Category Archives: What I’m Making

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs, What I'm Making

Know Your Worth for Ida B. Wells-Barnett

KNOW YOUR WORTH for Ida B. Wells-Barnett, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project.
You can purchase this print here.

Ida B. Wells was a Black person born in 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Ida B. Wells-Barnett died in 1931 in Chicago, Illinois. If you know anything about U.S. history you can see how amazing her place and time is for our country. (Slavery –> Civil War–>Reconstruction –> Jim Crow –> Great Migration –> WW1 –> women’s suffrage.)

Also, Ida was a superhero. Her superpowers are self esteem and journalism.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s life cannot be summarized. But I will try, with a list and two stories, and some resources so you can learn more. Let me start with the stories.

Story 1.
Ida’s father, Jim, was the only son of his enslaver, Morgan Wells, by his enslaved mother, Peggy. Morgan cared for his son enough to apprentice him to a carpenter, but not enough to set him free, apparently. Ida said that Jim was the “comfort and companion” of his white father. Morgan’s wife, Margaret, had no children herself. When Morgan died, Margaret had Peggy (Ida’s grandmother) “stripped and whipped.” Later, during the Civil War when many Southerners had little to eat, Margaret was starving. And Peggy saved Margaret’s life. 

When I first read this story I thought, what a compassionate and moral person Peggy was! After reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson I thought, maybe it was Stockholm syndrome? Now I’m thinking it’s all of that, but mostly, it is so complicated. 

Story 2.
At the beginning of 1913 Ida started a Black women’s suffrage club in Chicago. She was assisted by two white suffragists, Virginia Brooks and Belle Squire. One of the first things the club did was raise money so that Ida could represent them by joining the Illinois contingent at the spectacular suffrage procession in Washington D.C. (a brain child of perSISTER Alice Paul). When this group was mustering for the parade, they were told that Black women would have to march at the back so that they would not offend the Southern white women, who had threatened to leave the procession. Ida eloquently refused, and Brooks and Squire tried to support their friend and promised to march with Ida elsewhere in the parade. As the procession started they could not find Ida. They started marching with their contingent and Ida came forth from the sidelines and linked arms with her friends and marched with the Illinois group and no one tried to stop her. This was reported, along with a photograph, in the Chicago Tribune of March 5, 1913.

These stories show the struggle for feminism to be inclusive, and thus are at the hub of how to understand Female Power.

Following is a  list of some of my favorite things about Ida B. Wells-Barnett and some things I learned while researching her. There are many more amazing things to learn about Ida.

• Ida’s first memory is of reading the newspaper out loud to her father’s admiring friends.

• At 16, Ida became responsible for her 5 surviving siblings when her parents died in a Yellow Fever epidemic.

• Ida loved to dress well and regretted spending rent money on a new hat. She called anger her consuming sin.

• Ida bit the conductor’s hand when he dragged her out of her seat in the first class ladies train car. She sued the train company and won the case but lost on appeal. She knew she deserved to be treated like a lady. There were not equal first class accommodations for Black people.

• She started out earning money as a school teacher. Then she started in journalism by writing letters to the papers and editing the publication of the lyceum cultural group she was a part of. There was a thriving African-American press with many newspapers, many published by churches. She made a name for herself, exhorting her people to improve themselves, and criticizing shortcomings, and soon she was being paid for her writing. She agreed to be the editor of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight in exchange for an ownership share. She later worked hard to increase circulation around the region and printed the newspaper on pink stock so that people could find it easily on the newsstand.

• She lost her teaching job when she exposed poor conditions in the schools, corruption on the school board, and the questionable morals of some teachers. She exposed a philandering Christian minister and the community of ministers who closed ranks to protect him. When they threatened to attack her livelihood by telling their congregations to stop buying the Free Speech, she exposed their threats and they backed down and the misbehaving minister was penalized.

• When her close friends were lynched in Memphis she investigated the crime. She showed that they had been tortured and murdered because they were successfully competing with a white-run business.

• There used to be about the same number of lynchings targeting whites and Blacks.

• She started looking in to the rising number of lynchings of Black people. Until she started reporting on these, lynchings had been accepted by people, both white and Black people as the lynching victim’s fault. She found that Black economic success prompted white retribution. She also found that most of the so-called rapes of white women were really consensual sexual relationships. Because of sexual and racial politics, there was hardly any way for a white woman and a Black man to legally love each other.

