history – Page 7 – Empowering women through fiction and history.

Ghosts From the Past: Penelope Alderdice in The Specter

My historical family saga, the Waxwood Series is about more than just an affluent Nob Hill family coming to grips with the startling changes happening in the last decade of the 19^th century. It’s also a story about a Gilded Age family whose lies, half-truths, and myths force every one of its members to change. And it begins not with the current generation but with the previous generation.

It begins with Penelope Alderdice, protagonist Vivian’s grandmother. Penelope, in spite of her old-fashioned name, is one of the most evolutionary characters in the series. When I wrote the novel on which this series was based back in 2014, she wasn’t even a character. When I turned the novel into a family saga, I added the grandparents because, by definition, family sagas tell the story of several generations. I wanted to write a series about generational trauma: The trauma past generations pass down to present and future generations. As this is something I’ve experienced first-hand, the topic is very close to me. I knew Vivian’s story of breaking the cycle would only be meaningful if readers knew where that cycle began.

Since this post is about grandmothers, I thought I’d show a few photos of my own. The first is my grandmother and grandfather with me in 2011, the year they both passed away. The second is of my great-grandmother (whom many in my family say I resemble in looks and personality). I don’t know when this photo was taken but she died in 1966 so probably sometime in the late 50s or early 60s.

In 2017, I started my newsletter and wanted to give subscribers a free gift for signing up. So I took a scene from the old novel and expanded it into a short story called “After the Funeral”. The plot took place at Penelope Alderdice’s funeral where an uninvited guest claimed to have known “Grace” in her youth, revealing an entirely different person than the Penelope that Vivian knew. As I was developing the books in the series, I realized Penelope’s story had to be expanded into a book. That story became The Specter, the first book of the Waxwood Series.

I realized my earlier mistake in dismissing Penelope as just another Angel in the House. She was, in fact, a much more complex character, emotionally and socially. Her secrets follow Vivian like the ghost in the book’s title. Penelope’s story, which begins about halfway through The Specter, tells of the sort of woman you would expect to see in Gertrude Atherton’s The Californians, a book about San Francisco’s high society in its infancy in the 1850s and 1860s. Penelope’s upbringing prepares her for her role as the wife of a successful San Francisco businessman, but there is more to her than that. Her one moment of rebellion in 1852 has ramifications for the entire family, past, present, and future.

What those ramifications are, you’ll have to read about in the series. But you can start with The Specter, which has been updated with a new prologue and a better pace (at the request of readers). You can get your hands on it for free here https://tammayauthor.com/books-2/waxwood-series/the-specter-waxwood-series-book-1.

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

More Than Brando’s Mouthpiece: Sacheen Littlefeather

This month is American Indian Heritage Month so I wanted to celebrate a classic Indian American actress. I came across this article from the Vintage News website in my Facebook feed last month about Sacheen Littlefeather who passed away on October 2. However, Littlefeather was known as an activist for American Indian rights more than for her acting. But what fascinated me about her story was how in 1973 she made headlines when, in Marlon Brando’s name, she went onstage to decline the Oscar he won for his role in The Godfather.

Photo Credit: Sacheen Littlefeather standing in front of the Oscar statue holding Marlon Brando’s statement declining the Oscar for The Godfather, 45th Annual Academy Awards ceremony, 27 March 1973, UCLA Library Special Collections: TarkusAB/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0

The story behind her appearance at the Oscars has now become legendary. Before the 1973 Oscars, an incident occurred at Wounded Knee where Oglala Dakota and the American Indian Movement entered the town and took over in protest of Native American inequality and were eventually driven out by law enforcement. This incident sparked Marlon Brando’s rage and prompted him to declare that if he won the Oscar for The Godfather, he would decline it in protest of how American Indians were portrayed in films and television and treated by the film industry.

When the announcement that Brando had won came, people were surprised to see a young woman appear on the stage in traditional Apache dress, holding up her hand to decline the Oscar statuette. The story goes that Brando prepared a long speech for Littlefeather to deliver but the producers of the show threatened to have her forcefully removed from the stage if she didn’t keep it to thirty seconds. Put in a difficult position, Littlefeather handled it with dignity and grace. She condensed Brando’s wordy speech to a few eloquent and respectful words as to why he was declining the Oscar (you can watch that here). She endured booing and racial slurs from the audience, and John Wayne had to be restrained from attacking her onstage. The incident got her blacklisted from Hollywood and she never worked as an actress again.

Many have criticized Brando, accusing him of being a coward and sending a young woman to do his dirty work. There’s no doubt Littlefeather showed more courage and grace than Brando in facing the hostile Oscar crowd and backstage reporters. But Littlefeather maintained it was her idea to go in place of Brando and she did it to put across her message of inequality and prejudice that many American Indians working in Hollywood had to endure at the time and she never regretted what she did.

Let’s celebrate the courage and dignity of American Indians like Sacheen Littlefeather to stand up for their equality and heritage this month!

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Celebrating American Nurses During World War I

I have a special place in my heart for nurses because my mom was a nurse back in the 1980s. She worked in the ER of our local hospital for a while and then became a home healthcare nurse. Though she retired from the profession when my parents moved back to Israel, she still to this day uses her medical expertise to advocate for family members and friends and help them maneuver through the Israeli healthcare system.

So today, on Veteran’s Day, it seemed fitting to honor war nurses. I wanted to take a look especially at World War I since this war is in the time frame of my Adele Gossling Mysteries (well, not yet, but it eventually will be.) Although called the Great War, it’s more like the Forgotten War these days (usurped by World War II).

