How can it be December already?
It was carved pumpkins, then pumpkin pie, and now we are readying for Christmas trees, dreidels, and multi-color candles.
December brings one of my favorite memories with it. When my daughter was little, no more than four, and attending nursery school, songs of the season were a big deal and one of her favorite school activities. “Dreidel, dreidel, dreidal, I made it out of clay…” became a standard in our house even though we are not Jewish. But my favorite memory from this time is when she asked, “Can I have a dreidal for Christmas?” It was so wonderful, and was a hit with several of my Jewish friends from work.
All the mixings of my life have been wonderful, and that is what I try to hang on to at this time of year.
No matter whether we are preparing for marvelous gatherings for the Holidays or settling in for enjoying the memories of Christmases past, we can make the the most of the upcoming season. It is difficult for many, but it can be done.
Sometimes I focus on an orthogonal element of my family’ history when I become too sad over times and people gone into history. What do I mean by this? Though Sojourner Truth is not in my family tree, I often think of her at Christmas-time.
Christmas was one of the times my father would expound upon family history and the homestead at Hill Lake, north of the town of Silver Lake, in Kosciusko County, Indiana (Yes, that same Kosciusco County as in American Gods,) and stories about my great, great, grandfather John M. Hill and his multiple army enlistments, his wounding in service of the Union Army, and his participation in the Battle of Gettysberg were often subjects recounted. Stories from the 1800s seemed nuanced and real even though my dad, born in 1915, heard them second hand.
I was born in Indiana where my family had lived since the 1840s. By the time the divisions over abolition of slavery were headed toward war, in the late 1850s, Indiana was four decades into the ban of new slavery as the freeing of all slaves had been accomplished in 1820, four years after being granted statehood.
The Boston Liberator reported on October 15, 1858: “At her third appointed meeting in this vicinity, which was held in the meeting-house of the United Brethren, a large number of Democrats and other pro-slavery persons were present.”
This vicinity was Northeastern Indiana. The United Brethren meeting house was in Silverlake, Indiana. This group became EUB which was the church of my father’s family.
I always envisioned my family being in the supportive audience there, the progressive community which Republican at the time, that had invited her to speak during her anti-slavery tour. My father was quite politically progressive, it appears that this tendency could be traced back several generations.
Christmas, “Ain’t I a woman,” family stories, and political history; my holiday memories contain it all. What are your unlikely holiday associations?
Vera Bradley Is Not Who She Never Was
Regular readers will be surprised at my choice of topic for today in this non-compensated post about the little woman’s accessory company gone global from the Northeastern Indiana close to where I grew up – Vera Bradley located in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Except that the company is not actually in Fort Wayne from what I can tell, but rather has its HQ in Huntington, Indiana (which claims Dan Quayle as a local boy except that he grew up and went to school in Phoenix, Arizona.) And Vera was not a founder. They liked the name. It was the name of a mother of one of the founders. When I spent five days in the Fort Wayne area in August, I thought I would follow up with Vera Bradley folks I met at the Windy City Soiree last year. Health events in my family kept me from having the time to pursue interviews. The soiree/event was at Water Tower Place in downtown Chicago just before BlogHer 2013. The Vera Bradley Store there was one of the retailers participating in the event.
I came away with a very positive impression of the company’s outreach to bloggers as well as the social media and marketing people and programs. I received a great little, but not chintz (pun intended,) swag bag.
Why did I love it so much that I carried it even though my dog nibbled the corner as soon as I arrived back in Tucson from the conference?
I was not new to the brand with this swag. I had been given a few small gifts over the last 15 years from friends in the Fort Wayne area.
I also won a drawing for a large travel bag that I also really like due to the sturdy, soft, stuff-it-to-the-gills design that I have used on short and long trips.
This company is a great case study for women entrepreneurs and companies with women-focused and tailored products several reasons:
- Women founded company
- Small local company that became a large global corporation
- Two woman privately owned cottage industry to publicly traded corporation
- Brand identity incongruity when production patterns changed
Vera Bradley which trades as VRA on the NYSE was founded by Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and Patricia Miller in 1982. It is headquartered in Huntington, Indiana though it is known as a Fort Wayne Company. Fashion and Fort Wayne might not seem like a likely combination but the city also claims Bill Blass as a native son.
To get a more complete picture of the history of the company and its identity, image, or brand ups and downs I recommend reading Indianapolis Monthly coverage of the company from 2009 that was updated in August 2013.
