Let's take a walk over to the Biography section

March 31 - Today's post contributed by Paula Willey

"Let’s take a walk over to the Biography section"

Professor Angela Davis

As I was thinking about what I was going to write for Women’s History Month, my mind played that little slideshow that I think plays in every librarian’s mind when report time comes around for the kids. Over the years we compile a mental gallery of Biography People – people that we can suggest when a kid mopes in and mournfully sighs, “I have to write a report.”

It happens a few times a year. Black History Month, Be Your Hero, Halloween, Who Invented That? – all of these topics send kids to the biography section of the public library. The kid stands there looking unenthused while mom and dad pull things off the shelves. “Betsy Ross? She lived right here in Baltimore! No? How about… Helen Keller? She was deaf and blind!”

Whenever I see that happening, I hustle over to help out. As a parent myself, I’d like to spare my comrades in arms the humiliation of trying to get a kid amped up for a project they never wanted to do in the first place. I at least have that interior slideshow to help me out.

Mentally flipping through all those faces and names this morning, the usual suspects popped up: Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart. But then Diana Ross. “What’s Diana Ross doing in there?” I wondered, and then I remembered.

Years ago, a little girl came in with her dad looking for a children’s biography of Foxy Brown. “The…rapper?” I asked. You try to stay pretty neutral while answering questions, but I think we’re allowed a little leeway sometimes. “Not the rapper,” she clarified. “You know, like, Foxy Brown in the movie.” Ah. Foxy Brown, the 1974 blaxploitation film starring Pam Grier, Pam Grier’s bosoms, and a handgun.

Pam Grier as Foxy Brown probably
 wouldn’t recommend this movie
 for a third grader.

While my mind processed this request, and made a sound kind of like tires spinning in mud, I vamped by explaining that not a lot of fictional characters have biographies written about them. Then I got her talking about the requirements of what was obviously a school project. Turns out, part of the assignment was to dress up like their report subject, and she picked Foxy Brown because she already owned an Afro wig.

Not a bad rationale, really.

This is where Diana Ross comes in, of course. I was brainstorming all the famous women – and men, hey, I’ve known little girls to dress up like Popes for this project – who had sported Afros, and it’s not like you can Google that, or maybe you can now, I’ll wait here if you want to try. I get tired of googling stuff - about 75% of telephone reference nowadays is googling stuff for people who are afraid of computers.

 Diana Ross. Probably gets someone
else to google things for her

I suggested Diana Ross. Little girl looked blank and her dad looked skeptical. Jimi Hendrix, but this was before the very nice children’s biography of Jimi came out, and dad nixed Jimi because of the drugs. Lauryn Hill? Michael Jackson? Rod Carew? Then the PERFECT NAME came to me out of the blue, and I knew I needed to sell this one, because next I was going to go to Bob Ross, and nobody needs to go there.

“ANGELA DAVIS,” I said, and bless his heart, dad threw a fist in the air in the Black Power salute – this guy was clearly a 70’s devotee – and said, “FREE Angela Davis!” Kid maintained her blank look, and dad and I set about telling her why she should learn about Angela Davis and printing out articles from our biography database and talking about what a scholar is, and what an activist is, and what Communism is, and oh it is one of my favorite moments from my librarian career.

But then this sweet kid asked, “And can I get a biography of her?” and that’s when I winced. Yeah. There’s no 50-page biography of Angela Davis suitable for a third grader. We gave her the grownup version to hold up during the costume parade, and she wrote her report from the database articles, but here’s the soapbox portion of my Women’s History Month post.

Countess Ada Lovelace. Early adopter

There are more women in the world than Sojourner Truth and Hillary Clinton. In fact, I will venture to say that there have been women making history since the dawn of time. And while I’ve got women in my kids’ biography section – I’ve got Michelle Obama and Ella Fitzgerald and Sally Ride and Clara Barton – I still don’t have enough. I don’t have a kids’ biography of Helen Gurley Brown. Nor Margaret Mead, Shirley Chisholm, code breaker Elizebeth Friedman, astronomer Carolyn Shoemaker, or Jane Yolen.

That’s what I have to say. When I go to conferences, I like to give myself ridiculous job titles on my name badge. You get about 25 letters, why not use them all? So in addition to “Librarian,” my badge might also say “Loudmouth” or “Hypnotist.” This year, my job will be “Exhorter.” I am exhorting us all to write about more women, and to beat on publishers until they publish our picture book biography of oceanographer Sylvia Earle, our 80-page illustrated book Who Was… Ann Richards, and of course, the book I’ll write, Tell Me Again Why We Left Wisconsin? a biography of fictional character Caroline Ingalls. Maybe my library customer will grow up to write Foxy Lady: Pam Grier for the just-invented middle grade nonfiction series “Profiles in Coolness.”