• She riled things up in Memphis when she encouraged Black people to withhold their labor, to stop spending money at white businesses, and to just move away, because they were not safe there. She maintained that Black people deserve the protection of the laws. 

• Six thousand Black people left for Kansas and Oklahoma after Ida wrote her articles on the Memphis lynching. White businesses suffered from this loss. Black people stopped riding the streetcars and the streetcar owners came to Ida to ask her to assure the Black riders that the newly electrified cars were safe. Ida wrote about this visit and told her people to keep up the boycott.

• She started carrying a pistol in her purse. She writes: “I’d already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit.”

• On May 21, 1892, Wells published an editorial in the Free Speech refuting what she called “that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape White women. If Southern men are not careful, … a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” She had many examples of consensual relationships between white women and Black men. Shortly afterward a mob destroyed her newspaper and office equipment and white people made it clear that Ida herself would be murdered if she returned to Memphis from her trip to New York. She never returned to Memphis.

• The white press would often slander her. She looked into suing some of them, and her lawyer recommended another lawyer, Ferdinand Barnett, to investigate Ida to see if any of the slander could be true. He couldn’t find anything bad but she decided it wouldn’t be worth her time and money to go forward with the suit. She later ended up marrying Ferdinand Barnett. He knew well what he was getting into. From what I have read he supported her 100%.

• She did more than anybody else during her lifetime to elucidate and fight the rising tide of organized extrajudicial violence against Black people. It worked.

• She worked hard to develop organizations for Black women and Black people so that there would be some persuasive authority to defend the rights of African-Americans. She worked to establish the NAACP but in a sneaky and confusing move, W.E.B. De Bois excluded her from the first board and she later regretted leaving in a huff.

• She would speak to mayors and governors, complete with Shakespearian references, and sometimes get them to do the right thing.

• She researched and investigated, sometimes incognito. She wrote clearly and simply. She was a persuasive public speaker. She understood the power of words, and through words she had power. She was smart. She was tough. She was prudish, but probably not more than any other higher-than-working-class Victorian. She cared deeply about Black people and women and working people. She had a passion for justice. She appreciated beautiful things. She didn’t believe that Black people should accept inferior status. She knew her worth. She knew that Black lives matter.

DESIGN NOTE

I’ve chosen to work from this photograph of Ida because she is looking directly at the camera. The more iconic images of her when she was younger have her looking off to the side, perhaps it is a  Victorian style of feminine depictions. I prefer the image to confront us directly. 

Photo: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. “Ida B. Wells, journalist and civil rights activist” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1920 – 1929. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/87aada9f-45f3-e71c-e040-e00a180662cd

RESOURCES

Wikipedia, of course. I just sent them some $$.

IDA A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching by Paula J. Giddings

Crusade for Justice by Ida B. Wells (her unfinished autobiography), edited by Alfreda M. Duster

Ida B. Wells: A Passion For Justice: The Pioneering African American Journalist & Activist documentary by William Greaves from 1989, available through public libraries via Kanopy. Especially wonderful is Toni Morrison reading some of the fiercer bits from Crusade for Justice.

Works by Ida B. Wells at Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/5765

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs, What I'm Making

Junko Tabei, VENTURE

VENTURE for Junko Tabei, perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project.
You can purchase this print here.

I love to go where I’ve never been before.

Junko Tabei (née Ishibashi; 22 September 1939 – 20 October 2016) was a Japanese mountaineer, author, and teacher.

In 1969 Tabei started the first women’s climbing club in Japan, not to emphasize the woman part, but in order to avoiding the annoying men who gave her a hard time in other climbing clubs. The Club embarked on their first expedition in 1970, climbing the Nepalese mountain Annapurna III. They successfully reached the summit using a new route on the south side, achieving the first female and first Japanese ascent of the mountain.

Mountain climbing of this caliber ran counter to the feminine indoctrination required of Japanese women. The climbers in the club had to transform themselves:

“Her job as group leader required asking a lot of questions, but many people in Japan consider this—to admit you don’t know something—a sign of weakness. The image of the woman whose strength is her ability to remain silent is still powerful in Japan.

“When we began the climb we were determined to only show each other our strong sides,” Tabei says. “When you are climbing a mountain, your life depends on the exact opposite. You can’t be reserved and not say what you think or feel.”

Several of the women on the Annapurna III ascent became sick from the altitude. Yet no one wanted to admit to weakness. Tabei was responsible for her fellow climbers, and she needed to know the truth about their conditions and capabilities. “You need to have a relationship where, when you’re climbing, you can say, ‘I need to go slower,’” she says.

