Plaid Ponderings: Thoughts of a Lezz

If Rick Santorum could leave me, my vagina, and what I do with my vagina alone, that’d be great.

Mary Eliza Mahoney, America’s first black graduate nurse, was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts on May 7, 1845. The eldest of three siblings, Mahoney attended the Phillips Street School in Boston.

At the age of twenty, Mary Mahoney began working as a nurse.  Supplementing her low income as an untrained, practical nurse, Mahoney took on janitorial duties at the New England Hospital for Women and Children.  Incorporated on March 18, 1863, New England Hospital provided its patients state-of-the-art medical care by solely female physicians. It also assisted women in the practical study of medicine.

On March 3, 1878, Mary Mahoney was accepted into New England Hospital’s graduate nursing program.  During her training, Mahoney participated in mandatory sixteen-hour-per-day ward duty, where she oversaw the well-being of six patients at a time.  Days not requiring ward duty involved attending day-long lectures while simultaneously devoting time to her studies.  Completing the rigorous sixteen-month program on August 1, 1879, Mahoney was among the three graduates out of the forty students who began the program and the only African American awarded a diploma.  Upon her graduation Mary Mahoney became the first African American graduate nurse.

Madam C.J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove, was an African-American businesswoman, hair care entrepreneur and philanthropist. 

She made her fortune by developing and marketing a hugely successful line of beauty and hair products for black women under the company she founded, Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. 

She experimented with home remedies and products already on the market until she finally developed her own shampoo and an ointment that contained sulfur to make her scalp healthier for hair growth.

Madam C. J. Walker was selling her products throughout the United States. While her daughter Lelia (later known as A’Lelia Walker) ran a mail order business from Denver, Madam Walker and her husband traveled throughout the southern and eastern states. They settled in Pittsburgh in 1908 and opened Lelia College to train “hair culturists.” In 1910 Walker moved to Indianapolis, Indiana where she established her headquarters and built a factory.

She began to teach and train other black women in order to help them build their own businesses. She also gave other lectures on political, economic and social issues at conventions sponsored by powerful black institutions. 

After the East St. Louis Race Riot, she joined leaders of the NAACP in their efforts to support legislation to make lynching a federal crime. 

In 1918 at the biennial convention of the National Association Of Colored Woman she was acknowledged for making the largest contribution to save the Anacostia (Washington, DC) house of abolitionist Frederick Douglass. She continued to donate money throughout her career to the NAACP, the YMCA, and to black schools, organizations, individuals, orphanages, and retirement homes.

At her death she was considered to be the wealthiest African-American woman in America and known to be the first self-made female American millionaire.

Eunice W. Johnson was an executive at Johnson Publishing Company. Johnson was best-known as the founder and director of the Ebony Fashion Fair, which was started in the 1950s as a hospital fundraiser and became an annual fashion tour that highlighted fashion for African-American women that ran until a year before hear death.

Born Eunice Walker on April 4, 1916, in Selma, Alabama, she graduated with a degree in sociology from Talladega College in 1938. She met her future husband, John H. Johnson, in 1940 while she was attending Loyola University Chicago and was married after she earned her master’s degree the following year.

Together with her husband, she established The Negro Digest in 1942, a magazine styled after Reader’s Digest. The rapid growth of their first publication encouraged them to create Ebony, a monthly designed to emulate Life and its style of boldly-photographed front covers. Johnson had been the one who suggested that the magazine be named for the dark wood. 

By the time of her death, Ebony reached a readership of 1.25 million, while its weekly companion Jet reached a circulation of 900,000.

The Ebony Fashion Tour began as a fundraiser that she created in 1958 for a hospital in New Orleans. In its half century of existence, the tour visited 200 cities across the United States, Canada and the Caribbean, raising over $50 million for charity. The fashion tour was a pioneer in using African-American models on the runway and helped highlight the works of African-American designers. 

Building on her difficulties in finding cosmetics suited to the skin tones of her models, Johnson created Fashion Fair Cosmetics in 1973 as a line of makeup that would be sold in leading department stores.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot is an American sociologist who examines the culture of schools, the patterns and structures of classroom life, socialization within families and communities, and the relationships between culture and learning styles. She has been a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education since the 1970s.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot has pioneered portraiture, an approach to social science methodology that bridges the realms of aesthetics and empiricism, which she continues to use in her own work.

She has written eight books, including “I’ve Known Rivers”, which explores the development of creativity and wisdom using the lens of “human archaeology”, “The Art and Science of Portraiture”, which documents her pioneering approach to social science methodology, and, her most recent, “The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50”.

In 1984, Lawrence-Lightfoot was awarded the prestigious MacArthur prize fellowship, and in 1993, she was awarded Harvard’s George Ledlie prize for research that makes the “most valuable contribution to science” and “the benefit of mankind.”

In March 1998, she was the recipient of the Emily Hargroves Fisher endowed chair at Harvard University, which, upon her retirement, will become the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot endowed chair, making her the first African-American woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor. She also has an endowed professorship named in her honor at Swarthmore College.

Mrs. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin was involved in various activist organizations during her lifetime. During the Civil War she was involved not only in civil rights causes for freed and free blacks, but also heavily involved in the women’s suffrage movement.

In 1879 she established the Boston Kansas Relief Association, a charity organization that provided food and clothing to black Bostonians who were migrating to Kansas.

From 1890 to 1897 Ruffin served as the editor and publisher of Woman’s Era, the first newspaper published by and for African American women. It was used to highlight the achievements of African American women and to champion black women’s rights. 

She was also close friends with Susan B. Anthony and Booker T. Washington.

In 1894 she organized the Women’s Era Club, an advocacy group for black women, with the help of her daughter Florida Ridely and Maria Baldwin, a Boston school principal. 

On a side note she was also married to George Lewis Ruffin, the first African American to graduate from Harvard Law School, the first African American to serve on the Boston City Council, and the first black judge in the United States.

I don’t give a fuck what you say. 

If the candidate is anti-choice. They are anti-women.

That’s just the truth. 

What else do you need to do after you take away a woman’s choice about what she wants to do with her own body?