parsons, Diane Lane, Harvey Keitel, Bette Midler, Harvey Fierstein, Steve Buscemi, Julie Taymor, Philip Glass, and Olympia Dukakis
photo: amny.com
La Mama Experimental Theatre Club
Left: La MaMa at 74A E. 4th St. (Photo by Theo Cote). Right: The Ellen Stewart Theatre at 66 E. 4th St. From americantheatre.org
Dorothy Day, Maryhouse, and The Catholic Worker� 55 East 3rd Street: Learn more about Dorothy Day: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/13/dorothy-days-radical-faith
This was the home of peace, anti-poverty and social justice activist and journalist Dorothy Day, native New Yorker (1897-1990) and founder of the progressive Catholic Worker Movement which still thrives today. In 2015, Pope Francis called her out as one of "four great Americans," along with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Thomas Merton. Day was arrested several times for her involvement in protests. She even went on a hunger strike after being jailed for protesting in front of the White House in 1917 as part of an effort to secure the right to vote for women.
Maryhouse continues to be a center for social justice activities, as it was when run by Day. It provides hospitality services for women in need. The Catholic Worker newspaper, started by Day, is published 7 times for year.
https://cromwell-intl.com/travel/usa/new-york-revolutionary/catholic-worker.html
Dorothy Day photo courtesy of Milwaukee Journal/Marquette University Archives
Elizabeth Blackwell�Site of the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children �64 Bleecker Street
Elizabeth Blackwell, born in 1831 in England, the first female doctor in the United States, founded the infirmary here in 1857 to serve the immigrant poor. This institution and its medical college for women (opened 1868) provided training and experience for women doctors and medical care for the poor. In 1849 Blackwell became the first woman in the U.S. to receive a medical degree. She led a team of nurses who tended to the wounded during the Civil War.
en.wikipedia.org
Elizabeth Jennings Graham (1827-1901)
African American teacher and civil rights figure. At Park Row between Spruce and Beekman, in 1854 after having been thrown off a streetcar, brought a successful lawsuit to end discrimination in public transportation in NYC transportation.
commons.wikimedia.org
Emily Roebling�Assisted the chief engineer of The Brooklyn Bridge
Emily Roebling (1843-1903) played a very important role in the completion of the work on the Brooklyn Bridge (1869-1884). Her husband, Washington Roebling, was the son of the bridge’s designer John Roebling, who tragically died after an accident shortly after work got underway. Washington Roebling assumed responsibility for the project but became ill and was confined to their Brooklyn Home.
For the next eleven years, Emily took over for him as the “first woman field engineer”. She would go onsite daily to give his orders to the crew, communicating with assistant engineers, funders, and the press, keeping records, and answering mail. To better manage the project, she studied strength of material, street analysis, cable construction, and other engineering issues.
Above: courtesy of Library of Congress, Everett Collection
Portrait on right of Emily Warren Roebling by Carolus-Duran, Brooklyn Museum/en.Wikipedia.org
City Hall (1811)
Women of City Hall and the NYC Government
�Margaret Chin�City Councilmember since 2010 and Immigration Advocate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Chin
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Photo: Library of Congress Digital Collections
Offices of “The Revolution”
In 1868, Anthony and Stanton began publishing The Revolution, the official publication of the National Woman’s Suffrage which they had formed to fight for a federal constitutional amendment giving all women the vote. The weekly paper was influential, but struggled to survive financially, and stopped publication in 1872, the same year that Anthony broke the law by voting in a federal election in Rochester, New York. Tried in 1873, she was found guilty by an all-male jury, but never imprisoned. Based in Rochester, she continued to travel and campaign for suffrage; she also worked with Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper on their History of Woman Suffrage.
Photo by Ariel Boverman
Nelly Bly, Journalist
Her bravery, curiosity and outright nerve made her a writer of international fame, one of the first investigative journalists in the age of sensational journalism. But the story that put her on the map was her undercover expose at Blackwell’s Island (today’s Roosevelt Island) ripping open the abuses of New York’s island of untouchables, changing how the city thought about both the infirmed and the incarcerated. Read more about her here:�
The Women of Wall Street
Abigail Adams, “Stock-Jobber”
Born in 1744, Abigail Smith married John Adams in 1764. Since John was often away on state business, Abigail was left alone to manage the farm and handle the family’s affairs. Despite instructions from her husband to invest in land, Abigail realized she could earn a higher rate of return on their money by investing in US government bonds.