Go slow they did, eventually reaching the summit [of Annapurna III] on May 19, 1970. The ascent profoundly changed Tabei. For her, there would be no more slaving into the late hours to prove she was her company’s most loyal worker. No more fears about speaking her mind. No more concerns about what people said behind her back. “If people want to call me ‘that crazy mountain woman,’ that’s O.K.,” she says.”   (Robert Horn in Sports Illustrated, April 29, 1996)

She was the first woman to summit Everest, in 1975, as part of a team of women, but for logistical reasons she was the only one who made it to the top. When she got there she didn’t cry out in celebration, she just thought, “Oh, I don’t have to climb any more.” Later she said that she didn’t understand why men made such a big deal out of climbing Everest, it’s just a mountain. Still: “There was never any question in my mind that I wanted to climb that mountain, no matter what other people said.” 

Oh, and on that Everest climb her team had been buried in an avalanche. Tabei had been rescued by one of their Sherpas, who pulled her out of the snow by her feet. It was two days before she was well enough to proceed.

She never accepted corporate sponsorship after Mount Everest, preferring to remain financially independent. She saved money to fund her expeditions by working as an editor, making paid public appearances, guiding mountain-climbing tours, and tutoring local children in music and English. Tabei’s friends and supporters sometimes donated food and equipment.

Tabei was instrumental in the movement to clean up the mountain climbing routes which were getting buried with climbers’ trash. This meant organizing expeditions with the sole purpose of cleaning up the environment. Tabei also wrote seven books during her life.

In 1992 she was the first woman to complete the Seven Summits challenge by climbing the highest peak on each of the seven continents: Everest (1975), Kilimanjaro (1980), Mt. Aconcagua (1987), Denali (1988), Mt. Elbrus (1989), Mount Vinson (1991), and Puncak Jaya (1992). By 2005, Tabei had taken part in 44 all-female mountaineering expeditions around the world.

When she died at 77 years old in 2016 she had only stopped climbing for two weeks. Her goal had been to climb the highest peak in every country, even though she had been battling cancer since 2012. She had made it up the highest peak in 76 countries. A google search tells me there are 195 countries. She must have known she would never achieve the goal, but still she kept going.

An astronomer named an asteroid “6897 Tabei” after her and in 2019, a mountain range on Pluto was named “Tabei Montes” in her honor.

SOURCES

Wikipedia

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1008036/3/index.htm

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/22/498971169/japanese-climber-junko-tabei-first-woman-to-conquer-mount-everest-dies-at-77

https://vault.si.com/vault/1996/04/29/no-mountain-too-high-for-her-junko-tabei-defied-japanese-views-of-women-to-become-an-expert-climber

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs, What I'm Making

Alice Paul: DISOBEY

DISOBEY for Alice Paul, perSISTERS series print in the Female Power Project.
You can purchase this print here.

Seize the Vote.

Here is a new design for Alice Paul.

The first thing I want to say about Alice Paul is that she was not an intersectional feminist. She believed that the problems of Black women were caused by racism, which she thought was a separate struggle, and Alice’s strategy did not include foregrounding the liberation of Black women. She thought that full inclusion of Black women in suffrage activities would alienate the white women in the South and she decided that it was more important to unify white women than to fully include ALL women. She thereby lost the chance to use the full power and voice of Black women to further the cause of women’s rights, and missed the opportunity to amplify Black women’s voices. We now know that this was the wrong thing to do. It is always the right thing to listen to Black women and amplify their voices. I am glad to say that Ida B. Wells-Barnett, another perSISTER I celebrate (coming soon!), refused to be segregated during the great women’s suffrage procession of March 3, 1913 (organized by Alice Paul and others). She insisted on walking with her group from Chicago, even though the Illinois delegation forbade it. Ida’s resolve had to be twice as strong for her to march there, then.

(Still, on this Library of Congress page highlighting some of the women arrested and imprisoned for their role in suffrage protests, you can see several African American women: https://www.loc.gov/collections/women-of-protest/articles-and-essays/gallery-of-suffrage-prisoners/)

Alice Paul (January 11, 1885 – July 9, 1977) was an American Quaker, suffragist, feminist, women’s rights activist, and one of the main leaders and strategists during the final rounds of the multi-generational fight for women’s right to vote in the U.S. Her militant and confrontational tactics were vital in the success of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. 

