The Progressive Era – Page 14 – Empowering women through fiction and history.

This Month’s Woman in History: Nannie Helen Burroughs

Photo Credit: Nannie Helen Burroughs, 1909, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division: FloNight/Wikimedia Commons/PD US

For women to take on the entrepreneurial spirit in the 21^st century is not only accepted but supported. Women business owners have a lot of resources online and in their communities these days to help them build and grow their businesses in whatever field they choose. When they can’t get the job they want, they create it.

But in the early 20^th century, this wasn’t the case. In spite of the rise of the suffragist movement during this period, ideas about women’s place were still hampered by the previous century’s separate spheres. Even progressive women like Adele Gossling, the protagonist of my new series, The Adele Gossling Mysteries, is looked down upon by the inhabitants of her new home because she prefers running her stationery store and helping the police solve crimes over marriage and children.

One woman who took the entrepreneurial spirit to new heights and opened many doors for African-American women at the turn of the century was Nannie Helen Burroughs. The daughter of former slaves, Burroughs took her high scholastic achievements and applied for a job with the Washington D.C. public school system. She didn’t get it. So, like many women entrepreneurs, she decided to create the job she wanted. Her dream was to open her own school for girls that would teach them how to make their own living and give them the courage, strength, and education to fight for the rights of their people.

Burroughs began putting her plan into action by doing what many women entrepreneurs do: She worked at odd jobs to save up money to build her school. She solicited all the funds she could from the African-American community, refusing to accept donations from whites so she could dictate the curriculum of her school in her way. When she bought the buildings and land for her school, she did much of the work herself. She opened the doors to the National Training School for Women And Girls in 1909 and from the get-go, it was a huge success.

Photo Credit: Trades Hall, National Training School for Women and Girls, now the headquarters of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, taken by Farragutful on 8 July 2017: Farragutful/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY SA 4.0

Burroughs’ ideas of women’s education were progressive for her time. Like many New Women, she believed the sky was the limit to what girls could and should learn. At the same time, her school emphasized the importance of practical training so her girls would graduate with the skills to support themselves. The curriculum included courses in dressmaking and handicrafts along with literature and science. Like many New Women, Burroughs also believed in physical activity for girls, abhorring the previous century’s “delicate woman” and the school had its own basketball team.

Burroughs’ school evolved with the times, such as teaching skills relevant to women seeking work in factories during World War II. Upon her death in 1961, the National Training School for Women and Girls was renamed the Nannie Helen Burroughs School. Today, the six-acre complex houses several facilities, including the headquarters of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, a group that works for civil rights and social justice, and a private high school.

Let’s celebrate this amazing woman educator, suffragist/feminist, and civil rights activist during this Black History Month!

If you love fun, engaging mysteries set in the past, you’ll enjoy The Missing Ruby Necklace! It’s available exclusively to newsletter subscribers here. By signing up, you’ll also get news about upcoming releases, fun facts about women’s history, classic true-crime tidbits, and more!

A Gilded Age New Year

Photo Credit: Fanciful sketch of a New Year’s Eve celebration, Marguerite Martyn, 1914, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 4 January 1914, Editorial Section: BeenAroundAWhile/Wikimedia Commons/PD US

Since this is the holiday season, I’ve been reflecting on the holidays in history, particularly in the 19^th century. I wrote about Thanksgiving and Christmas in the Gilded Age. No holiday discussion could be complete without New Year’s.

New Year’s in the 19^th century was then, as it is today, about seeing off the old year and bringing in the new. In the earlier part of the century, celebrations were rather modest. It was not uncommon to have a “watch night” on New Year’s Eve where people (especially in rural areas) would watch and wait for the clock to strike midnight so they could leave their old sins behind and begin the new year fresh to commit new ones.

Gilded Agers turned New Year’s into a real party holiday for the same reasons they turned Thanksgiving into a dining extravaganza: They wanted to show off. So they threw lavish parties and “invitation only” balls that included eight-course dinners and plenty of champagne even before the clock struck midnight. There are anecdotes about these Gilded Age party-goers, most of them wealthy, who were indeed determined to leave their sins behind them in the old year. It was not uncommon for them to go from house party to house party, making complete fools of themselves, and getting their names in the society columns the next morning. What a way to start the new year!

There were other traditions that are staples of New Year’s which came in the 19^th century. One of them is the song “Auld Lang Syne,” a sentimental farewell to old friends and experiences. The song was actually an 18^th century ballad composed by Scottish poet Robert Burns, and the tradition of singing it at midnight on New Year’s Day began in the mid-19^th century, though it wasn’t until later in the 1920s that it became a permanent staple of our New Year’s tradition.