Although all of Abigail’s property legally belonged to John under New England’s coverture laws, she set aside “pin money” to buy the bonds, often through an uncle who acted as a trustee for her. Abigail’s “stock-jobbing” activities were among the few sources of contention between husband and wife. Eventually, however, she managed to convince him that the investments would benefit the family, and went on to earn profits that far exceeded those they would have made had John been making all of their financial decisions. Portrait by Gilbert Stuart/National Gallery of Art
Victoria Woodhull�“Spiritualist, Suffragette, Broker”�
Born into poverty in 1838, Victoria Woodhull went on to open the first female-owned brokerage on Wall Street, fight for women’s rights, start a newspaper, and run for President of the United States. After moving to New York in 1868, Woodhull became Cornelius Vanderbilt’s clairvoyant, helping him pick stocks using her abilities as a spiritualist. Learning from this experience, she formed a brokerage company at which she earned over $700,000 (or over $12 million in today’s terms).
An outspoken social reformer, Woodhull became the first woman in the US to run for President in 1872, with famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her running mate. In that same year, however, after exposing an affair between a well-known minister and one of his congregants in the newspaper that she founded with her sister, Woodhull was arrested for sending “obscene materials” through the mail, a federal offense.
After a protracted legal struggle which drained her mentally and financially, she left for England in 1876, where she married her third husband and lived out the remainder of her life quietly.
Fun Link: https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-should-know-about-victoria-woodhull
Isabel Benham (1910-2013) �“Madam Railroad”�
When Isabel Benham attended Bryn Mawr, a women’s college, in the late 1920s, economics courses were not offered at all. In fact, upon hearing of Benham’s desire to study economics and work on Wall Street, a dean of the college advised her to enroll in typing school. Benham, however, insisted that the school offer economics, and she became one of only five women in her class to graduate with a degree in that field in 1931.
With the Great Depression and her gender working against her, Benham persisted in her efforts to work on Wall Street, initially supporting herself by selling magazine subscriptions. She eventually landed a job with RW Pressprich as a bond statistician. Working for years for a boss whom she said “made life difficult,” Benham went on to become one of the most distinguished railroad analysts on Wall Street and the first woman to be named partner at a Wall Street bond house. She lived to the age of 103!
Read more about her:
https://contentworks.medium.com/women-who-rocked-the-finance-world-isabel-benham-221b1e3363f3
Photo courtesy of www.railwayage.com
Muriel Siebert�“First Woman of Finance”�
In 1967, Muriel “Mickie” Siebert became the first woman to purchase a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. The lone woman among 1,365 men, Siebert had struggled to purchase the seat, having been turned down by nine prospective sponsors before finding the required two sponsors to endorse her application.
In 1975, Siebert & Co. became the nation’s first discount brokerage. In 1977, Siebert became the first female Superintendent of Banks for New York State, overseeing all New York banks, which had assets of approximately $500 billion. Not a single bank failed during her tenure.
Siebert remains president of Siebert & Co., frequently providing analysis and commenting on Wall Street to the media. She is also heavily involved in philanthropic work, particularly projects that advocate on behalf of women and minorities in the financial industry, as well as those that teach financial literacy.
businesswire.com/courtesy Siebert Financial
Anna Catharina Zenger (C. 1704-1751)
Anna Zenger was the wife of printer John Peter Zenger, the publisher of The Weekly Journal, who was thrown in jail in 1734 after being charged with libel, criticizing the British Governor William Cosby. While a mother, Anna kept the publication going for 8 months which helped to build support for Zenger’s eventual acquittal, a trial that laid the foundation for freedom of the press.
Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton (1757-1854)
Wife of founding father Alexander Hamilton, she lived for 50 years after her husband’s death and worked to preserve his writings and legacy. She founded the first privately run orphanage in New York in 1804 and also worked with Dolly Madison to raise funds for the Washington Monument in our nation’s capital.
Louise Nevelson (1899-1988)
One of the most important 20th century American sculptors, "Shadows and Flags", 1977. Location: Williams Street, between Liberty Street & Maiden Lane. Louise Nevelson Plaza was the first public plaza in New York City to be named after an artist. �
Nevelson studied at the Art Students League in New York. While at the League, she studied painting, modern dance, and sculpture. During this time, Nevelson met Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and assisted the legendary muralist with his paintings for the New Workers' School. During the mid to late 1930s, Nevelson also worked with the Works Progess Administration.