The basic story is that this was a home-grown, mid-western, crafty company that seemed sensible, old-fashioned, and part of a tradition or women’s culture that also included sewing bags, quilts, crocheted afghans, and many more types of fabric art that evolved out of generations of women decorating utilitarian textiles with personalized stitchery. Baekgaard, whose mother provided the name for the company, and Miller were not the first or only cloth bag makers from Northeastern Indiana. This bag was my Grandmother’s sewing bag. I begged my mother to let me carry it as a purse in High School, but she said, “No.” She did however make me one just like but with non-fragile handles.
Patterned bags are also nothing new. Here you can see my mother’s bead and metal flapper bag from High School.
The tradition of women’s decorative, utilitarian design inspired Vera Bradley original products and continues to be part of their bright, bold cloth items, though they included a leather line this Fall. But the partners developed some distance between them, and the IPO was in October of 2010 where shares opened at $24.85 a share, far above the $14 to $16 that was expected.
With the public offering success, it became obvious to everyone that the corporation was all grown up. Fort Wayne kitchen tables gave way to a New York apartment decorated much like a Vera Bradley handbag. Baekgaard’s Big Apple apartment signals her moving up in the world while still being a significant player in the company. Miller was tapped by Mitch Daniels, former Indiana Governor to serve as Indiana’s first Secretary of Commerce for the State of Indiana and CEO of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation. Miller is also on the Board of the Vera Bradley Breast Cancer Foundation.
The big hoopla over hundreds of Indiana workers losing their jobs in 2008 and 2009 shifted lots of Hoosier perspectives about the company. Customers who bought the product thinking it was made in the USA did not like finding Made in China tags in their expensive quilted cotton bags. I understand. Internationally sourcing corporations probably should not try to seem folksy. Therein lies the challenge. Acknowledging original design, place, and customer-base while attempting to appeal to people who wouldn’t be caught dead carrying bright and pastel floral quilted items is going to prove very tricky.
In their favor:
- Some jobs are returning to or being created again for distribution and a few production activities in Indiana.
- The quality remains quite good.
- There are people who like colorful travel bags and wallets and would not carry a similar purse.
- Cotton is still favored over plastic by lots of folks.
- They have regular sales with significant percentages off.
- Their social media is quite good. Check out their seasonal screen-savers and backgrounds available for free download in desktop/laptop, tablet, and mobile sizes.
A few weeks ago I purchased another all-in-one cross-body that I will again carry as a wallet. If they have convinced me to still buy their product they may have a future. Quality and cotton count for a lot in my book, and they do listen to customers and constantly incorporate changes, so I will not give up on this once a women-owned, Hoosier business.
Happy Pi Day & Women's History Month
Pi Day
Pi is pronounced just like pie. Pi is a transcendental number, and represents the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Why is March 14th Pi Day? The 14th day of March is written, in the United States, as 3-14. Three point one four is often how pi is abbreviated although it has been calculated out to 10 trillion digits.
Celebrate Reason & Women
I love science, and although math is not my strong suit, I love the concept of Pi Day in all its nerdy glory.
At this particular time in history, I think it is more important than ever to celebrate knowledge.
This month is Women’s History Month, and Makers is honoring Katherine Johnson, a mathematician – I like their film interview with her, and I recommend watching it at makers.com/katherine-johnson
If you don’t know who she is, you have been missing a wonderful story of behind-the-scenes history that is the perfect melding of mathematical history and women’s history. There are so many aspects of her story that elucidate unspoken, or glossed over, truths in our culture. I am fascinated by this pioneering womann research mathematician.
But a series of video interviews with Mrs. Johnson are also available on You Tube. I include two below.
Katherine Johnson: Working at NASA:
Katherine Johnson: America’s First Space Flight:
I knew I had run across found an image of woman mathematician while hunting through government archives for retro women’s stories. But I couldn’t find it. I knew it was a public domain photo I used for something last year. It was driving me crazy. So I went to Pinterest and I found the pic!
This is all so relevant today. The talk of black men engineers having a hard time at Langley (pre-NASA ) while black women were preferred in their jobs and the talk of working on planes and black boxes in the early days of flight data recorders perfectly flowed with the news coverage, at least the MSNBC news coverage I was watching as I wrote this post.
And That Indiana Pi Thing
Oh and I almost forgot. I always mention the silly Indiana slip-up where they attempted to legislate the value of pi to the 3 in the late 1800s. They would have done it and left it that way if not for a Purdue Professor. (Go Boilers!)
