History - Women

by Brenda Wilbee

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by Brenda Wilbee

She Could Out Pray and Out Preach White Patriarchy 
Born a slave in 1797​​​​ on the estate of Colonel Johannes Hardenbergh Jr. - a Revolutionary War hero and wealthy landowner 95 miles north of New York City - Isabella (Belle) was born child #9 to James Baumfree and Elizabeth Bett. She carried no memory of her older siblings; the Colonel had a habit of selling them off. Nor did she remember the Colonel. She was a toddler when he died in 1799.

She did remember his son...

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by Brenda Wilbee

GRACE AND GRIT MIGHT WELL HAVE BEEN THE NAMES of these two Van Buren sisters. My guess is you've never heard of Augusta and Adeline - Gussie and Addie as they preferred to be called.

We want to. 

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by Brenda Wilbee

A WOMAN KNOWN ONLY as the Lone Woman has a story we cannot know. Yet we try.

She was born on San Nicholas Island off the coast of Santa Barbara’s Channel Islands in the early 1800s, a small outcropping of sandstone and sea mist, home to the Nicoleño for millennia. In 1835, the Catholic Church rounded up those who remained, but she got left behind. Subsequent searches found no trace of her. She was given up for dead and became the legendary Lone Woman.... Until found in 1853.

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by Brenda Wilbee

Sometimes we use I Corinthians 10:13 to deny the power of evil, and in doing so we let evil reign. Interpreting the word “temptation” to mean circumstances or events or crushing stress rather than what it does mean—temptation to do wrong—we blind ourselves to people whose burdens really are too heavy to bear. Erroneously assured in our minds that God will not allow too much stress to accumulate in a neighbor’s life, we sit back and allow our neighbor to suffer more than he or she can withstand.

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by Brenda Wilbee

WAS MARY, fiance of Joseph, at the well in Nazareth when the stranger approached? Or was she washing butter, packing it into earthen vessels? What was she doing when a man she’d never seen before said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.”

I wonder, did the bucket fall from her hand, warm water splash across her hot and dusty feet? Did she drop her bowl? Did it break? Did she hasten to gather the precious butter coated now in dust and dirt? Kneeling, scooping, heart beating fast?

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by Brenda Wilbee

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by Brenda Wilbee

When ISABEL "SOJOURNER TRUTH" was born a slave in 1797 in Hurley, NY, it was against the law to sell a slave South. Yet when a former master sold her five-year-old son Peter to a Dr. Gedney (who in turn sold him to his brother Solomon), it didn’t stop Solomon Gedney from selling the little boy to his sister’s brother, an Alabama planter. Outraged and grief-stricken, Sojourner Truth confronted Solomon Gedney’s wife. When she got no satisfaction, she appealed to Mrs. Gedney the matron, mother of the man who’d illegally sold her son. 

“Ugh!” said Mrs. Gedney. “A fine fuss to make about a little nigger!

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by Brenda Wilbee

BEFORE Anne Hutchinson was born, her father Francis Marbury had been thrown into English prisons three times for his Puritan views. His daughter, Anne Marbury Richardson, must have gotten her steel from him. She needed it, for she ran afoul of the Purtians themselves—in the New World. They held little tolerance for anyone else. 

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by Brenda Wilbee

In February, I visited the Orchard House in Concord, MA, where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women in 1868: The same year my great-grandmother Isabella Stewart was born in Denholm, Scotland, clear across the ocean. Such different lives! Granny lived in the heart of the Scottish borderlands—daughter of a poor agricultural laborer on Hall Rule Farm, where barefooted she hoed onions to help support the family. Louisa May Alcott was already an established writer by the time Isabella came along, and although she didn’t hoe onions to support her family’s crippling poverty, her prolific writing made her the primary bread winner.

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