And the famous New Year’s Eve ball, that gigantic globe of light that drops at midnight every year in Times Square? That originated on New Year’s Day in 1905. The original ball was seven hundred pounds of iron and wood with a hundred light bulbs. The ball has been updated several times, the last in 2008, so it now weighs over twelve hundred pounds. Rather than lowered by hand with ropes as the original ball was, it now has a laser atomic clock located in Colorado.

I don’t think it’s a far stretch to say we still do, in a way, have our “watch night” where we wait impatiently for midnight to strike so we can let go of the old year’s sins and enter the new fresh. In fact, the reason New Year’s Day is on January 1st has to do with just that idea. Julius Cesar was the one who implemented the new calendar year to begin on that day, naming the first month of each new year January after Janus, the Roman god of new beginnings. Janus has two faces — one face facing front and the another face in the back of his head. Why? So that he can look back to the past and look forward to the present and future. For anyone who has read my fiction, this is exactly what my characters do. So, in essence, if I had to chose a holiday that belonged to the Waxwood Series, it would be New Year’s.

Want to read about how Vivian Alderdice looks back into the past to find her future? Start reading the Waxwood Series for only 99¢! Get all the information here.

Is the life of a Gilded Age debutante all parties and flirtations? Read “The Rose Debutante” to find out! It’s FREE! Plus, you’ll get to know about life in the past and about the resilient women the history books forgot. And how about fun historical facts, great deals on historical fiction books, and a cool monthly freebie thrown in just because? Here’s where you can sign up.

It’s Here… The Waxwood Series Relaunch!

All covers by Essi/100 Covers

Series: Waxwood Series, Book 4

Author: Tam May

Genres: Historical Women’s Fiction/Family Saga

Relaunch Date: November 1, 2021

How many myths and half-truths does it take to destroy a family?

Vivian, the daughter and “Dagger Girl”, whose refusal to leave family secrets untold leads her down a dark path to a better future.

Jake, the son, and heir, whose search for a father figure leads him down the dark path of sin and redemption.

Larissa, the family matriarch, whose obsession with Nob Hill’s rigid social codes hides the shameful secrets of her past.

Come dive into this family saga set during one of America’s Gilded Age today. Book 1 is only 99¢!

Click the following links below to get the full details and all the buy links for each book:

The Specter (Waxwood Series: Book 1): https://tammayauthor.com/books-2/waxwood-series/the-specter-waxwood-series-book-1

False Fathers (Waxwood Series: Book 2): https://tammayauthor.com/books-2/waxwood-series/false-fathers-waxwood-series-book-2

Pathfinding Women (Waxwood Series: Book 3): https://tammayauthor.com/books-2/waxwood-series/pathfinding-women-waxwood-series-book-3

Dandelions (Waxwood Series: Book 4): https://tammayauthor.com/books-2/waxwood-series/dandelionswaxwood-series-book-4

Want to read an excerpt from each book? There’s a group for that! Join Tam’s Dreamers and you’ll get access to extra files, including special excerpts and other goodies. Plus, fun stuff about the history you never knew (like Victorian-era pudding recipes and vintage Halloween stickers!). You can request to join by clicking the button below.

Tam’s Dreamers

About the Author

As soon as Tam May started writing at the age of fourteen, writing became her voice. She writes historical women’s fiction and historical mysteries. She loves to take readers into the nooks and crannies of the past, and she wants to inspire readers with her resilient and autonomous female characters. Most of her fiction is set in and around the San Francisco Bay Area because she fell in love with the city and found her independence and writing voice when she lived there in the 1990s.

Her book Lessons From My Mother’s Life debuted at #1 in its category on Amazon. She’s also published a Gilded age family saga set among San Francisco’s Nob Hill elite titled the Waxwood Series which follows the Alderdices as they discover their place amidst revolutionary changes and shifting values in the last decade of the 19th century.

Tam’s current project is a historical mystery series titled The Paper Chase Mysteries. The series takes place in Northern California at the turn of the 20th century and features amateur sleuth and epistolary expert Adele Gossling, a progressive and independent young woman whose talent for solving crimes comes into direct conflict with her new community apt to prefer the previous era’s angel in the house to the current century’s New Woman.

Tam lives in Texas but calls San Francisco and the Bay Area “home”. When she’s not writing, she’s reading classic literature, watching classic films, cross-stitching, or cooking yummy vegetarian dishes.

Social Media Links

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tammayauthor/

Instragram: https://www.instagram.com/tammayauthor/

Goodreads Author Page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/16111197.Tam_May

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/Tam-May/e/B01N7BQZ9Y/

BookBub Author Page: https://www.bookbub.com/authors/tam-may

To celebrate the relaunch of the Waxwood Series, I’m doing a big giveaway where you could win a grand prize that includes paperbacks of all four books in the series, swag, and chocolate. And there are a few smaller prizes on offer as well. To enter, click the button below.

