Women’s History Month: World Celebrates IWD
The world celebrated International Women’s Day 2021 this week as part of Women’s History Month. This year’s them for IWD was “Choose to Challenge.” Each year, the day serves as an occasion to recognize cultural, social, economic and political achievements of women throughout the world, as well as call attention to continuing gender inequality. This year’s organizers say that they chose its theme, “Choose to Challenge,” to inspire people to challenge gender biases and question gender stereotypes. “A challenged world is an alert world and from challenge comes change,” IWD’s website says. “So let’s all choose to challenge. How will you help forge a gender equal world?
Celebrate women’s achievement. Raise awareness against bias. Take action for equality.
Last year was an important one in terms of women’s history, because it was the 100th Anniversary of Women’s Suffrage, and as countries celebrated IWD, we were all tasked with reflecting on the leaders who left their mark on history by plowing through stereotypes and degradation. Women have fought, struggled, overcome and thrived in the face of adversity, helping to show that a woman’s true place is in directing the course of history, moving society forward into a new place of inclusion and respect.
Dakota Territory’s Pioneer Women
While the Great Dakota Wilderness was still sparsely settled, immigrants came to the prairie as families, single men and even single women. Thousands of women led their own homestead efforts in Dakota Territory, turning up sod, leading plow teams, sustaining livestock and food supplies. Women in pioneer families also did an incredible breadth of work alongside their husbands and children to make a living. They broke the sod and planted crop, milked cows, gathered eggs, herded cattle, made products like butter and soap, sewed and mended clothing, washed clothes, grew gardens, canned fruits, meats and vegetables, made five meals a day for their farming men, and raising their children. They were busy from before sunrise to long after the stars came out.
Redefining a Woman’s “Place”
Pioneer Women set the stage for other strong women—no matter their life’s work—to rise from the prairie. Here are a few North Dakotans who took life by the horns and made their own, in turn directing the course of the state’s (and nation’s) history.
Elizabeth Preston Anderson (1861-1954)
Barnes County’s most prominent figure in the Women’s Suffrage movement was
Elizabeth Preston Anderson, from the Tower City area. She was a Christian woman and former teacher, in the early to mid-1900s solely working with the local chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union she had organized. Preston Anderson expanded the group’s mission to also include supporting women’s suffrage and she was a huge leader in organizing groups, appointing leaders and encouraging women across the state to get involved in politics. She testified at the State Capitol multiple times, advocating, for both alcohol education and women’s suffrage.
Dr. Fannie Quain (1874-1950)
Fannie Almara Dunn Quain was the first woman born in North Dakota to earn a doctor of medicine degree. She graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1898 and returned to
her home state to champion a state campaign to eradicate Tuberculosis. Dr. Quain co-founded the North Dakota Tuberculosis Association, serving as the organization’s secretary, treasurer, vice-president and president at different times. She also established the state’s first baby clinic and the State Sanatorium at San Haven, while raising public awareness of Tuberculosis to slow its spread.
In addition to raising two kids, Dr. Quain spent most of her years as an active member of the public health and medical communities. She helped raise the state’s standard of nurses’ training, assisted in fighting a deadly pandemic, saved lives as a physician and advocated for more women in medicine throughout her 75 years.
Pearl Young (1895-1968)
North Dakota native Pearl Young left home at the age of 11 to work as a domestic in order to attend high school. She studied at Jamestown College for two years before transferring to the University of North Dakota, where she graduated in 1919 with a triple major in physics, mathematics and chemistry. Young taught physics at UND for a few years before she was hired as a physicist by National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA — the agency that later became NASA) to work at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Virginia. She was only the second woman hired as a physicist by the federal government.
Era Bell Thompson (1905-1986)
Era Bell Thompson was born in Iowa in 1905 and moved with her family to a farm in near Driscol, North Dakota in 1914 at the age of 9. Her experiences as one of the few Black North Dakotans in the early 1900s made Thompson feel alienated, and “less than” in the eyes of those around her. She graduated Bismarck High School in 1924 and enrolled at UND. Despite challenges finding housing and jobs that would accept her, she excelled both academically and athletically. She began writing for the campus newspaper and also broke five UND women’s track records (tying two national records).
Thompson earned her journalism degree from Morningside College in Iowa and moved to Chicago in 1933 to work as a housekeeper. In 1945, she wrote her autobiography detailing her experiences as a young black woman in North Dakota. The book launched Thompson into a 40-year career as writer and journalist, serving for a long time as editor at the nationally prominent African-American magazine Ebony. In 1954, her travels through 18 African countries led to her book, “Africa, Land of My Fathers” which recounts the raw firsthand encounters she had in the places of her heritage.
These women—and many more—took initiative in living the life they wanted to, whether or not it was the societal norm. They helped show the world that a woman’s place is in the house…..and the senate (and anywhere else she darn well pleases).