Paula Willey is a librarian, mom, and writer in Baltimore, Maryland. You can read her opinionated reviews of children’s and teen books on her blog Pink Me, http://pinkme.typepad.com, and listen to occasional on-air rants on Maryland’s NPR station, WYPR, http://wypr.org .

The First American Women Illustrators

March 30 - Today's post contributed by Amy June Bates

The First American Women Illustrators

 by Amy June Bates

I suppose it is inappropriate to start this by writing about a man, because it starts with one Howard Pyle, the father of American Illustration.  He is responsible for teaching and honing the skills of the first generation of American illustrators, male and female, through the turn of the twentieth century. Of his 110 students, 40 were women, a ratio that stood out in its day. Notable among that number were Jessie Wilcox Smith, Violet Oakley, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and Sarah Stilwell. Howard Pyle provided them with opportunity by sharing his knowledge and connections based on merit not gender.

Those first women illustrators paved a remarkable path. They built on the opportunities Pyle provided to them with hard hard work. Hard work. They made it possible. They made illustration a career for women. I’ve recently been reading about them in Red Rose Girls, by Alice Carter. It has made me wonder what it felt like to be a woman blazing a trail by making her living in a heretofore man’s profession.

Back to Howard Pyle again. Although he started out a fairly open-minded instructor, he became increasingly frustrated by female students who chose to get married instead of pursuing a career in illustration. He was quoted as saying, “Once a woman is married, that is the end of her.” Although his classes started out with equal numbers of men and women, eventually he focused mostly on his male students. He made no secret of his feelings, and his charismatic opinions bore a great weight and influence on his students. Still, his female students bore much affection for him, though he supposedly secretly harbored a great irritation at their continual knitting in his class.  Probably the lowered female numbers put a considerable pressure on the female students who remained. Jessie Wilcox Smith, Violet Oakley  and Elizabeth Shippen Green vowed never to marry or have children.

Jessie Wilcox Smith said many times that motherhood was “the most sacred occupation,” an attitude which sounds a little patronizing when it is expressed by one who has chosen not to pursue it. It might sound better if it weren’t an opinion usually offered by men in a way that tends to imprison women on a pedestal. She also said, “A women’s sphere is as sharply defined as a man’s, if she elects to be a housewife and mother- that is her sphere and no other. Circumstance may, but volition may not lead her from it. If  on other hand she elects to go into business or the arts, she must sacrifice motherhood in order to fill successfully her chosen sphere.” In case you think her opinions unnecessarily strict, look back at the handful of brilliant woman artists of this time period, an era in which women began to be renowned for their artistic achievements and career in their lifetime: Mary Cassatt, Beatrix Potter, Kate Greenaway, Cecilia Beaux, Rosie O’Neil, Sarah Stilwell, Elizabeth Shippen Green, and the list could continue.  Of these luminescent women, none had children and only one ever married. Maybe Jessie was right. Maybe it was self preservation. Maybe they didn’t want to “end,” as Howard Pyle ominously implied they might.  Curiously, the most popular and famous work of these women, or at least the jobs they were continually hired to do, all feature children or maternal subject matter. I tend to think that this is partly a bias in the market. Perhaps mothers and children were an “appropriate” subject matter for women. 

I had never realized that these turn-of-the-century women artists chose not to marry or have children at least in part as a sacrifice to their careers. And if Jessie Wilcox Smith’s opinions were harsh, well, what she said was true in her world. A woman could have a husband and children, or possibly a career, but not both.  However these women illustrators and artists also chose to define themselves differently than women had in the past. They were not the wife of… mother of…They were the successes that they made of themselves.

I wanted to write about the women above because of their huge mark on my world. I am an illustrator. It makes me proud to be able to say that, and I have worked hard to earn it. But it is in part due to those women that I have my career. I had many wonderful teachers who inspired me and encouraged me. I also had two (male) teachers who told me that I would end up married with children and would never amount to anything more. Thank goodness I also live in a time when I don’t have to take remarks like that seriously. Those teachers didn’t hold my future in their hands.  

I have read the accounts of other women illustrators over the last one hundred years. Women who eventually could choose a family and a career, but could expect little help from any man inside the house. I can say now that I do have children and a career and a husband who is as invested in my career as I am in his. While I am grateful, and looking back makes me feel even more so, I don’t feel like it is too much to ask of the world. I would sort of like to thumb my nose at Howard Pyle, just a little. 