Photo Credit: Nurses in Rouen, France during World War I preparing to go to the front lines, from Good Housekeeping, Oct 1918: Picryl/Copyright: No known restrictions

World War I saw a lot of bloodshed and tragedy (if you want to read more about this war, you can read this blog post) and even though Americans didn’t get into the battle until about a year and a half before its end, American soldiers still saw plenty of fighting and nurses did plenty of healing. Sadly, many of these nurses didn’t get the honor and credit they deserved.

Linnie Leckrone was one of these. She was a nurse in one of the toughest situations during wartime: She was part of a unit that helped soldiers who were under constant artillery attack. She helped many soldiers under gas and shock in the most frightening conditions. However, where many men who came home from the war received a hero’s welcome, Leckrone got nothing when she came back to her hometown of Portage, Wisconsin. However, all is not lost, as in 2007, Leckrone received a posthumous Silver Star medal for her bravery and courage, which her daughter accepted.

Unlike, Leckrone, Lenah Higbee did receive her due. Higbee actually joined the US Navy Nurses Corps in 1908 and endured a lot of caustic remarks for doing so. But Higbee, dedicated to her work, persevered, and eventually became the second woman superintendent of the corps. Her work during World War I helping wounded Navy soldiers earned her the Navy Cross and her name on a battleship!

Not all nurses during World War I worked on the front lines. Working behind the scenes was Anna Caroline Maxwell, who is often referred to as the American Florence Nightingale. Earlier in the 20th century, she helped establish proper training and education for nurses by establishing the US Army Nurse Corps, and during the war, she not only trained nurses in their duties but helped them prepare psychologically for the rigors of war. The French awarded her the Medal of Honor for Public Health for her work.

War isn’t just about the men. It’s also about the women who heal them, so let’s salute all veteran war nurses on this day!

Tragedy and Survival: The Ohlone of California

Today is Columbus Day, a day many of us in America learned about in school. When I learned about it (I won’t tell you how long ago that was…) teachers only talked about Columbus but not about the people already inhabiting America or about their suffering and their strength. Luckily, we live in much more enlightened times and kids today are also taught that this is also Indigenous Peoples’ Day, a celebration not just of Columbus but also of the Indigenous people who were already on American soil.

Photo Credit: A modern Ohlone family in traditional Ohlone dress, taken 21 February 2-15 and displayed in the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, CA: Noahedits/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.0

I came across the history of the Ohlone of California after doing research for Book 5 of the Adele Gossling Mysteries (coming out next year). I was interested in Native American tribes that settled specifically in the Bay Area and the Ohlone interested me. Calling the Ohlone a “tribe” is actually incorrect. These people indigenous to the Bay Area actually made up at least fifty tribes with different languages, practices, and cultures. The Ohlone population decreased with rapidity during the years Mexico owned California for several reasons, including infant mortality, plagues, and persecution. By the mid-nineteenth century, the Ohlone population had been reduced by almost ninety percent.

That was also the time when the already dwindling Ohlone population suffered more tragedies at the hands of the new American government, as California became a state in 1850. Massacres took away more of their people and the government took away much of the land that had been theirs. By the turn of the century, there were less than fifty Ohlone people left and the majority of them lived more of a Mexican than an Ohlone life.

We can be thankful that today, the diverse tribes of the Ohlone have been recognized and the culture of these tribes revitalized and celebrated.

So happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day!

Amateur Doctors: Forensic Pathology in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

It’s well known that mourning practices were an art form in the 19th and early 20th centuries. When I did quite a lot of research on mourning for my Gilded Age family saga, the Waxwood Series, there was no shortage of information. These rituals and fascination with death is the subject of a future blog post.

Indeed, when it came to mourning death, early Americans were experts. But when it came to explaining death, that was a different story. It’s understandable when we think of how uncomfortable any discussion of death makes many of us feel. I have a friend who builds alters to honor the dead, and she’s always saying how difficult it is for her to talk about what she does because she’s afraid of getting into morbid territory and making people squirm.

Photo Credit: Woman in mourning, carte de visite photograph, 1860s, Nashville, Tennessee: Et0048/Wikimedia Commons/PD US expired

And yet, in cases where death isn’t obvious (such as from illness or accident), it’s the law (then and now) to investigate the cause to determine if foul play was involved. For this, a medical examiner is called in and a pathologist (who may or may not be the medical examiner) conducts an autopsy on the body.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, you couldn’t even say American forensic pathology was in its infancy. More like it was in the womb. The role of the medical examiner was pretty ad hoc and didn’t even officially exist until the 1930s. Examiners were not explicitly trained in pathology and often were local doctors who were good at treating the living but had little experience examining the dead. They were amateurs in pathology, though there’s no doubt many of them did the best they could.

In addition, medical examiners and pathologists were, like policemen and mayors, government-appointed, and as such, they were subject to the kind of corruption that ran rampant in the 19th and early 20th centuries (until the Progressive movement called for reforms). In other words, these men could be bribed to cover up evidence for various reasons. Maybe the victim was a well-respected citizen of the town and the pathology brought up something that pointed toward a less-than-stellar life the influential family didn’t want to be made public. Or maybe the examination of the victim showed foul play that would require important people to be involved in the case who didn’t want to be involved. The examination might even implicate someone important to the town in a dastardly crime so evidence needs to be covered up or distorted. I’m reading a true crime book right now about the death of a woman in the early 20th century where the writers surmise this is exactly what happened.

Pathology (whatever little of it there was in the early 20th century) plays a role in Book 3 of my Adele Gossling Mysteries, though not in a corrupt or gruesome way. A doctor is asked to write out a new death certificate because what looked like an accident proves to be anything but. It was possible to retract the death certificate if further examination suggested otherwise. This is what starts the investigation into Thea Marsh’s death in the book.

Death At Will is coming out at the end of this month, but you can grab your copy now at a special preorder price here. And did you know Book 1 of the series, The Carnation Murder, is now free? Get your copy here.