The Women of the US Postage Stamps—Part 8

 By Jennifer Uhlarik

 

Hello, dear Readers! Are you ready for your next installment of the Women of the American Postage Stamps? Let’s go!

Our first honoree is Helene Madison, who was featured on a postage stamp in 1990. Helene was born in Madison, Wisconsin, but moved to Seattle, Washington, at a young age. There, she began swimming in a nearby lake just a short walk from home and was discovered by swimming coach Ray Daughters in 1928. Under his tutelage, Helene went on to compete in swimming for her high school, winning the championship the same year Daughters discovered her. A gifted freestyle swimmer, Helene earned the best records in numerous races at various distances. Going into the 1932 Olympics, she held every world record in freestyle swimming and won three gold medals there. Helene’s final competitive race was the 400-meter freestyle during that Summer Olympics. Due to a short acting career after the ’32 Olympics, she was unable to compete in the 1936 games. She went on to coach swimming among other jobs, and her many world records went unbroken for years. She died in 1970 of throat cancer.

Marianne Moore is next up. Marianne was born in Kirkwood, Mississippi, in 1887, the granddaughter of a Presbyterian minister. Before her birth, Marianne’s father had a psychotic episode, leading to her parents’ divorce, so she and her brother were raised by their mother alone. During her college years at Bryn Mawr College, she began writing poetry and short stories for the school’s literary publication, then went on after graduation to teach for a few years at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She ended that career in 1914 and began writing poetry, eventually landing in New York’s Greenwich Village. There, she associated with the avante-garde artists and gained the notice of poets Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens, among others. Marianne never married. Her poetry stuck closely to her Presbyterian upbringing, with themes of strength and overcoming adversity. In her lifetime, she won a National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and every other significant award for poetry. Her most famous poem is titled “Poetry,” in which she praised other poets. Miss Moore lived to be eighty-four and died after a series of strokes. Her ashes were interred with her mother’s remains in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. She was featured on her postage stamp in 1990.

The third lady of the postage stamps for today is Ida B. Wells, who was born into slavery in 1862 Mississippi. Still an infant, she was freed when the Emancipation Proclamation was put into effect. At the age of sixteen, her parents and baby brother all died during a yellow fever outbreak, and she took a teaching job to support her remaining family. She soon went on to not only write for, but co-own, the Memphis Free Speech Newspaper. She quickly became an accomplished investigative journalist who often wrote about events of racial segregation and inequality. One of the many incidents she wrote about was her own experience of riding a train and being forcibly removed from a women’s train car to make room for a white passenger. She was forced into a smoking car instead. In 1884, she fought the incident in court and won a $500 monetary award (equivalent to nearly $18,000 in 2025)—but the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed that decision, requiring she pay court costs. Another incident she wrote extensively about was the murder of three black men who had been arrested for protecting themselves and their grocery store after a tiff between two boys—one black and one white—led to a racially-charged mob incident. The men were forcibly removed from jail before their trial and shot to death in a field not far away. After speaking so openly in her articles on these and other such incidents, Ida Wells’ newspaper office was overrun by a mob and so thoroughly destroyed that no copies of any of their newspapers remain. Afterward, Wells took up residence in Harlem, New York, and later Chicago, Illinois. She continued her work, outing the racial atrocities of the South through various pamphlets and other sources, while working to advance the lives and experiences of the black community at large. She fought to end segregation, fought for women’s suffrage, and was a co-founder of the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), among many other things. She died of kidney disease in 1931 at the age of 68. Her legacy has lived on through awards, a posthumous publication of her autobiography, and many other honors. Her postage stamp was also released during 1990.

 

And our final postage stamp honoree for today is Olympian Hazel Hotchkiss Wightman. Hazel was born in 1886 in California, a frail child whose doctor encouraged her parents to put her in some kind of sport to strengthen her. Tennis was the sport the family chose, considering it was thought to be “genteel.” She went to University of California—Berkley for college, married George Wightman at age 25, and competed in tennis until late in life. During that time, she won forty-five U.S. titles, competed in and won two gold medals in the 1924 Olympics in Paris, France, and became known as the “Queen Mother of American Tennis” for all she did to advance the sport. She held titles and won competitions in women’s singles, women’s doubles, and mixed doubles. She raised five children, coached many women in the sport of tennis, authored a book, and was named an Honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1973. No one woman has done more for the sport of tennis than Hazel Wightman has, and for that, she has been inducted into the University of California Women’s Athlete Hall of Fame, the International Women’s Sports Hall of Fame, and the International Women’s Tennis Hall of Fame. Hazel lived to be eighty-seven and died in Newton Massachusetts. She was also featured on her postage stamp in 1990.

 

It's Your Turn: Which of these women had you heard of, and which do you find the most interesting? 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.

 

Available Now:

Love and Order: A Three-Part Old West Romantic Mystery

 

Wanted: 

Family, Love, and Justice

One Old West Mystery Solved Throughout Three Short Romantic Stories

Separated as children when they were adopted out to different families from an orphan train, the Braddock siblings have each grown up and taken on various jobs within law enforcement and criminal justice.

 

Youngest child, Callie, has pushed past her insecurities to pursue a career as a Pinkerton agent. Middle child, Andi, has spent years studying law under her adoptive father’s tutelage. And the eldest and only son, Rion, is a rough-and-tumble bounty hunter. 

 

When the hunt for a serial killer with a long history of murders reunites the brother and sisters in Cambria Springs, Colorado, they find themselves not only in a fight for justice, but also a fight to keep their newly reunited family intact. How will they navigate these challenges when further complicated by unexpected romances?