The way we live now is a result of the efforts of hard working people who have changed the world. Their struggles unite our present with our past.  It is possible to be  inspired by and also in disagreement with some of the people we idolize. And it remains important to question the status quo so that we can continue to improve the world for our daughters and sons. Right?

###

A selection of books illustrated by Amy June Bates

Editor's Note:

This very modest biography is taken from Amy June Bates' website:

When Amy was a kid she loved to draw and read. She spent the time that she wasn't reading and drawing trying to keep her six brothers and sisters from drawing on her pictures and losing her place in whatever book she was reading. She loved the mountains quite a bit.

 She grew up and learned to draw a lot better.

 She currently lives in Pennsylvania with her three children and husband. She reads and she draws quite a bit.

Her blog is Amy June Bates Drawing a Blank 

How High is the Sky?

March 29 - Today's post contributed by Robert Burleigh

How High Is The Sky? The Story of Henrietta Leavitt

Let me state first that I’m not a woman! But as the father of two daughters, a husband, and a friend of many women, I feel both an obligation and a wish to tell the stories of women—whether they were famous and celebrated or forgotten and marginalized (as so many were, and often still are).

How do we bring to light the struggles, triumphs (and even failures) of people who are no longer here to tell us what happened to them—people like Henrietta Leavitt? Why is it important to do so? How did these people think and feel about their experiences? What is the best way to convey this to a child? These are intriguing questions that have drawn me to the biographical form and led me to write many biographies of sports figures, explorers, scientists, artists, and writers for children over the years.

But I define the term “biography” pretty loosely in my biographies! Typically, while attempting to always base them on facts, I try to find a moment or event in a life that I can use to bring that person to life—hopefully conveying a sense of immediacy that will enliven and engage readers. For instance, the story of my recently published biography, Night Flight (illustrated by Wendell Minor, Simon & Schuster, 2011), follows Amelia Earhart’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1932. She was the second person and first woman to make this crossing. The facts in Night Flight—the horrific weather, the engine problems—are true. But I also wanted to express how Amelia felt. And to do so, I had a helpful start: her own later brief retelling of her dangerous journey, which became the starting point for my own retelling.

Writing Look Up! Henrietta Leavitt, Pioneering Woman Astronomer presented another problem.  Much less is known about Henrietta Leavitt than is known about Amelia Earhart. In a certain respect, Henrietta is a classic example of women in science. You haven’t heard of her?  That’s what I mean. Only a series of accidents—along with her own inquiring spirit—led to her being singled out at all—and at last recognized as a significant player in the history of astronomy.

The book was inspired by my editor at Simon & Schuster, Paula Wiseman, who suggested that I read George Johnson’s fine book (for adults) titled Miss Leavitt’s Stars: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Discovered How to Measure the Universe. I found Leavitt’s story compelling and decided I wanted to attempt a biography of her.

Born in 1868 in Lancaster, Massachusetts, Henrietta first attended Oberlin College and then went to Radcliffe College, graduating in 1892. Little is known about her very early life, though I surmise that she must have had some special interest in the stars. At Radcliffe, she took an astronomy class in her final year, where she was reportedly the only woman in the class.

A year later she was working at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge.  Hard to believe, but she started out working for nothing! This was because her family was well off, and was therefore expected to support her. Still, she wanted meaningful work. (She later received a salary: all of $10.50 a week!)

Henrietta was assigned (along with a number of other women working at the Observatory) to review the nightly photographs taken by the Observatory’s male staff members. The women workers—or “computers,” as they were called then— examined the photos and recorded star positions in separate notebooks.

Although her assignment was a routine one, Henrietta took things further. She noticed that certain stars (called variable stars because their light varied, or changed from dimmer to brighter) had fixed patterns to their changes. She slowly realized that the “blink-time” of a variable star was related to the star’s true brightness. And from knowing a star’s true brightness, astronomers can actually ascertain the star’s distance from the earth.

Using Henrietta Leavitt’s discovery, it became possible for astronomers to figure the distance from Earth to more and more stars. The Milky Way was seen to be far bigger than people had earlier thought. And soon it became apparent that it wasn’t the only galaxy in the universe. The new world of twentieth—and twenty-first—century astronomy had been born, due to one woman’s interest, curiosity, and hard work.

But for Leavitt, recognition came slowly. We don’t know the circumstances of her reporting her findings at the Observatory—how they were initially received, and how (if in any way) her findings changed her relationship to the hierarchy there. Even at a later date, the then-director of the Observatory suggested that it was his interpretation of Leavitt’s data that deserved the major credit.