The battle for the vote was long and tangled and powered by different groups approaching the problem from different angles, while not really getting along. Alice Paul was quite literally written out of the history because the history was written by more genteel factions. Also, she didn’t like to seek attention for herself personally. Only lately has Alice been acknowledged for her vital role in this struggle. We are more ready to accept militant women now.

Alice Paul was brilliant and highly educated, earning many degrees, including a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1910, and a doctorate in Civil Law from American University in 1928. But it was while she was in England that she gained her most life-changing education. 

Basically, she learned that the human misery she had seen during her settlement house work (in the U.S.) could not be fixed through social work, because it was created by deep systems of oppression. She realized that social change required equal legal status for women. She took up with the English women’s suffrage movement and learned to Disobey: she was willing to risk physical harm while confronting powerful men at public events and then gaining public sympathy when she was beaten and hauled off to jail. It was shocking to the public to see women treated this way. She also learned to demand to be treated as a political prisoner upon arrest. Hunger strikes were another tactic, and then educating the public about the torture of forced-feeding. Alice was arrested seven times and imprisoned three times during her English sojourn. Her health damaged, she returned to the U.S. in 1910 to recover and do suffrage work back home.

In the U.S., Alice and her comrade Lucy Burns (a suffrage activist she had met in jail in England—also an American) created the National Woman’s Party (NWP) and used comparatively tamer tactics than they had in England. Their six-day-a-week silent picketing in front of the White House is their most famous activity and it turned out to be highly effective. Members of the group also suffered from police and prison brutality, culminating on November 14, 1917 in the “Night of Terror” which was a turning point in the suffrage struggle. The imprisoned women were beaten and tortured and the brutality and misogyny shocked people. 

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/radical-protests-propelled-suffrage-movement-heres-how-new-museum-captures-history-180976114/

There are so many interesting things that happened and a lot of places to read about this, and there’s just not enough space to tell the story here. https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote
See:
https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/alice-paul
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Paul

Having won passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920, in 1923 Alice Paul wrote the text of the Equal Rights Amendment, which has still not become part of our constitution. Astonishingly, Alice Paul survived until 1977, well into the flowering of second wave feminism. Besides being the year that Alice died, 1977 was the year that the momentum behind ERA ratification fell apart. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1977-conference-womens-rights-split-america-two-180962174/)

DESIGN NOTE

I first became interested in Alice Paul this year (2022) when I was reading 111 Places in Women’s History in Washington DC That You Must Not Miss. The authors mention that the National Museum of American History has in its collection a charm bracelet that belonged to Alice Paul. As the states ratified the ERA, she added the state charm to her bracelet. There are actually 4 bracelets because all the states didn’t fit on one. An Ohio state charm dated 2/7/74 was the last one that she added, the 33rd, just before she suffered a stroke. Only 35 of the required 38 states ratified the ERA before the 1982 deadline.
(https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search?return_all=1&edan_local=1&edan_q=alice%20paul%20bracelets&)

This struck me, how physical this token is. Then as I was learning about Alice in developing this print I saw how this gift for the physical symbol and for theater was deployed in all of Alice’s work. No other perSISTER so far has offered me so many visual elements to work with—truly a gift to archives as well. She was a master of visual rhetoric:

– The NWP flag colors are Gold, White, and Violet: Give Women the Vote (influenced by the British suffrage flag that was green, white, and violet).

– Alice made a huge NWP flag with space for 36 stars, one for each state required to ratify the 19th amendment. She would sew on a new star as states ratified. https://www.loc.gov/item/2016827559/?loclr=blogflt

–  Special pins and medals were given to women who had been jailed for the cause, with add-ons for hunger strikers. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/womens-suffrage-jail-pins-protest

– The silent picketers themselves were powerful theater, and their banners are important relics.

– The 1913 suffrage procession: the woman on the white horse, the gorgeous printed program, the floats, the insistence on marching up Pennsylvania Ave, the timing to be the day before Wilson’s inauguration.

– WOMEN driving (!) through the heartland of America asking women to sign the suffrage petition. 

– There are many, many, photographs from the Alice Paul suffrage movement era.

Here is a photo of Alice toasting her completed flag. https://whyy.org/episodes/alice-paul/

More Resources
https://www.nps.gov/articles/symbols-of-the-women-s-suffrage-movement.htm

https://www.loc.gov/collections/women-of-protest/articles-and-essays/selected-leaders-of-the-national-womans-party/

Based on a photo of Alice Paul by Harris & Ewing in the Library of Congress

The texture background in this print is from vecteezy.com