Tag: Adele Fasick

  • P is for… Patience!

    Contributed by Adele Fasick.

    The old proverb “Patience is a virtue…” is quoted most often by parents trying to calm the urgent requests of children. The version I used to hear was “Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can. Seldom in a woman, and never in a man.” This sentiment has been around at least since the fifteenth century probably because people still find patience a difficult virtue to practice.

    One place where we almost never find patience is in government. Voters usually want results quickly and politicians try to respond. But a few figures in American history have been willing to work patiently for years to achieve their goals. Frances Perkins was one government figure who did just that.

    Frances Perkins was born in Boston in 1887 into a prosperous family, but she spent most of her life in New York and Washington D.C. Like many women of her time, she was given a good education but was not expected to use her education in a job or career. Her destiny, as her family saw it, was to marry a prosperous husband and raise children to follow the same path as her mother and aunts. But Frances saw life differently.

    After Perkins graduated from college, she became a social worker in Philadelphia and New York, but a dramatic fire in 1911 changed the course of her life. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which caused the death of 146 workers, occurred in her New York City neighborhood. The workers died because bosses had locked access to the elevators in the building. This terrible accident opened Perkins’s eyes to the overwhelming unfairness of the problems faced by workers. She realized she could do more through political action than she could through providing care to individuals as a social worker and so she became an activist. She started to work with government agencies in New York City.

    Frances was a young woman, just turning 30, when she decided to work in government. She soon discovered that most of the men she worked with were uncomfortable confronting a young, well-dress woman and didn’t know how to behave with her. Should they flirt with her or treat her like one of the boys? What would their wives think? Frances took an unusual approach to help them. She deliberately tried to appear older than she was. She began to wear somewhat dowdy clothes, and to project a motherly image. This was her way of not frightening off her male colleagues and she became famous for looking like someone’s middle-aged wife rather than a politician.

    Patience worked for Perkins. When Franklin Roosevelt was elected President in 1932, he asked her to serve as the Secretary of Labor. Choosing a woman for that post raised an uproar. Labor leaders opposed her because she had never been a union member. She was supported by the League of Women Voters and other women’s groups. Her appointment marked the first time a woman had served as member of the president’s cabinet.

    Frances Perkins became a major partner in Roosevelt’s introduction of the New Deal. She was responsible for some of its major achievements—including the minimum wage law, unemployment insurance, and Social Security. She even tried to introduce healthcare as a benefit for all workers, but the American Medical Association killed that provision. Nonetheless, Perkins’s patience led to some of the policies that have made life better for millions of Americans over the years. Perhaps that demonstrates that patience is indeed a virtue.

    You can read more about Perkins and other memorable women in my blog Teacups and Tyrants.

  • J Is For… Justice!

    Contributed by Adele Fasick.

    Everyone has heard of Daniel Boone, but his daughter Jemima, is almost forgotten, although she too played a part in settling the western states.

    Jemima’s great adventure started on July 14, 1776, when she was 13 years old and living with her family at Boonesborough, the settlement her father had organized. She and two other teenaged girls took a canoe out on the Kentucky River, which flowed close to the settlement. Seeing flowers on the opposite shore, the girls decided to paddle over and pick some. As they drew close to the shore, a group of Shawnee and Cherokee Indians appeared, seized the canoe, grabbed the girls, bound their hands, and marched them away from the river.

    It wasn’t long before the settlers in Boonesborough heard voices calling and realized something was happening. They ran to the river where they found the empty canoe floating in the water. The girls had disappeared. Daniel Boone quickly organized a few men as a search party. Although both Shawnee and Cherokee Indians travelled often through the area, their trails were well hidden and Boone had no idea which way they might have gone.

    Fortunately, Jemima and her friends were familiar with the difficulties of tracking people through a heavily wooded area so they did their best to leave traces of where they had gone. The girls were wearing long dresses, which made it difficult for them to walk through the dense woods, so the Indians cut several inches off the bottoms of the skirts. The Indians buried the leftover fabric so it wouldn’t be found, but the girls were able to tear pieces from the ragged skirts and attach them to bushes along the path. When the Indians noticed what they were doing, they ordered them to stop, but some pieces of fabric were left.

    Jemima was wearing a bonnet and she realized the bonnet strings could give information. She tied knots in the string to indicate the number of Indian braves who had taken them—five in all. Because the girls were clever enough to leave clues, and because Daniel Boone and his party understood them, it took only a few days to rescue the girls.

    Despite the worries of other settlers, the girls were not injured by their captors. In fact, the girls seem to have established congenial relations with several of the Indians. They reported that they had been well treated. Daniel Boone negotiated with the Indians and reached an agreement on where the settlers could hunt and fish. The girls were released, and everyone was satisfied.

    Jemima and her friends became famous. Years afterward, James Fennimore Cooper wrote about their adventure in The Last of the Mohicans—one of the most popular books of its time. Unfortunately, Jemima was never able to read the book. Like most pioneer women, she was never taught to read. Reading and writing were considered necessary only for men. So, although Jemima found justice from the Indians, she did not always get it from her own family.

    You can read more about Jemima’s story in my blog Teacups and Tyrants.

  • G Is For… Graceful!

    Contributed by Adele Fasick.

    G Martha Graham

    G is for graceful, the beauty of movement that balances motion and stillness in a pattern pleasing to the human eye. Dancing is one of the most ancient arts. Images of people dancing have been found in India in pictures made more than 6000 years ago. Over the centuries, dancing developed in every known culture.

    Throughout Europe and America ballet gradually became honored as the highest form of the art of dancing. When I was growing up in New York, high school students could be excused from classes on Wednesday afternoons to attend ballet performances at the New York City Ballet. For sixty cents we would watch performances of traditional classical ballet and dream of becoming dancers. But even as we watched, the dance world was changing.

    Martha. Graham was the one of the people who revolutionized dance during the twentieth century. She was born in Pennsylvania in 1894, but moved with her family to Santa Barbara, California when she was 14 years old. It was in California that she first saw professional dance performances and decided to study dance. She soon became a star. During the 1920s she moved to New York where she started her own studio and school in 1926. The school that she started has been an important part of the modern dance world ever since its founding and it is now the oldest active dance school in America.

    Most dance performances staged in America before the twentieth century had been based on the European tradition of ballet dancing. Dancers wore gauzy tutus and ballet shoes that allowed them to dance “en pointe” and move about the stage as if they were floating.  Graham’s approach was very different. She developed the concept of “contraction and release” as the major style of movement. Some fans of the more familiar European style of dance considered Graham’s work a betrayal of the traditional culture of ballet. Graham herself felt that she was expressing the spirit of her time. She wrote: “No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time; it is just that the others are behind the times.”

    Graham believed that dancing was an important expression of the nation’s culture. She declared that “The body says what words cannot.” Many videos of the dances she created are now preserved in the Library of Congress. You can discover them through their website. Her works continue to inspire dancers and audiences throughout the world. If you want to read more about Martha Graham and the art she inspired, take a look at my blog, Teacups and Tyrants. (teacupsandtyrants.com)