Waxwood Series Relaunch Giveaway

Waxwood Series Relaunch Giveaway!!!

Gilded Age Technical Innovations: The Automobile

Photo Credit: Henry Ford’s first car, a Quadricycle Runabout, 1896, Midcoast Studios, Henry Ford Museum: The Henry Ford/Flickr/CC BY NC ND 2.0

We might see the late 20^th Century onward as the era of phenomenal technical innovation (think: personal computer, wifi, and the internet), but it was really the Gilded Age that started it. As I mentioned in this blog post, the Gilded Age (roughly the last quarter of the 19^th century) moved us into the modern era where the 20^th (and 21^st) centuries took over. Everything was getting a make-over then, including fashion, business, and politics. Technology was no exception.

Although cars didn’t really become popular until they became affordable (when Henry Ford released the Model T in 1908), they’re still probably one of the most earth-shattering of all the technical inventions created in the Gilded Age. When exactly the first car was manufactured is a matter of dispute, though people generally cite Carl Benz (of Mercedes-Benz fame) as being the first to come out with a three-wheeled automobile that ran on gasoline. The contraption was pretty modest, looking almost like a three-wheel bicycle with a fancy leather seat. The car was created in 1879 but didn’t get its first run until 1886.

The idea behind the early automobile can be found really in the word itself (which didn’t come about until 1897). The car was all about the ability to go where you wanted in a vehicle that ran on its own (as opposed to having an animal pull it). This is one reason why early automobiles were first referred to as “horseless carriages”. They were thought of as carriages just like any other (and many early 19^th century ones looked more like carriages and wagons than the cars we know today) except they didn’t need a horse to pull them.

Interestingly, early automobiles didn’t necessarily run on gasoline. Many ran on steam power (using a smilier principle as the steam engine, another new technological innovation of the 19^th century) and some even ran on electricity (hello, hybrid). In fact, early electric cars were often marketed to women (yes, women did drive cars in the early 20^th century, including author Edith Wharton and society etiquette queen, Emily Post) because they were elegant and easy to operate.

One of my favorite films is Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). The movie is based on a 1918 book (but takes place earlier) and documents the downfall of a wealthy Midwestern family. The shift from carriages to automobiles figures prominently in the story. Eugene Morgan, an old beau of Amberson matriarch Isabella, is a car manufacturer at a time when they were considered, in the words of Isabella’s son, a “useless nuisance”. In the film, there is a discussion of the automobile at the dinner table one night. The discussion brings out some of the fears people had about cars then, such as the value of exclusive neighborhood properties going down once cars allowed people to travel longer distances. Interestingly, the biggest “nuisance” we would consider with cars today (accidents) isn’t even mentioned, probably because the speed limit in the early 20^th century was less than 20 miles an hour outside city limits. The philosophical speech Morgan delivers about the automobile is that, like it or not, no one could stop this technological innovation from replacing the horse and buggy and, of course, this prediction proved right. By the 1910s, cars outnumbered horse-drawn carriages in many cities across America.

Photo Credit: Baker Electric Coupe 1908, taken by Lars-Göran Lindgren: Lglswe/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY SA 3.0

The Alderdices are, like the Ambersons, stuck in the past and are reluctant to embrace the new technologies that were already coming their way in the last decade of the 19^th century. In Book 2, Jake and Vivian is introduced to a custom-made car belonging to Stevens called the Brata. The name is fictional but the car itself was inspired by a real electric car manufactured by the Baker Motor Vehicle Company in 1909. The car attracted me and fit Stevens’ character, like the kind of car he would really own, so I adopted it, although the series takes place some ten years earlier. Interestingly, Jay Leno, a classic car enthusiast, restored one of the Baker Electric 1909 automobiles and you can see him driving it here.

Incidentally, cars also play a role in my upcoming historical cozy mystery series, The Paper Chase Mysteries. The protagonist and amateur sleuth, Adele Gossling, an up-and-coming New Woman, symbolically and literally invades the backward-thinking town of Arrojo in Book 1 when she shows up in a Beaton Roundabout (another fictional name for an automobile but inspired by the Stearns Steam Surrey, manufactured by the Stearns Steam Carriage Company in Syracuse, New York in 1902). If you’re curious, you can find a photo of the car here.

The Waxwood Series is about to get a complete makeover! All four books will be getting new covers and new blurbs in November. You can find out more about the series here.

Come join me for a peek into the corners of history! Curious about those nooks and crannies you can’t find in the history books? Are you more a people lover than a date or event lover when it comes to history? Then you’ll love the Resilient History Newsletter! Plus, when you sign up, you’ll get a prequel to my Waxwood Series for free! Here’s where you can sign up.