It’s important to know our “foremothers,” as Virginia Woolf advised us. Today, we all know her name. But what about Leonie von Zesch, a dog-sledding Alaskan dentist who cleaned cavities with hairpins? What about Alice Ball, the African American woman who discovered a cure for leprosy in Hawaii when she was only 24—only to have her Ivy-League professor steal the credit?
Author: Erika J. Waters
Erika J. Waters, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus from the University of the Virgin Islands. She founded The Caribbean Writer and researched early Caribbean women writers with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. She's published articles, interviews, and reviews in journals and magazines and was a Fulbright Scholar to Finland. Her most recent book is Discovering Old Florida: A Guide to Vintage South and Central Florida--where she first learned about the intriguing Marian Newhall Horwitz O'Brien.
100 Years Ago, The South Elected Its First Woman Mayor
In 1916, 33-year-old widow Marian Newhall Horwitz made the difficult decision to leave her affluent Philadelphia life behind and move to frontier Florida.