Sometimes while researching one auction item, I’m led to the history of another that’s just as fascinating. That’s truly been the case in my discovery of the contributions of women.
Many of them have touched the way we live, how we dress, how we decorate our homes, how we think and how we appreciate culture and art – but you’d never know their hands were in the creating of these things. Often, you have to dig a little deeper to find them because they have been buried in history. Luckily, I’ve been able to come up with a few.
During Women’s History Month, I have compiled some of my earlier blog posts on women: how diverse we are, how we were perceived and what a joy it is to be us. Today, I’m offering posts on some of the great women I’ve discovered through my auction finds that you may not have heard of. I certainly had not. Importantly, some of them were inventors:
Belle Kogan – a female first designer
I didn’t see much that moved me on the box-lots table in the back room of one of my favorite auction houses recently. Not until I spotted a light beige vase interspersed among some small junk on one tray. I turned the vase over, looking for the maker and saw the words “Red Wing.” I recognized the name, although I didn’t know much about this manufacturer. It didn’t matter, though, because the vase itself was lovely.
- A fluting or pleating iron likely from the 18th century, for sale at auction.
Antique fluting or pleating irons
Women were apparently at the forefront of improving on fluting irons, used to “crimp, ruffle and press little pleats into starched fabric.” I found several irons selling on the web that had been patented by a woman named Susan Knox in 1866, but she was not the first. At least 12 women in this country got patents for fluters, according to the 1993 book “Mothers and Daughters of Invention” by Autumn Stanley. In 1862, Mary Carpenter got a patent for an ironing and fluting machine. And in 1866, Henrietta Cole patented her own versions of table and portable “pony” models, the latter of which won her several awards.
The little red paper box was adorable because it was so dainty. It had a picture of a woman in Victorian dress on the front and a label inside that said “Hair Jewelry. Madame K. Schmitt.” I assumed that it once held a piece of beautiful gold jewelry for the hair, and felt cheated that the piece was long gone. Later, when I mentioned the box to another auction-goer, she said that it had literally held jewelry made out of human hair. That thought had never occurred to me, and I found it rather strange.
- Dell O’Dell and her magic pencil.
Female, black magicians: Still a rarity
After auction this week, I was going through a tray of small items and came across what innocently looked like a No. 2 pencil. Yellow with narrow red bands, unsharpened and inscribed. A gold coiled string hung from a metal cap at the eraser end. On the outside was this inscription: “Dell O’Dell. Sensational Lady Magician. Seven years bad luck to untie, cut, burn or break the string or the pencil. Easiest way, cut the button hole. Available for Banquets. Private Residences. 5040-61st Street, Woodside, Long Island, N.Y. Havemeyer 9-7043.”
- A black laboratory technician at Fort Jackson State Hospital at Fort Jackson, SC, in 1944. National Archives photo.
Being black and a WAC in World War II
The story behind the play was more intriguing than the play itself. That’s what I determined after watching a very small cast tell the story of two black women who refused the indignity of scrubbing floors when they were trained as technicians in the Women’s Army Corps in the 1940s. Black women, it seemed, were among the first to join the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) when it was formed in 1942 at the prodding of a female Massachusetts congresswoman named Edith Nourse Rogers. One of the first groups of black WACs to go overseas was the 6888th Central Postal Battalion headed by Charity Adams (Earley), the first African American woman officer in the WAC.
Cookbooks: How I found Julia Child & Abby Fisher
I’m one of the tons of people who saw the movie “Julia & Julie” in August and then went home to make the signature dish “Boeuf à la Bourguignonne (Beef Stew in Red Wine, with Bacon, Onions, and Mushrooms).” I got the recipe from a 1967 edition of Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” that I picked up at an auction house a couple weeks before the movie came out. Another of my most recent finds was not the actual cookbook but news of it, by a woman named Abby Fisher. She’s considered the first black woman to publish a cookbook, called “What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Preserves, Etc.”
- The wringer on the electric-powered washing machine was both a blessing and a danger.
Wringer washing machine leads to black female inventor
A black woman named Ellen F. Eglin of Washington, DC, invented what some websites described as a successful clothes wringer in the 1880s. She never benefited, though, because she didn’t patent it. Instead, she sold her design to an agent for $18. She said in Woman Inventor magazine in 1891 that she sold it for one reason: “You know I am black and if it was known that a Negro woman patented the invention, white ladies would not buy the wringer. I was afraid to be known because of my color in having it introduced into the market.”
- Why is Charles Smiling?, oil on canvas, 1973.
Pyramid Club’s forgotten women artists
In the 1948 Pyramid Club catalog I got at auction, the women artists appear to share the listing with the men. Their names are right there, seemingly in no particular order and with no ranking. The club did not allow women as members, but apparently understood, recognized and respected their work as artists. One of those women was Sarai Sherman, who featured a work called “Hericane Time” in the exhibit in 1948 when she was 26 years old.
- A photo that nurse Lessie inscribed to her mother.
A woman’s 1940s nursing photos
It was a simple cardboard box, sitting low in front of some computer towers and near some laptops on a side table in a room at the auction house. The box seemed out of place in that spot, overshadowed by all around it, discarded. In it were some photos that other auction-buyers would surely want: a studio portrait of a young Lessie (short for Leslie) in her nurse’s uniform and addressed to “the sweetest mother ever born – whom I love with all my (she had drawn a heart here). Lessie.” There were also about 20 photos of a group of nurses in uniforms.
Every now and then when I’m at auction, I see a piece of furniture or some other item that reminds me of my grandmother. Things that belonged to her and represented who she was to me. Annie Lee didn’t have a lot of material things, but she had a lot of children. She lived at a time when families were large and women kept the house, birthed the babies, fed them, clothed them and raised them, and tended to their men. My grandfather worked the farm with his older children. I grew up there, but by the time I was older it was no longer a working farm, so I escaped that drudgery. I don’t think farming was a pleasant memory for my mother and her siblings.
