To the Loyal Women

This is something a little different – this plaque is inside the Pennsylvania state monument at Gettysburg. I am not aware that there is anything else like this on the battlefield proper (but I’ve been wrong before). What it made me think about was that here is a plaque with no names, just dedicated to the loyal women of the commonwealth, and yet it probably contains more information than most of their tombstones did.

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Founder of Flag Day

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Hope you enjoyed

I tried very hard to focus my posts this month on gravestones for women in honor of Women’s History Month, and I was kind of disappointed to discover how hard it was. Women’s tombstones seem less likely to have epitaphs or other biographical information beyond whose wife or mother the deceased was.

Tonight I was at a restaurant and the hostess’ nametag said her name was “Keziah.” It’s a name I had never before seen given to a currently living person, but it was a little awkward to explain that I run a cemetery blog, and so she might have thought I was a bit strange. She did tell me that it is from the Biblical Book of Job.

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Southard Wordless Wednesday

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Oh really?

When I was in graduate school for history, my advisor told a story to several women’s history classes about when she first expressed an interest in women’s history. One of her professors curtly informed her that women’s history was too hard to study because women changed their names at marriage and so couldn’t be tracked through historical records the same way men could. Decades later, with women’s history now firmly established as a legitimate field of study, the claim that many women are lost to history merely through the act of changing their surname is laughable, but I think of it every time I walk through a cemetery and see stones like these, where a woman is listed with at least two surnames she used during her life.

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Sophronia Bullfinch Pike

When doing research on Sophronia Bulfinch Pike, I found, among other items, a post with her “most famous recipe,” Western Fudge Cake. Pike was a member of the Home Economics Association, but I couldn’t find much else about her other than what is inscribed on her tombstone. It was a little disappointing, because a Google search turns up all sorts of tantalizing hits, but when you click into the document and try to find her name, you can’t. She must have been an interesting woman. From what I can read in those snippets, she was one of those women of the 19th and early 20th centuries who went to college and then had a career rather than marrying.  One of the summaries indicated she had taught at Western College for Women, her alma mater, for almost 50 years.

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A Grave Concern: Is that so?

Whenever I stroll through a cemetery that has tombstones from the 19th century, I think of an story one of my women’s history professors in graduate school told me.

As my professor told it, when she became interested in women’s history while in college, one of her history professors tried to discourage her. After various arguments as to why women did not constitute a worthy area of historical interest, he concluded with a declaration about how women’s history couldn’t be done anyway because women change their names when they marry and there is no way to trace them. Now there are plenty of ways in which I could dispute that old curmudgeon’s theories about women’s history and the possibility of studying women, but the I mostly just chuckle at the ludicrous idea that women’s history will run aground because women change their names at marriage. (We’ll leave aside that name-changing is culture-specific rather than universal.) After all, it’s not like there are government documents or possibly even tombstones where women’s names before and after marriage might be recorded, right?*

*Heavy sarcasm alert.

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A Grave Concern: Louise Bethune Wordless Wednesday

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The Ghost of Helen Peabody

When I was a student at Miami University of Ohio, everyone knew about the ghost of Helen Peabody. Helen Peabody was graduate of Mount Holyoke and a teacher there before she moved westward and became the first principal of Western Female Seminary (once Western College for Women, now preserved as Western Campus of the University). By all accounts, she loved her school and her students, although she did not love the proximity of the male students at the University. By all accounts, she did not believe in coeducation After thirty-five years of service, she left her name on Peabody Hall, a stately dormitory and classroom building, and, some say, her spirit inside. (The existing Peabody Hall was built on the foundations of previous seminary buildings that burned down.) Even though she died in California in retirement, her body was brought back to local cemetery in Oxford for burial. The stories about Peabody Hall and President Peabody are multiple.

The simplest is that she still roams the halls, and students see her apparition walk by, which they recognize by the portrait of her on the first floor. Vigilant in the protection of her legacy, she supposedly shook awake the student that raised the alarm the last time Peabody Hall had a serious fire. The most sinister versions of the Helen Peabody ghost stories have her as a fierce protector of female students, engaging in a sort of psychological warfare against male students who mistreat them. A friend of mine swore up and down that a male student experienced unexplained and untraceable calls to his answering machine where a low female voice threatened him and ordered him to get out of her hall. This story sounds similar.

Whatever your belief about her spirit, the earthly remains of Helen Peabody rest in Oxford Cemetery, just a hill or two over from her beloved academic home. Her grave is flanked by other colleagues who shared her dedication to higher education for women.

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Emily Jessup

In Oxford Cemetery in Oxford, Ohio, you can find this monument to Professor Emily Jessup. The light is a little unusual in the photograph, so below I have typed for you the information on the tombstone:

Emily, daughter of William and Nancy O’Dell Jessup,
Born Wilton, Conn., Sept 3, 1824,
Died Oxford, Ohio, Sept 25, 1893.
Pupil, Teacher, Associate Principal, Mount Holyoke Seminary, 1843-1862
Teacher, Western Female Seminary, 1862-1893

Mount Holyoke Seminary, Jessup’s alma mater, exists today as the women’s institution Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Mary Lyon founded Mount Holyoke in 1837 to provide access to higher education for young women, against whom the doors of universities were generally closed. The seminary was the first college for women in the United States, and provided inspiration and practical guidance for other women’s colleges to follow. Mount Holyoke counts itself the first of the Seven Sisters: Vassar, Smith, Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Barnard, and Radcliffe colleges; all institutions for the education of women.

According to Mount Holyoke’s records, Emily Jessup graduated with the class of 1847 and then taught at the institution for approximately fifteen more years. She, like many of her colleagues, then took that experience to Western Female Seminary, another women’s college.  Considering she graduated a year ahead of Helen Peabody (the first principal of Western Female Seminary) and then would have been her teaching colleague for about four years, it seems reasonable to assume that Peabody had a hand in convincing Jessup to move westward. We know what Professor Jessup looked like thanks to archival photographs on the web.  Despite health issues that necessitated the use of a wheelchair, Jessup instructed for 30 years at Western Female Seminary, until her death in 1893.

As we leave Emily Jessup today, I want you to look one more time at her tombstone, and reflect on the uniqueness and daring of her life.  In an era where women’s rights were severely circumscribed and American society prescribed a very rigid role for women of Jessup’s race and class, she defined herself by educational and professional accomplishments.

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