WORDS ON WOMEN
These books about famous Marylanders are a perfect read for Women’s History Month
With “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” streaming on Hulu and the winner of a Golden Globe, longtime fans of the legendary jazz singer are suddenly discovering that she had Maryland roots.
Born Eleanora Fagan in Baltimore, Holiday grew up there before moving to Philadelphia and fame. By the time she returned to Maryland in 1937 with the Count Basie Orchestra for a concert at the Royal Theater in Baltimore, she was a jazz star.
The movie from director Lee Daniels is based on “Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday and the Power of a Protest Song” the 2017 biography of the singer and her song about lynching by Gary Golio.
There are plenty of other books about Holiday’s life, her troubles with drugs and an FBI that seemed hellbent on destroying her.
One is “With Billie” by Julia Blackburn, a 2005 look at her life, her career and her death at age 44. The most famous is probably “Lady Sings the Blues,” her autobiography with William Dufty. It was the basis of the 1972 film “Lady Sings the Blues” starring Diana Ross.
If learning about one famous Maryland woman sounds like a good book, here are nine other books worth reading during Women’s History Month in March.
‘Wondrous Beauty’
Few people today know that Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, considered the most beautiful woman of 19-th century Baltimore, married Jérôme Bonaparte in 1803 after his visit to the United States. That mattered because his older brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of France whose wars of aggression killed millions and redefined the map of Europe.
‘Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature’ By Linda Lear
Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” published in 1962, is considered a taproot of the environmental movement in the United States. This 1997 biography follows Carson as she deals with the attention her book brought from hostile government and industry figures and the public that would eventually come to adore the book. woman in Dorchester County who escaped and then returned to lead more than 300 slaves to freedom is well-known, no small thanks to the museum on the Eastern Shore, the 2019 movie “Harriet” and renewed efforts to put her image on the $20 bill. But Clinton’s work was one of the first to follow Tubman’s life as a Union scout, a spy, and a nurse for the Union Army.
‘Mary’s Land’
By Lucia St. Clair Robson
Robson’s 1995 historical fiction focuses on the life of Margaret Brent, one of the first Catholic women to land in the young colony of Maryland in 1638. Brent was a real historic figure, the first woman admitted to the practice of law in Maryland. It was reviewed at the time as packed with authentic detail and dialect.
‘Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom’ By Catherine Clinton
Tubman’s story as an enslaved
‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’
Rebecca Skloot
The 2010 story of Henrietta Lacks and the cell line, known as HeLa that came from her cervical cancer cells in 1951 is a story of how one Baltimore woman’s life changed that of millions, without her knowledge or permission. It was later made into a 2017 movie for HBO.
‘Wild Women of Maryland: Grit & Gumption in the Free State’
Lauren R. Silberman Silberman, the director of fundraising and communications, compiled stories about Marylanders who mark on history as spies, would-be queens and fiery suffragettes for her 2015 book. Some, like Tubman’s, have been told elsewhere, but others are new, like Baltimore journalist Marguerite Harrison’s secret trip into Russia to report conditions there after World War I.
‘Juanita Jackson Mitchell: Freedom Fighter’
Katherine Kenny
Juanita Jackson Mitchell earned fame as a civil rights activist who was the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Maryland Law School, the first Black woman to practice law in Maryland. She was married to Clarence
M. Mitchell, Jr., mother of two Maryland State Senators, and grandmother of one.
‘My Life and Times’
Verda Freeman Welcome
This 1991 autobiography is the story of Verda Freeman Welcome, the first Black female state senator in the nation when she was elected to the Maryland Senate in 1962. She served for 20 years, passing legislation on discrimination in public accommodations, mixed marriages, equal pay for equal work and university status for Morgan State College.
‘Courageous Women of Maryland’
Katherine and Randrup Kenny
The 2011 paperback offers details about 18 Maryland women, including poet Lucille Clifton; U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski, photojournalist Sadie Kneller Miller and the Cone sisters, art collectors.