Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony

This morning I found an email from Molly Murphy MacGregor, Executive Director and Cofounder of the National Women's History Project (www.nwhp.org) asking for a description of my "wonderful book"--Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: A Friendship that Changed the World. After sending it to her, I thought I should also post it here, along with two quotes that are on the back cover:

"Failure is impossible."
Susan B. Anthony

In the Spring of 1851 two women met on a street corner in Seneca Falls, New York—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a thirty-five year old mother of four boys, and Susan B. Anthony, a thirty-one year old, unmarried, former school teacher. Immediately drawn to each other, they formed an everlasting and legendary friendship. Together they challenged entrenched beliefs, customs, and laws that oppressed women and spearheaded the fight to gain legal rights, including the right to vote despite fierce opposition, daunting conditions, scandalous entanglements and betrayal by their friends and allies.
Weaving events, quotations, personalities, and commentary into a page-turning narrative, Penny Colman tells this compelling story and vividly portrays the friendship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, a friendship that changed history.

"It is fifty-one years since we first met and we have been busy through every one of them, stirring up the world to recognize the rights of women."

Susan B. Anthony

"Nothing that Susan could say or do could break my friendship with her, and I know nothing could uproot her affection for me."

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

Hurrah! Here's the cover of my forthcoming book: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: A Friendship that Changed the World. It will be out in 2011.

Barnegat Bay: Goldenrod, Monarchs, and a Cloudless Sulphur

The Seaside Goldenrod is in bloom and the Monarch butterflies are migrating at the Jersey Shore. (I count nine in this photo.) Last weekend kayaking on Barnegat Bay, I spotted a Great Blue Heron, a Dunlin, Double-Crested Cormorants, Monarchs and smaller yellow butterflies. Wondering if a butterfly would land on my yellow kayak, I sat very still and very quiet . . . .and a yellow one did, probably a Cloudless Sulphur, just inches from my hand!

Women War Correspondents

Tonight the Newswomen's Club of New York is sponsoring an event, "War Correspondents, Reporting from the Frontline" with an impressive panel of women war correspondents: Edith M. Lederer, who began her career as a foreign correspondent in 1972, becoming the first woman assigned full-time to the AP staff reporting on the Vietnam War; Cami McCormick, a CBS news correspondent, who served nine tours embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq between 2003-2009, and was seriously injured in August 2009; and Gina Chon, who was based in Baghdad from 2007-2009 . Milena Jovanovitch, who had read and loved my book, Where the Action Was: Women War Correspondents in World War II, had contacted me this summer to be the expert in a short documentary she was making for the event. Tonight I get to see the result of the time I spent with her as she interviewed and filmed me. Recently Milena reported that the documentary also includes "great historical photos and archival video of wars, including World War I, a B-17 bombing run, Gen. MacArthur in Korea, along with other visuals such as copies of some of Sigrid Schultz's stories and the Life magazine with Margaret Bourke-White's B-17 photo shoot." I'm eager to see it and hear the panel!

Amazing coincidence

We were in Vermont on Sunday to bury my older brother Vin; an event that amazingly coincided with the first visit to the cemetery by a woman named Sue who had been close friends with my younger brother Jon, who had died at the age of 20 in 1966. It was a short friendship, a month or so in person & a year or so of writing letters, but one, she said with tears streaming down her face, that had "changed her life." Although I have no memory of writing to her about Jon's death, she said I did and she still has my letter; she also has all of Jon's letters.

When the service for Vin started, I motioned for Sue and Bill (her husband of eleven months) to join us. They stood slightly behind and off to the right of me in front of Jon's grave. It was quite amazing--beautiful, Linda said--to experience her quietly mourning for Jon, 44 years later.

As you can see, it was a gorgeous New England day. The headstones from left to right are: Vin, Dad, Jon.

Quirky epitaph

Since the mid-1990s, when I was writing and taking photographs for my book Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts: A History of Burial (I took many of the 130 photos), I have had an eye out for quirky epitaphs. Two days ago, I found this one in a cemetery in Vermont. (click on it for a larger image)