Only years later did a Swedish scientist consider nominating Leavitt for the Nobel Prize.  But he found out that she had died in 1920, and thus withdrew his nomination. (Nobel prizes cannot go to a deceased person.)

Look Up! is beautifully illustrated by the artist Raúl Colón . It is also bookended by a simple phrase, which I like to think Henrietta Leavitt might have uttered both as a small child and a serious scientist: How high is the sky?  If she didn’t ask the question in those words, her life and work—against incredible odds—went a long way toward answering it.

About Robert Burleigh 

Over the past 35 years, I have published poems, reviews, essays, many filmstrips and videos, and around 50 children's picture books. 

Born and raised in Chicago, I graduated from DePauw University (Greencastle, Indiana) and later received an MA in humanities from the University of Chicago. I've published books for children since the early 1990s. My books - including numerous unpublished ones! - run a broad gamut, from stories geared for pre-schoolers to survival stories and biographies aimed at seven to eleven-year-olds. My work is wide-ranging because, basically, I'm a generalist by experience - and inclination! 

In addition to writing, I paint regularly under the art name Burleigh Kronquist (Burleighkronquist.com), and have shown work in one-person and group shows in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere around the country.

Louisa May's Battle: How the Civil War Led to Little Women

March 28 - Today's Post Contributed by The Fourth Musketeer

Louisa May Alcott is famous around the world as the author of Little Women, one of the most beloved works of literature for children, but what is less known is that she may never have had a career as a writer at all if not for her valiant service as a nurse during the Civil War.

It is this lesser-known part of Alcott's life that award-winning author Kathleen Krull concentrates on in her handsome new picture book about the iconic author, Louisa May's Battle:  How the Civil War Led to Little Women (Walker Books, 2013).  

Alcott came from a family of dedicated abolitionists, and longed to help the union effort in some concrete way.  Of course educated women from "good families" rarely worked outside the home in those days, but the Civil War gave some women the opportunity to work as nurses, provided they met the requirements:  at least thirty years old, "very plain," single, strong, and with two character references.  Alcott was able to meet all these standards, and soon was on a 500 mile long trip to Washington D. C., where she was assigned to work at a hospital--in reality an old hotel.  Her duties included shocking activities like undressing and bathing the men, bandaging wounds, and most importantly, keeping up the men's spirits.  

Krull describes how Louisa, after just a few weeks of nursing, became desperately ill with typhoid fever, and had to be taken home to recuperate.  While she did not return to nursing, she did return to her writing, which up until that time had been published but did not enjoy much success.

Krull's lively text is liberally sprinkled with quotes from Alcott's colorful and detailed letters home to her family.  These letters were published at the time in an abolitionist newspaper, and later as a book, Hospital Sketches.  This slim volume was her first to be published to critical acclaim.  As Krull points out, the book was Alcott's first to be published out of her own experience, and the success led directly to her being asked to write a "girls' book."  This, of course, proved to be Little Women, which was based on her own family and which she set during the  Civil War, one of the first novels to be set during the turbulent period which forever changed the United States.  The book became a huge hit, and led to a lucrative writing career for Alcott.  

Back matter includes a brief commentary on the early history of women in medicine, a map detailing the Battle of Fredericksburg and a brief description of this "nightmarish" battle, and a list of sources.  Among the sources listed are websites, children's books by Louisa May Alcott, and books about Alcott, including those for young people and for adults.  

Readers will enjoy the old-fashioned look of this large picture book, which is printed on ivory-colored antique style paper.  The illustrations by Carolyn Beccia, created with Corel Painter digital oils on gessoed canvas, also provide an old-fashioned feel.  Her paintings have a realistic yet statuesque quality, and are infused with earth tones that suggest the sepia photographs of the Civil War era.  In many of the illustrations, Louisa wears a red shawl that perhaps suggests the great bloodshed of the war and often provides the only spark of bright color.  Above, in one of the most striking illustrations, Louisa is in the process of writing Little Women, and imagines all the events of her life as a patchwork quilt.

I would highly recommend this new book to introduce young readers to Louisa May Alcott, either before or after reading one of her classics.  It's an inspiring look at a brave and talented woman, one who introduced strong female characters in her classic stories.  Of course, the book would also enhance a unit on women's history or the Civil War.

Margo Tanenbaum is proud to be working as a children's librarian in Southern California, where she loves nothing more than matching children with books whose stories they will treasure.  She blogs about historical fiction and history-related nonfiction for young people at The Fourth Musketeer, and is co-organizer of Kidlit Celebrates Women's History Month.  You can also find her reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.