Brave Women

Maya Angelou
Passed away.
May 28, 2014, Winston-Salem, NC

 Poet, historian, author, civil rights activist,
A producer and director.
Maya,composed and read  at the
Bill Clinton inauguration in 1993.
Amelia Earhart
They think they found the plane of Earhart.
off an island caller Gardner, Some people say the Japanese
held her and co-pilot. Then shot them.















Belle Boyd a Southern Lady

Isabelle "Belle" Boyd
was one  of the
Confederacy's

most famous spies.
 She was born in May 1844 in

Martinsburg, Virginia a wealthy family

with Confederate ties. Her father was a soldier in

the Stonewall Brigade, besides three other members

of her family were convicted of being Confederate spies.

On the Fourth of July 1861, Belle Boyd shot a Federal

soldier who insulted her mother. Eighteen and very pretty, 

“The Secesh Cleopatra” teased and laughed with the 

Yankee officers who visited her home in Martinsburg, 

they let war secrets slip, she coded the information, 

tucked it inside a watch case and sent it by courier to 

Stonewall Jackson for his Shenandoah Valley campaign.

When Union officers used her aunt’s house in Front Royal, 

as headquarters to plan a major offensive, Belle hid inside and

lay in an upstairs closet, ear pressed against a floor hole. 

They finished at 1 a.m., on her horse  rode recklessly through

Union pickets and across fifteen miles of dark fields,

 delivered the information to a Confederate colonel. 

When Belle was twenty-one, she had been arrested six or seven 

times for spying and imprisoned twice. 

During her stay in Washington, D.C.’s Old Capitol Prison, 

jailed Rebels passed messages to her that were tied around

rolling marbles or pushed through floor cracks and a hole they

managed to drill in a wall. 

Dorthy Dix

When the war began,
a woman already well

known for reforming insane asylums
now faced another giant task:
to select, organize and manage
all women nurses for the
Union armies. Though sixty years old,
Dorothea Dix took on the job, complete 
with its back-breaking labor
 and harassment from men who didn't like her. Dorothea found
military hospitals in horrible condition. For the next four years,
she worked without pay every day, even when ill and confined
to bed, and often missed meals or slept on warehouse floors.
She worked to create more hospitals, paid for an ambulance herself,
organized a public drive for dried fruit and preserves for wounded men,
and opened her house to tired and sick nurses. She inspected hospitals
throughout the North, demanding better diets for the wounded and
courts-martial for doctors found drunk on duty. She reported every
problem directly to the surgeon general and soon was hated by doctors
though loved among the wounded men who took her baskets of fruit and
flowers. Dorothea continued working until the war ended, and then
returned to her first love, helping the emotionally disturbed.

Today in Maine
Dorthy Dix 
Mental Hosp.

Harriet Stowe

In 1857, an Ohio mother
named Harriet Beecher Stowe
sat in a church with her children,
listening to a sermon. 
The daughter
of abolitionist clergyman Lyman Beecher,
she had little firsthand knowledge of
slavery. But suddenly she imagined
a black man—he would later be known
to the world as Uncle Tom—dying from
the lashes of a slave whip.
Then she imagined two black
overseers,  made brutal by
the cruelty of their white master,
being  shamed by the gentle forgiveness of the dying man. 
When the church service ended, Harriet went home and
wrote down the imagined scenes. When she ran out of writing paper,
she finished the story on heavy wrapping paper. The final result was
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a tear-jerker which gave the North stereotypes
of slaves and villainous masters. It converted thousands to the anti-
slavery cause. Furious Southerners interpreted the book as an attack
on their way of life, and booksellers became afraid to sell it in the South.
Anyone selling a copy risked being run out of town, and among the many
hate letters Harriet received in the mail was a package containing a
black human ear.

But the controversy also fueled sales. Within the first year, a record
300,000 copies sold in the United States alone, and the book would
outsell all others of the century. Harriet took no credit. “God wrote it,”
she said. It is said, that when Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe, he said,
“So this is the little woman who wrote the book that made this big war!”

Mary Todd

While living with her
sister in Springfield,
Illinois, Mary Todd
met Abraham Lincoln, 
fell in love and agreed
to be his wife. But a
nervous Lincoln soon
broke the engagement,
 sending him into a
depression. Against the wishes of the Todd family, the courtship
resumed one and a half years later, and the couple was hastily
married in November 1842.

Mary had grown up in Kentucky and had Confederate relatives,
many questioned her loyalty to the Union, But Mary was an
very loyal Unionist. She raised money to help the homeless and
very poor slaves who escaped as war refugees and fled into
Washington. She was also a frequent visitor to the Washington
hospitals filled with wounded soldiers. She once arrived at
Campbell’s Hospital shortly after several legs had been amputated.
Mary stayed, offering companionship and special food, though
many women were unable to tolerate the odor and anguished groans.

Wish I had a legacy like that. 
I plant trees and flowers, not much to give.

Posted by Yvonne @ La Petite Gallery
Comments are welcome