Fortunately, this vote took place the same day the head of Perdue University’s Mathematics Department, Clarence Waldo was at the statehouse securing funds for the University’s budget. When he heard the assembly was discussing mathematics, he listened in and was amazed. He spent the rest of the day educating Indiana senators on geometry and properties of transcendental numbers. His lessons were effective enough that the bill died on the Senate floor on February 11. — Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph.D. on About.com
Now go enjoy Pi Day!
Wordless Wednesday: Winona Lake Bible Conference 1915
I woke up feeling a bit down in the dumps today. Sometimes I become a homesick for times and places to which I once had connections. Today I decided to take a trip down memory lane via the digital collections of the National Archives. Ssarching for images of geographic locations in Indiana I ran across this image of what I believe was an annual event. I grew up hearing stories about the huge gatherings that occurred at Winona Lake, in Kosciusko County, Indiana. This was one county to the west from where I grew up. I wonder if my Great Grandparents were in attendance there?
The Library of Congress information follows the image. Essentially the copy right info for this pic boils down to: A. R. Van DeVenter claimed copyright to this image when he was submitted to the Library of Congress in 1915. It is now out of copyright.
- Date Created/Published: c1915.
- Medium: 1 photographic print : gelatin silver ; 8 x 45 in.
- Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication.
- Digital ID: (digital file from intermediary roll film copy) pan 6a26418 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pan.6a26418
- Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
-
Notes:
- J20[…] U.S. Copyright Office
- Copyright deposit; A. R. VanDeventer; September 7, 1915; DLC/PP-1915:44992.
- Copyright claimant’s address: Warsaw, Ind.
- Subjects:
- Format:
- Collections:Part of: Panoramic photographs (Library of Congress)
- Bookmark This Record: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2007661804/
View the MARC Record for this item.
U.S. Late-Boomers are the Last Generation Living to Remember When Choice Became Legal
As a Late Boomer I’m telling my story.
This post is cross-posted from my blog, Build Peace, which is participating in a blog carnival today organized by two Hoosier-based blogs, What Tami Said and Shakesville in support of Planned Parenthood which, as you know, is under siege from Right Wing extremists. Check out the Blog Carnival here.
My story of interaction with Planned Parenthood is not all that special. Every woman’s life story is unique. Planned Parenthood allows women to have unique, self-guided lives. That is a very good thing.
I live in a city in Arizona where Margaret Sanger spent much of the later part of her life. I grew up a few miles from a country town in Indiana where good but poor girls died from septicemia or blood loss from botched back alley abortions and wealthy girls traveled to “see an Auntie” who lived somewhere that a skilled physician performed abortions for a hefty fee and silence in a clean medical office after hours. It was a very big deal. I grew up hearing my Mom’s stories of good women who died young from back alley abortions. Her take. Nasty business, but sometime necessary, and it should be legal. Apparently at least one of her friends died because of lack of access to medical care and the butchery of an illegal abortion.
“The pill” was developed around the time I was born, with persistence it could be obtained in the 1960s when I was a child, and by the time I was a teenager it was widely prescribed to mature adult women, but teenagers needed to have their parents permission and that was a rarity. I knew one girl who had a mother who actually helped her get on the pill.
It was not easy to get access to the services Planned Parenthood now offers. The Fort Wayne branch, founded in 1977, did not exist the first time I went to a women’s clinic in Fort Wayne. The county of my official residence at that time had no dedicated women’s services. You had to lie to say you lived in Allen County and give the address of a friend or relative if you wanted to get birth control. If you did not want to take your chances and go to a male physician who might or might not lecture you, refuse to help you, or who simply was so old school that he (physicians back then seemed to all be male) didn’t understand the basics of the types and risks of different contraceptive options.
Then I began to attend Purdue University and had some not so good experiences with the campus Medical Center, again largely because at that time you did not know what type of person the physician you might see was and whether you would get a lecture, good information, or help. That is when I began to use Planned Parenthood for annual check-ups. The Lafayette branch opened in 1975.
For the next ten years all my annual check ups were done there. I paid the highest price on the sliding scale after I was out of college and continued to use PP because I felt it was important to support the only facility within an hour and a half drive where women without support systems could turn for information about contraception, annual check ups, and referrals to more specialized services. I remember interns rotating through the clinic getting experience that was not easy to arrange in Indiana back then.