Louise Bourgeois (1911- 2010).
Born in Paris, has been very influential since the 1970’s on artists working in abstract expressionism and surrealism, especially in the development of installation art and feminist-inspired body art. Produced a large body of work in sculptures, drawings, books, prints and installations. Lived in Manhattan beginning in 1938, used her Chelsea townhouse as salon, later taught at Pratt, Cooper Union, Brooklyn College, among others. Check out her spider art! www.cnn.com/style/article/louise-bourgeois-spiders/index.html
In Wagner Park adjacent to Battery Park, Eyes (1995)
Photo by Ariel Boverman
Photo of Bourgeois by Robert Mapplethorpe (1982)
artsy.net
Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774-1821)�Shrine of Elizabeth Ann Seton, 7 State Street (opposite Battery Park)
First American born saint, founded the Sisters of Charity, the nation's first Catholic order of nuns, In 1809 opened the first free Catholic School in the U.S. in Emmitsburg, Maryland.�
Dorothy Schiff, Newspaper Publisher (1903-1989)
NYPR Archive Collections/wnyc.org
Gloria Steinem, Feminist�Ms. Foundation for Women Original Headquarters, 120 Wall Street
Toni Morrison (1931-2019)
Photo courtesy of global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Althea Gibson �West 143rd Street between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd.�and Malcolm X Boulevard (Althea Gibson Way).
Born in South Carolina, as a child her family moved to 135 West 143rd Street in Harlem. She played on local courts, eventually attending Florida A & M University. Her breaking point came in 1950, when Alice Marble, a former tennis No. 1 herself, wrote a piece in American Lawn Tennis magazine lambasting her sport for denying a player of Gibson's caliber to compete in the world's best tournaments. Marble's article caught notice, and by 1952 — just one year after becoming the first black player to compete at Wimbledon — Gibson was a Top 10 player in the United States. She went on to climb even higher, to No. 7 by 1953.
In 1956, it all came together when she won the French Open. Wimbledon and U.S. Open titles followed in both 1957 and 1958. (She won both the women's singles and doubles at Wimbledon in 1957, which was celebrated by a ticker-tape parade when she returned home to New York City.) In all, Gibson powered her way to 56 singles and doubles championships before turning pro in 1959.
Once given the chance, she became a champion, a role model – and an icon. She became somebody. Somebody special. Through her talents and tenacity, Althea Gibson opened doors and opened minds.
https://www1.nyc.gov/html/mancb10/downloads/pdf/althea_gibson_street_co_naming.pdf
Harriet Tubman Statue�(“Swing Low” / 2008, Alison Saar) Harriet Tubman Triangle, West 122nd Street, Central Harlem�
Fearless abolitionist and conductor of the Underground Railroad who led scores of slaves to freedom. , worked as a nurse and spy for the Union during the Civil War, and dedicated herself to Women’s Suffrage later in life. She was the first African American woman to be depicted in public sculpture in New York City.
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Photo: H.B. Lindsley/Library of Congress via AP
Madame C.J. Walker’s Residence� 110 West 136th Street, demolished (now the Countee Cullen Branch of the NY Public Library).
In the early 20th century Ms. Walker became the wealthiest self-made millionaire in the United States for developing and marketing hair products and was also well known for her philanthropy.
She moved here in 1913 and had two townhouses built, one as her home and the other for an elaborate salon and school.
When she died in 1919, she stipulated that 2/3 of her fortune go to charities and that the company should always be run by women.
Marian Anderson (1897-1993)�Manhattan Residence: 1200 Fifth Avenue (1958-1975).� https://www.mcny.org/marian-anderson-digital-installation�
Cicely Tyson Way�East 101st Street between Lexington & 3rd Avenues
Cicely Tyson was born in Harlem 1924 where she was raised by her devoutly religious parents, from the Caribbean island of Nevis. Her mother, Theodosia, was a domestic, and her father, William Tyson, was a carpenter and painter. She grew up singing and playing the organ in church.
She was discovered by a fashion editor at Ebony magazine and, with her stunning looks, she quickly rose to the top of the modeling industry. In 1957, she began acting in Off-Broadway productions. She had small roles in feature films before she was cast as Portia in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968). Four years later, Cicely was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her sensational performance in the critically acclaimed film Sounder (1972). In 1974, she went on to portray a 110-year-old former slave in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), which earned her two Emmy Awards.
