19th century – Page 6 – Empowering women through fiction and history.

America’s First Female Private Eye: Kate Warne

Most Americans know the story of the Lincoln assassination on that fateful night at Ford’s Theater on April 15, 1865. Too bad Kate Warne wasn’t on the job.

Who was Kate Warne? Only the first woman private detective, one of those women that history forgot. But as we’re wrapping up Women’s History Month, let’s take a peek at this amazing woman’s life.

Warne was a bold widow who, in 1856, walked into the Pinkerton Detective Agency and asked its founder, Allan Pinkerton, for a job. And not just any job. She asked for a job as a private detective.

Keep in mind this was the era of the separate spheres. Women were delegated to the home, church, and family. They did not get involved in law and order. But Warne knew she could be a huge asset to the Pinterketons because she was a woman. Women were invisible beings at that time. No one paid much attention to what they said or did as long as they were respectable and didn’t rock the boat. So who better to do undercover work than a woman?

This is exactly what Warne did. Her first case was to get a confession out a Southern embezzler. She got it by taking a woman’s route: She befriended the man’s wife and circulated in society as a widow under the name of “Mrs. Cherry.”

Photo Credit: Kate Warne, watercolor portrait, cropped, 1866, unknown artist, Chicago History Museum: Benjamin.P.L./Wikimedia Commons/PD US Expired

Her biggest assignment came in 1861. The newly-elected Lincoln was traveling by train from Illinois to Washington for his inauguration when rumors of a plot to assassinate the newly elected president began circulating. Using her beauty and charm, Warne got in with the Southerners on the train, including secessionists, and learned the details of a plot to take Lincoln in Baltimore. She and Pinkerton himself helped Lincoln to get through Baltimore by disguising the president-elect and coveting him in a sleeping berth for the Baltimore leg of the trip. Her wiliness and womanliness saved Lincoln from assassination — that time.

Warne continued her undercover work during the Civil War, mainly as a spy who picked up information in Southern society and passed that information on to the Northern army. Her success as a private eye encouraged Pinkerton to continue hiring women for his agency, many of whom Warne supervised. Sadly, Warne’s work came to a premature end when she died in her mid-30s.

My amateur sleuth, Adele Gossling, also uses her feminine wiles to help the police solve crimes. Unlike Warne, her status as a New Woman at the turn of the century gives her much more of a voice and a presence in the world. But she can wheedle information out of anyone, including a bumbling assistant deputy sheriff and a rough-edge cowboy named Rainer.

To read all about that, pick up a copy of The Carnation Murder, Book 1 of the Adele Gossling Mysteries, now at 99¢, here.

If you love fun, engaging mysteries set in the past, sign up for my newsletter to receive a free book, plus news about upcoming releases, fun facts about women’s history and mystery, and more freebies! You can sign up here.

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/

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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

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.

The Great Rebellion: The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848

Although this photo is from a later period in history, it nonetheless depicts one of the objections to women’s rights — that the “natural order of things” in terms of gender roles would be reversed and men would have to do the housework while women went out into the political arena.

Photo Credit: A woman wearing knickers (“pants”) and smoking a cigarette while her husband does the washing, 1901, Underwood & Underwood: P. S. Burton/Wikimedia Commons/PD Underwood

Today marks the anniversary of the start of what Elizabeth Cady Stanton called the greatest rebellion of the 19^th century: The Seneca Falls Convention.

The convention grew out of a moment of oppression. The World Anti-Slavery Convention took place in London in 1840, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, met there for the first time. Both were denied entry into the convention because organizers decided to bar all women from attending. From this was born the idea in Cady Stanton and Mott’s minds to organize a convention closer to home to discuss women’s rights.

This event took place in Seneca Falls, New York on the weekend of July 19^th and 20^th in 1848 and became the first organized political gathering for women. You may recall I wrote here about the idea of suffragism (the right to vote). But was the convention really focused on women’s suffragism? Yes and no. Certainly, the right to vote was on the agenda, but as I mentioned in my blog post above, it wasn’t considered of the utmost importance, though it would be later on in the movement. What was high on the agenda was the idea that women were equal to men. You might recall from my discussion of the separate spheres that it was generally thought women were weaker than men emotionally and mentally, and therefore, their confinement to the private sphere was justified. So the idea that women were equal in every way was, as Cady Stanton declared, revolutionary indeed.

To this end, the attendees of the convention (there were 300 of them) came up with a Declaration of Sentiments. The name, of course, suggests the Declaration of Independence, and this is no surprise, as the wording stems directly from that document. You can read the entire Declaration of Sentiments and see the names of some of the movers and shakers of the suffragist and abolitionist movements (including Frederick Douglass) who signed the declaration here.

Reactions to the convention were mixed. Some reporters and editors considered the idea of women meeting to talk about their rights as nothing short of lunacy. Others were afraid it would lead to a gender role reversal (as the cartoon above shows). Still others, like the famous Horace Greenly of the New York Tribune, begrudgingly admitted suffragists might be on to something when they insist women were created equal to men in the eyes of God and humanity.

Although the convention wasn’t perfect (it was haphazardly organized and attended mainly by locals,) it gave rise to the idea that women’s rights were worth putting on the political agenda of the 19^th century. Also, like the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique nearly 120 years later (which I talk about here,) the convention triggered a movement that followed into the 20^th century, creating not just one but several waves and generations of fighters for women’s rights.

I talk about women’s rights in the late 19^th century a lot in my Waxwood Series, and it also will come up in my upcoming historical cozy mystery series, The Paper Chase Mysteries. Book 3 of the Waxwood Series, Pathfinding Women is especially focused on the suffragist movement and some of the conflicts within that movement (though more in a personal than political sense).

Want to explore the nooks and crannies of history that aren’t in the history books? Like social and psychological history and not just historical events? Want in on exclusive sneak peeks, giveaways, and surveys? Then sign up for my newsletter! You’ll get a free short story when you do.