I am fortunate to have faced no unwanted pregnancies and to have had no abortions. Until I was with my husband (in my thirties) I never faced an unplanned pregnancy. In my twenties when I was unmarried and living with a man with whom I knew I did not want to have children, I was the birth control Goddess. It was a bad situation and I didn’t realize the gravity of it until I tried to leave him and experienced “spousal” rape, stalking, and threats of violence. I could not safely use the pill but had a couple different models of IUD, and used a diaphragm religiously. I had made the decision that if I became pregnant I would immediately go to Planned Parenthood and seek a referral for terminating the pregnancy. I now understand that this determination to never have a child with this guy signaled the problems in the relationship long before I consciously admitted them to myself. Prevention, prevention, prevention was also my mantra because growing up as an unwanted and unplanned child myself, I swore I would never expose a child to the resentment I had experienced because I was not wanted. I am still haunted by the memory of my mother, when I was no more than 9, when in an angry outburst she voiced, with utter contempt of having to deal with a preteen, that she had not planned for nor wanted me to be. It stays with me to this day.
My daughter was unplanned but dearly wanted and born in another state than Indiana. I will never tell another woman what she should do in a given situation. I just want all the options within our current human tool kit to be available to that woman. I dearly and passionately want every child born to be a wanted and loved child. That is the bottom line for me. I will never forget stopping at a Planned Parenthood booth during a street fair when I was very preggers just about 3 weeks before I had my daughter to sign a petition to keep abortion safe and legal and the wonderment that even the women working the booth showed that a pregnant woman would support abortion. It was then that I realized that I would be fighting this fight to keep all our options open for the rest of my life because ingrained attitudes and stereotypes do not go away easily or in one generation.
I ventured to Washington, D.C. in April of 2004 to participate in the March for Women’s Lives. That was one of the largest marches, some say the largest ever marches on D.C. The official count was 1.4 million in attendance. I volunteered to help direct people arriving in 1000 buses that parked at RFK Stadium to transportation to the National Mall. It was amazing. I will never forget the school bus filled with Junior High girls from
Pennsylvania, a Quaker School I believe, that had raised funds to attend. After the bus parking, I “rushed” to the mall as fast as the packed metro would take me. I marched with Arizona Planned Parenthood. I wanted to march with my friends in CODEPINK, but I felt it was far more important to show that even “conservative” states such as AZ have large numbers of people willing to spend time, money, and effort to be a part of a national statement by women, and men, about our commitment to the preservation of women as agents of control over their own lives.
My hope is that one day Planned Parenthood will no longer be the needed, vital service it is today. Good top notch healthcare needs to be available to everyone. Someday it will be. Perhaps then we will stop segregating, and thus stigmatizing health care for women, and we will be able to offer all services under the same roof as immunizations, back to school check ups, and routine visits with your physician, and with that all surgical procedures will then done in multi-specialty clinics or hospitals without the stigma of separation of services, and the denial of privacy from which specialized clinics suffer and to which their clients are unconstitutionally subjected.
Fort Wayne for Peace
Came back from the Fort Wayne, IN UU church showing of No More Victims and discussion among the 9 folks who came out to watch the film to find this great film forward from Liz in D.C.
I’m so proud to know these women. The courage and stamina they show inspire me.
9 may not sound like a whole bunch but it was pretty good considering that every body and her sister were headed out to watch the fireworks at the end of the 3 Rivers Festival. As I said in my last post…. the Heartland really is heating up for Peace.
Zanne Joi pulled into the driveway of the old family farm today with that beautiful pinkly emblazoned truck of hers. She will certainly add a degree or two to the heat. Bless her for having the ovaries to travel the U.S. from coast to coast helping motivate local peace groups, stirring the pot, and raising the temperature a bit.
Anyway, hope there are at least that many folks (9) at the vigil in front of the Federal Bldg. in FW tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. We will then take a message up to to Sen. Bayh’s office. He votes to fund the war though the majority of the people (even here in the heartland) want us out of Iraq and our troops home now. He won’t meet with CODEPINK Indiana (consistently scheduling with CPI and then canceling– several times over the last few months). His “boys” saw fit to arrest Sue E. for reading the names of the dead U.S. soldiers in front of the Bldg that contains his office in Hammond. Sorta like the three arrested in Fort Wayne for praying for peace in front of Lugar’s office in April. (I guess those in charge want prayer in schools but not in government buildings.)
Evan, we want the troops home now! Even Hillary had the balls to finally say no to the war funding. What happened to yours? Can’t stand up to the power brokers in D.C.?
By the way, Hillary does deserve kudos and perhaps a pink badge of courage for finally realizing the war must end.