Clever Divas

Born In San Francisco in 1872, a time when women just didn’t do a man’s job, Julia Morgan was to embark on a life that would be a constant battle to prove that a woman could not only do a job as well as any man, but she could do it better. Because of the need to constantly prove herself, her life would become a parade of first: the first woman to complete a civil engineering degree at the University of California and the first woman to study architecture at Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, to name a few. Since the Ecole had never allowed a woman admittance before, it was only after two years of winning European architectural contests that they recognized her outstanding talents and finally relented.

After her return to San Francisco, she took a position with the Berkely-based, architectural firm of John Galen Howard, winner of the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Architectural Competition. While in his employ, Julia had a hand in designing the Mining Building and the Hearst Greek Theater.
In 1904, Julia opened her own office in San Francisco. Two years later the city was ravaged by earthquake and fire and Julia’s business boomed during the rebuilding of the City By the Bay. Favoring the California style of architecture (open beams, lines that blended with nature) and the use of natural materials such as redwood, she undertook such projects as Nob Hill’s Fairmont Hotel and St. John’s Presbyterian Church, which would eventually become the Julia Morgan Center for the Arts.

Her crowning achievement came in 1919 at the age of 47, when William Randolph Hearst commissioned her to design and build a memorial to his mother and a museum of sorts to house his art treasurers at San Simeon. For the next 28 years, Julia worked on the project that was to become known worldwide as the Hearst Castle http://www.hearstcastle.com. Many pieces (Spanish antiques, Icelandic Moss, reindeer for the zoo, doors, windows, statuary, sometimes entire rooms, etc) were imported from Europe and sometimes created by master European craftsmen. Julia, who took a very personal interest in the project, designed most of the buildings, the intricate landscaping which she painstakingly integrated with the buildings, the famous Neptune Pool and the indoor Roman Pool, and the zoo and shelters for the animals herself. Only when the Hearst money ran out did the project come to a halt, leaving the castle unfinished.

Among her other accomplishments, and often done while she oversaw the building of the Hearst Castle, Julia also designed: Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, Phoebe A. Hearst Memorial Gymnasium for Women at U.C. , Berkeley City Club on Durant Street in Berkeley, and several Bavarian-style village houses on the McCloud River. In all, Julia was the architect for over 700 California buildings.

A recluse for most of her life, due in part to an inner ear infection that disfigured her face, in 1950, at the age of 78, Julia closed her architectural offices for good. She died 7 years later.

Blessings,
Diva Elizabeth

Her name was Mary Hays McCauly, and, as many women did back then, she went to war beside her husband, William Hays, an artillery matross (gunner).

Mary spent her days tending the wounded and bringing water to the fighting men on the front lines of battle, an act that would earn her the nickname Molly Pitcher. It is said that on one occasion, she hoisted a wounded Continental soldier on her back and carried him to safety away from the advancing British redcoats. On June 28, 1778, at the battle of Monmouth, the temperatures soared, leaving both guns and men in dire need of water.

Mary raced back and forth with her pitchers of water, cooling the overheated guns and soothing the parched throats of the solders. On one of these trips, she saw her husband wounded. Mary grabbed the rammer staff from her husband and took up his duties. Despite the heavy enemy fire, she remained at her post.

General Washington gave her the rank of noncommissioned officer, and the men gave her the name of Sergeant Molly. Pennsylvania’s Assembly awarded her an annuity for her service and later a widow’s pension that was said to be more generous than most.

At Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a flagstaff and cannon mark her grave and a sculpture on the battle monument memorializes her for posterity.

*** Mary is sometimes confused with Margaret Corbin, who also fought beside her husband, carried water, and took over the firing of his cannon when he was killed in 1776 at Fort Washington.

Blessings,
Diva Elizabeth

We all have a mental image of Scarlet O’Hara dressed in a bell-shaped, elegant gown; sitting on her veranda; sipping mint juleps; and being fanned by one of her slaves as that of the typical plantation mistress. Nothing could be farther from the actual thing.

Married at a very young age (usually around fifteen) to a man much her senior, she was immediately plunged into a life filled with duties she was rarely prepared to take on. From the cradle she was groomed to marry and take her proper place in a society that demanded much, but didn’t train her for what her life would really entail.

