By Jennifer Uhlarik
Hello, readers! It’s time for the next installment of women who have been featured on our American postage stamps. In previous posts, we’ve explored nearly 90 years of U.S. Postage history, with many interesting women who have graced the postage stamps.
Today, we jump in with the postal history of 1985. The first lady we’ll see on the postage stamp is a literal First Lady—Mrs. Abigail Adams, the wife of the second U.S. President, John Adams. Interestingly, due to a sickly childhood, young Abigail never attained a formal education. However, that didn’t stop her from learning. Her mother and other family members taught her to read, write, and cipher, and she availed herself of her extended family’s extensive libraries. She read much on many topics. When she was fifteen, a young country lawyer named John Adams came to her house with a friend—the man engaged to be married to Abigail’s sister. Eventually, John and Abigail married, and John whisked her away to an adventure she probably never imagined in her childhood. She birthed six children in twelve years, watched from afar as her husband served in the Continental Congress. During this time, she ran the family farm and wrote many letters to her husband, helping him hammer out ideas on the founding of this fledgling nation. In the 1780s, she accompanied her husband to Paris on a diplomatic mission, served as the very first Second Lady of the United States when John became Vice President under George Washington. Once Washington stepped out of the presidency after two terms, John was elected President, making Abigail the second-ever First Lady. They served only one term in the Presidency, though twenty-four years later, her second-born, John Quincy Adams, was elected as the country’s sixth President, making her one of only two women in American politics to be both the wife and the mother of an American president. (The other is Barbara Bush).
Also featured in 1985 was Mary McLeod Bethune. Born in 1875, Mary was the fifteenth child of seventeen. Her parents had both been former slaves and continued to work as sharecroppers for their former owner, eventually earning enough to purchase five acres of land from him. There, they built a cabin and raised their extensive family. She desired to be a missionary in Africa, but after the mission board turned her down, she became a teacher instead. Eventually moving to Florida, Mary started the Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in 1904. Initially, the school had six students—five girls and Mary’s son, Albert. A year later, the school had thirty students, and a year after that, the number had swelled to two-hundred-fifty. She sought rich benefactors for her school, grew the institution, and eventually merged it with the Cookman Institute in 1923, making it the first Black college in Florida. Mary Bethune served as president of the college until 1942. In addition to this prestigious work, she also went on to work for many other causes including women’s suffrage and civil rights, among others.
Our next lady is one I’d not heard of before—Belva Ann Bennett Lockwood. She was born in 1830 New York to a farmer and his wife. By age fourteen, Belva began teaching at the local elementary school, and four years later, she married her first husband, Uriah McNall. Unfortunately, their marriage was short-lived. After five years, Uriah died of illness, leaving Belva a widow with a three-year-old daughter in tow. Fearing her present education level would not serve her well, she fought to enroll in college and, after a semester, was granted a seat at Genesee College. It was there, she gained an interest in the law and began taking private lessons with a local lawyer who advertised for students wanting to learn law. After graduation, she became the headmistress of a school, but still found she was paid roughly half of her male counterparts. Upon meeting and getting to know Susan B. Anthony, Belva’s theory on education changed, particularly in regard to young women. In the schools she oversaw, she began expanding curriculums to include business classes, math, science, and more, so that her female students could do more than manage a household. She married for the second time in 1868, this time to Reverend Ezekiel Lockwood. Lockwood was substantially older than Belva, and supported her unusual goals of wanting to become a lawyer and run for political office. After much difficulty, she fulfilled all coursework and testing to gain her law degree but had to fight for her diploma. It required a letter to then-President Ulysses S. Grant to get the diploma issued, which then allowed her to join the District of Columbia bar. She was the first women to run for President of the United States, but as a member of the Equal Rights Party, she had no real chance of being elected to the highest office. Despite that, she had a forty-three-year career in law, became the first woman to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, fought to be sure the Cherokee Nation was given the $5,000,000 promised them by the government for land they ceded to the nation, and many other interesting cases.
Next up is Margaret Mitchell, who you might recognize as the famed author of Gone with the Wind. Margaret was born in 1900 in Atlanta, Georgia, and lived her entire life in that state. Her childhood consisted of hearing grisly stories of the American Civil War from her extended family, who fought for the Confederacy during the conflict, as well as seeing the old brick and stone fireplaces of many of the plantation homes burned in Sherman’s March to the Sea. She took up storytelling and writing at an early age, and by the time she went to college, her mother had many of her stories collected in boxes in the family home. As an adult, she worked for a time as a journalist for the Atlanta Journal but left the job when she injured her ankle. It was during this time that she began writing Gone with the Wind. It took her three years to complete, and it was quickly picked up by a publisher. Other works she wrote and submitted at the same time were rejected, although in 1996, a romantic novella she wrote in her teen years entitled Lost Laysen was discovered among the belongings of a former boyfriend and was published posthumously, to great acclaim.
Our final lady of the postage stamp for today is Isabella Bomefree. In case that name doesn’t ring a bell, she is better known as Sojourner Truth. Truth was born into slavery around 1797 in New York. In the 1820s, New York made a move toward abolishing slavery, and her owner promised to free her when the statewide abolition took place a year later. However, when he then reneged by stating an injury had made her less productive, she fled with her infant daughter to freedom (leaving several other children behind). A kindly couple took her and her daughter in and, when word came that her son had been illegally sold to another owner, helped Truth fight in court for her son. After months of legal battles, she won the case—a first for any black woman. In her newfound freedom, she became a Christian and believed the Lord called her to preach the truth that was in her. Thus, she began making the circuit to various camp meetings. She became a well-known speaker and singer, lending her voice to various causes from abolition of slavery to equal rights, women’s suffrage, and more. She lived to be eighty-six years old and spent the bulk of her life speaking out on these causes.
It's Your Turn: Which of these amazing women do you find the most inspirational or interesting, and why?
Jennifer Uhlarik discovered western novels at twelve when she swiped the only “horse” book from her brother’s bookshelf. Across the next decade, she devoured westerns and fell in love with the genre. While attaining a B.A. in writing from the University of Tampa, she began penning her own story of the Old West. She has finaled in and won numerous writing competitions and appeared on various best-seller lists. Besides writing, she’s been a business owner, a schoolteacher, a marketing director, a historical researcher, a publisher, and a full-time homemaker. She lives near Tampa, Florida, with her husband and fur children.
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