History > Women's History

If you have not met Ida Hagan, just as I had not growing up in the area in which she was born and worked for a Swiss Doctor Wollenmann in German-Catholic Ferdinand, she may surprise you. Ferdinand is not far from little German-Catholic St. Henry, where my father was born in 1904. Ida’s impressive story told in detail in the book you are holding, however, I will tell you that Ida was born in 1888 in Huntingburg, Indiana, where she attended high school after finishing “common” or elementary school, in a country school. After Doctor Wollenmann died in 2012, Ida moved away from Dubois County, lived with her first husband and worked as a pharmacist in Indianapolis, where in 1926 she married a ...

Esther "Pearl" McConnell was born in Kansas but moved with her family to Oklahoma in the early Land Rush days. She had a keen interest in writing and desire to improve herself. She was a remarkable women in the early 1900's of Oklahoma statehood, working as a school teacher, assistant school superintendent and as secretary to the Senate Pro Tem in the Oklahoma State Senate. Pearl’s wrote hundreds of articles for Oklahoma newspapers about the early Oklahoma pioneers which give us that rich flavor of the hardships and joys of a little girl and young woman growing up in the Oklahoma Territory in a tumultuous and rowdy time in one of our last frontiers. These stories are a true treasur ...

Tread the City’s Streets Again is the first book to explore the theology and vocation of Frances Perkins, the settlement house worker who went on to lift millions of Americans out of poverty through the creation of the Social Security system. From the slums of Chicago to the brothels of Philadelphia; from the tenements of New York to the halls of power in Albany and Washington, Perkins was guided by a deeply incarnational understanding of Christianity. Drawing heavily on her presentations as part of the St. Bede Lectures at St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue, in 1948, this book allows Perkins, mostly in her own words, to explain the theological foundations of her vocation. A lay associate of Al ...