Typically this young girl would go from being cosseted, waited on and even dressed to virtually running the plantation. In today’s world it would be the equivalent of a girl just into her teens running a small corporation. The so called “Southern Belle” had no time for worrying about ball gowns and parties at neighboring plantations. Fact of the matter is, she rarely attended parties because she couldn’t be spared from her duties. Most of the time her husband went alone.

While the plantation master was off “partying,” his wife was busy doing things like supervising the butchering of livestock, tending the sick, seeing that everyone on the plantation was clothed and fed, delivering babies and, if there was a need for a new gown, she would probably weave the cloth and then stitch it herself. All this she accomplished while supplying the master with an heir to his vast holdings. It was not unusual for a plantation wife to give birth to ten to sixteen children, and often died doing it.

Plantations, geographically, were located miles apart, which isolated the women even more from the society they’d known prior to marriage. There were often epidemics of yellow jack, cholera and other communicable disease that doubled her duties in caring for the sick. Even the mail came rarely more often than once a week. But just because she could not attend parties didn’t mean she didn’t entertain. Visitors came regularly and stayed for weeks, sometimes months.

Is it any wonder that when their menfolk died or when they trotted off to serve the Confederacy in the Civil War, that these ladies saw to running the plantations in their absence?

These Steel Magnolias can indeed take their place on our roster of outstanding women.

Blessings,

Diva Elizabeth

She was a frumpy, sixty-three-year-old woman, who had failed at most of the endeavors she undertaken in life, including teaching and working as a dancing instructor. She needed money to help her keep up with her financially affluent friends. But it was 1901, and women had not yet been granted their equal rights in society.

As she put it in her autobiography: I saw the options left me, the options of all single, destitute women over forty: I could turn to poorhouse charity or keep my self-sufficiency by scrubbing pots and privies, and spend my nights doing other people’s laundry. I didn’t want to lower my social standards, for I have always associated with the best class of people, the cultivated and the refined. To hold my place in that world I needed money, but how to get it?

The choice Annie Taylor ultimately made would astonish her friends and acquaintances, as well as an awestruck world. Annie Taylor had decided that she would be the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. She would not be deterred. After all, in 1850 a man, tightrope walker Charles Blondin, had earned both fame and fortune after he and Enrico Farini traversed the Falls on a tightrope. Why couldn’t she earn the same notoriety and riches?

On the afternoon of October 24, 1901, wearing only a shirtwaist, stockings and slippers, she took her lucky heart-shaped pillow in hand and climbed into a padded barrel she had designed herself and then had built by a local cooper. Some say a black cat went with her and emerged from the harrowing ride totally white. Others say the cat rumor originated from Annie’s use of animals to test the barrel before her trip. Eighteen minutes after she plunged over the edge of the Horseshoe Falls, Annie emerged from the Niagara River unscathed, except for minor bruises and being cold and dazed, and with her hair still in place.

Afterward, she told the newspapers: If it was with my dying breath, I would caution anyone against attempting the feat… I would sooner walk up to the mouth of a cannon, knowing it was going to blow me to pieces than make another trip over the Falls.

Unfortunately, disappointment was to be Annie’s only reward for risking her life.  She made little money off her daring feat and what she had made was used to hire private detectives to track down her manager who had stolen the barrel. Though she eventually found it in Chicago, it disappeared again and was never found. In the final years of her life, Annie was reduced to standing beside a fake barrel and selling autographed postcards at Niagara Falls to gawking tourists.

Despite her unequaled courage, even if her underlying reasons for undertaking such a dangerous adventure were questionable, the kindest words posterity could afford her were the thoses of two Niagra historians: The rapids lost their glamour when on October 24, 1901, Mrs. Anna Edson Taylor went over the Horseshoe Falls in a barrel. AND, When Mrs. Taylor followed in the footsteps of other Niagara daredevils by becoming a dime museum attraction, the vulgarization of Niagara seemed complete.

At the age of 83, Annie Taylor died in the Niagra County Infirmary. She is buried in the Stunters Section of Oakwood Cemetery in Niagra Falls, NY.

Blessings,

Diva Elizabeth