October 6, 2017 Hello ,
The Canadian Vine Awards for Jewish Literature were announced this week. You may remember Irena's Children was shortlisted for the award, but the winner in the young people's category is Seeking Refuge, by Irene N. Watts and Kathryn E. Shoemaker.
Seeking Refuge is a novel based on the heroic rescue operation known as Kindertransport, which evacuated Jewish children from Nazi Germany
to
London 1938-39. The protagonist, 11-year-old Marianne is lonely and homesick, and struggles to find her place while her English foster family treats her as a domestic servant.
My featured story today begins with a young girl, LaVaun Smith, who heard a great uproar outside her school in southeast Kansas one December day, 1921. Students rushed to the
door to see the commotion.
No Fear in These Women's Hearts |
A crowd of women filled the road beating on dish pans, wash pans and metal buckets with sticks and kitchen utensils. Some of the students saw their mothers among the crowd, as the women converged on the mine across the road
and to harass "scab" miners.
Union coal miners had struck the mines in Crawford and Cherokee County three months prior, but companies kept operations running with non-union workers, and arrested labor leaders for violating a statewide strike injunction.
With winter coming, wives, mothers, and sisters of the mine
workers decided to take things into their own hands. Gathering before dawn,
December 12, they marched through the region, routing "scabs" at 63 different mines.
One marcher recorded in her diary, the women “rolled down to the [mine] pits like balls
and the men ran like deers....There was absolutely no fear in these women’s hearts.”
The marching women, some pregnant and others carrying small children,
grew from two-thousand to possibly six-thousand strong. For three days they completely shut down coal production in the
region. One of the leaders, Mary Skubitz, had immigrated from Slovenia as a child. According to her son Joe, "Hunger drove most of those women. They just wanted something to eat and a
house."
Mary spoke German, Italian, and Slovene, which allowed her to rally a broad spectrum of women in the mining camps. Fluent in English as well, she was powerfully persuasive with the mine bosses and strikebreakers.
Kansas Governor Henry Allen dispatched four companies of the Kansas National Guard, including a machine gun division to get the women
back to their kitchens. The women, armed only with their pots, pans and red pepper spray, marched from mine to mine singing hymns and waving American flags.
The first day there was little violence, but the following two days when large numbers of men joined the protest, strikebreakers were beaten and property vandalized, inflaming headlines across the nation. The New York Times declared them an Amazon Army...on the warpath... invading mines and scattering workers with pepper
spray.
December 16, Sheriff Milt Gould arrested Mary and three other women, who spent one night in jail due a $750 bail.
Over the following month, the sheriff and his deputies were only able to arrest 50-some men and women who participated in the action. Bystanders would not cooperate in naming
names, and women protesters
told deputies they could not recall who had marched beside them.
Crawford County District Judge Andrew Curran handed down fines to forty-nine protesters for disturbing the peace, unlawful assembly, and assault.
The marching women were characterized by the newspapers in one of
two ways.
Benjamin W. Goossen write in Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains
(Autumn 2011), "either it was a laughable “Petticoat March” of witless and misguided domestics, or the attack of a ferocious 'Amazon Army' that threatened to destroy traditional notions of women’s role in society."
The Wichita Beacon described them as “a few women, peeking from behind windows, sometimes waving handkerchiefs and sometimes ‘making eyes’ at the soldiers."
The Kansas City Kansan labed them “women
terrorists,” who “clawed and used teeth” like “tigresses.” Some of the women defended themselves in letters to the editors, and small groups of women continued to accost strikebreakers even after the strike was called off.
The following
election season, (this was just two years after American women got the vote) the women who had tested their strength marching turned their energy to campaigning against the men who'd opposed them. Both Sheriff Gould, who had arrested dozens of marchers and Judge Curran, who had sentenced them were ousted from office. See my schedule for the next couple months. If I'm in your neighborhood, I'd love to see you.
Saturday, October 14, 2- 3:30 PM North Spokane County Library
44 E. Hawthorne Road Authors Maureen McQuerry, Stephen Wallenfels and I will be presenting a panel My Manuscript's Done...Now What?
Saturday, November 4, 2:00 – 3:15 PM Washington Library Association Conference Hotel Murano, Tacoma, WA Connecting Readers and Writers
Thursday, November 9,10
AM Central Library 330 Park Blvd, San Diego, CA Grit Arises in the Darkest Places Until next week... Have you read a great book? Tell me about it. Have a burning question? Let me know. If you know someone who might enjoy
my newsletter or books, please forward this e-mail. I will never spam you or sell your email address, you can unsubscribe below anytime with a single mouse click. To find out more about my books, how I help students, teacher and librarians, visit my website at www.MaryCronkFarrell.com. My best, Mary
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