She also appeared in the television miniseries Roots (1977), King (1978) and A Woman Called Moses (1978). Cicely did not appear steadily onscreen because of her loyalty to only portray strong, positive images of Black women.
She inspired a young Viola Davis. "She was the first actress that I saw when I was 6, 7 years old that — where I saw craft," Davis said. "Where I saw the magic of transformation." Viola Davis eventually got to share in that magic. In the TV series How to Get Away with Murder, Tyson played Davis' mother.
Cicely Tyson used to say, well into her 80s, that she was still looking for one more great role to play. At age 88, she found it: playing Mrs. Carrie Watts in a Broadway revival of Horton Foote's The Trip to Bountiful, with an all-Black cast.
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/28/621638033/cicely-tyson-commanding-actress-has-died-at-age-96
�Martha Graham (1894-1991)�Martha Graham Center for Contemporary Dance / Martha Graham Studio Theater�55 Bethune Street, West Village�
In 1926, Martha Graham founded her dance company and school, living and working out of a tiny Carnegie Hall studio in midtown Manhattan. In developing her technique, Martha Graham experimented endlessly with basic human movement, beginning with the most elemental movements of contraction and release. Using these principles as the foundation for her technique, she built a vocabulary of movement that would “increase the emotional activity of the dancer’s body.”
TIME magazine named Martha Graham “Dancer of the Century,” and People magazine named her among the female “Icons of the Century.” As a choreographer, she was as prolific as she was complex. Graham created 181 ballets and a dance technique that has been compared to ballet in its scope and magnitude. Her approach to dance and theater revolutionized the art form and her innovative physical vocabulary has irrevocably influenced dance worldwide. https://marthagraham.org/history
Martha Graham’s extraordinary artistic legacy has often been compared to Stanislavsky’s Art Theatre in Moscow and the Grand Kabuki Theatre of Japan, for its diversity and breadth. Her legacy is perpetuated in performance by the Martha Graham Dance Company and Graham 2 and by the students of the Martha Graham School.
Nydia Velasquez (b. 1953 )
Pura Belpre (1899-1982)
Sonia Sotomayor (b. 1954)�Associate Supreme Court Justice
Sonia Sotomayor
Shirley Chisholm�Campaign Headquarters at 1464 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn
Photo: en.wikipedia.org
Shirley Chisholm�State Office Building (downtown Brooklyn) and the new Shirley Chisholm State Park
Yuri Kochiyama, Activist (1921-2014)
Source: npr.org
Yuri Kochiyama
Anna Arnold Hedgeman (1899 –1990) �Civil rights leader who helped plan the 1963 March on Washington
Hedgeman was an African-American civil rights leader, politician, educator, and writer. After being the executive director of Harry Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign, Hedgeman was rewarded with an appointment in the new president's administration. In 1954 she was also appointed to the cabinet of New York City mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr., becoming the first African-American woman to hold a cabinet post in New York. �(wikipedia.org)
Photo from https://blackwomenwhoknowtheirworth.files.wordpress.com. Anna Hedgeman with Dr. King and Averill Harriman, former NY State Governor and Ambassador At-Large
Elsie Richardson (1922 – 2012)�Grassroots Community Organizer
Image credit: Granddaughter Celeste G. Lumpkins-Moses & Family
Ruth Bader Ginsberg (1933-2020)
Born in Brooklyn her family lived in a modest clapboard house at 1584 East 9th Street in Midwood, near the border of in a predominantly Jewish area.
She received her B.A. from Cornell University, attended Harvard Law School, and received her LLB from Columbia Law School.
Bader taught at Rutgers University Law School and then at Columbia University, where she became its first female tenured professor. She served as the director of the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union during the 1970s and was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1980. Named to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993 by President Bill Clinton, she continued to argue for gender equality in such cases as United States v. Virginia.
Photo of statue: brownstoner.com/Kevin Duggan
A statue of RGB was unveiled on March 12, 2021 in the lobby of the City Point Shopping Center in Downtown Brooklyn.
Women’s Rights Pioneers�The Mall, Central Park (2020)
photos by Hank Orenstein
���By 2030 the great Harriet Tubman is projected to replace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill
The End! Thank you for joining us!
Hank Orenstein, M.S.W.; Licensed NYC Sightseeing Guide; Licensed Associate Real Estate Broker�hank.orenstein@corcoran.com 646-596-3005 www.owningnewyork.com �