Henrietta Hay's Column

February is Women's History Month, or so I read someplace. For those of you who think that Women's History started in the seventies with the rise of the women's movement and the proverbial bra burning, you were born several years too late. The past twenty years have been important ones for women, but there were countless interesting and influential women who paved the way in their own individual styles. What's more, they were not meek and mild and the perfect ladies our mothers tried to teach us to be.

Many American women have left their individual marks on the history of the country. Most of them didn't make it to the history books. Autumn Stephens, in a little paperback book called "Wild Women": Crusaders, Curmudgeons and Completely Corsetless Ladies in the Otherwise Virtuous Victorian Era," tells about some of them. Today's feminists who are accused of being militant could learn a lot from some of these wild women.

One of the wildest ones was Carrie Nation. Her ax was as famous as Lizzie Borden's and she used it freely in her battle with the Demon Rum. She felt that her mission in life was to rip up every saloon in America. "I smashed five saloons with rocks," she said. "God was certainly standing by me." Stephens adds, "Or more likely just behind her, safely out of harm's way." Nation's most deadly weapon, however, was what she called the hatchetation of joints. "I am going to break this place up," she would announce before she would whirl into action shattering mirrors, smashing bottles and glasses and hacking away at anything else in the way. The men beat a hasty retreat when they saw her coming.

Agnes Morley Cleaveland, born in 1874, ran their New Mexico cattle spread while her mother stayed in the house and wrote letters to famous suffragists. Sporting a five gallon Stetson and denim knickers, Agnes learned early in life the value of equal firepower. In her autobiography she says, "A six-shooter makes all men equal. I amended it to, 'a six-shooter makes men and women equal.'" Fifty years later she wrote, "That I have survived to a ripe maturity is due to great self-control in not having committed premeditated murder and been hanged." In the meantime, however, she left the cows behind and graduated from Stanford. It doesn't pay to stereotype people.

One prosecuting attorney called Mary (Mother) Jones "the most dangerous woman in America," and she took it as a compliment. "The meek shall not inherit the earth," she proclaimed. Stephens says, "a curser, a drinker, a hard-boiled old bird, Mother Jones organized her first labor strike at the age of forty-seven and spent the next forty years roaming the country looking for trouble--and stirring it up when she couldn't find any." The magazine that bears her name is still doing the same thing.

Martha Black was a Canadian who with her brother made the grueling journey over the Chilkoot Pass into the northwestern Yukon, "the worst trail this side of hell." What made the trip a bit harder was that she weighed 110 pounds and was pregnant. She attributed the occasional discomfort she suffered to her stiff boned corset and cumbersome long skirt. She became a grubstaker, sawmill owner and bear killer. She finally found a house big enough for her ambition. She won a seat in the Canadian Parliament.

Mattie Silk and Katie Fulton, two of Denver's most famous madames fought a duel in 1877 over, of course, a man. On the fateful day a small group of onlookers gathered, with Fulton being seconded by the gentleman himself. "Possibly owing to their intoxicated condition, however, neither madam managed to get off an accurate shot," says Stephens.

One of the more famous Victorian ladies was suffragette Susan B. Anthony. She went through life unmarried, which gave her more time to fight her political battles. She claimed that, "She had no desire to degrade the gentleman she loved by marrying him. He was, after all, eligible to vote, own property and run for the office of president. In good conscience she couldn't allow him to pledge his allegiance to a political outcast and pariah."

We haven't heard a lot about some of these wild women, but it is good to know that they were out there. They made the kind of history that is not in most history books.