History walk will celebrate women who left their mark on Providence

11:35 AM EST on Sunday, March 21, 2004

BY LAURA MEADE KIRK
Journal Staff Writer

History walk follows in the footsteps of women who left their mark on Rhode Island.

Local historian Jane Lancaster was at a conference last fall when she heard a woman speak of historical walking tours of famous women in Boston and Portland. "We should do that here," she thought.

So she teamed with Sandy Lemieux, site manager of the John Brown House, to create "Enterprising Women: A Women's History Walk in Providence" as part of Women's History Month.

The 90-minute tour will take place next Sunday, March 28, at 2 p.m. starting at the John Brown House, 52 Power St., Providence, with nine stops along the way to talk about some of the state's most enterprising women and their contributions to education, the arts and industry.

The walk is free, but registration is required to ensure there are enough tour guides, explained Barbara Barnes, tour manager. Already, she said, "the response has been incredible."

The tour also will be offered each Wednesday this summer as part of the regular series of tours offered by the Rhode Island Historical Society. For more information or to register, call Barnes at (401) 438-0463 or by e-mail at provwalk [at] aol.com.

Meanwhile, we'll give you a taste of the tour by introducing you to these enterprising women from Rhode Island's history. After all, as Lancaster said: "Celebrating Rhode Island women is an idea whose time has come."

Betsey Metcalf was barely 12 years old when she developed, with help from an aunt, a way of flattening and weaving pieces of straw into a stiff ribbon to make bonnets that became all the rage in the late 1700s.

Most bonnets of that era were produced in Italy, Lancaster explained. But because of wars in Europe, they were too expensive to import here. Since Betsey Metcalf's family didn't have much money, she came up with a design of her own.

Her bonnets quickly became popular and soon were reproduced in a cottage industry by other women throughout New England, who often made and sold them as fundraisers for things like new organs for their churches. This cottage industry eventually spread to fledgling factories in Foxboro and Attleboro. One of Betsey's bonnets is on display at the Rhode Island Historical Society.

Sarah Helen Whitman is perhaps best known for her brief romance with Edgar Allan Poe. But the Providence woman was a highly regarded poet in her own right, Lancaster explained. She also was a suffragist, spiritualist and inspiration for many young writers who would gather at her home on Benefit Street to discuss their writing.

Whitman was widowed at a young age and eventually lived with her mother and sister on Benefit Street. And it was in Providence, often in the stacks at the Providence Anthenaeum, a private library at 251 Benefit St., that she courted Poe, who penned a poem, "To Helen," in her honor.

Her portrait hangs in the Anthenaeum, which also has some of her poems and anthologies -- as well as several of Poe's works.

Rhode Island's Centennial Women -- described as a "pioneering group of women fundraisers" -- raised more than $10,000 to fund the state's exhibit at the Centennial Exposition, the nation's first world's fair in 1876. Especially popular during the fair were foreign exhibits that helped fuel interest in design and interior decorating here.

Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf (related by marriage to Betsey Metcalf) was so inspired that she convinced fellow members of the Centennial Women to donate the $1,675 remaining in their treasury to found what would become the Rhode Island School of Design, said Nancy Austin, a local scholar who's contributing her research to the women's history walk.

RISD was incorporated in 1877 and opened its doors the following fall in the Hoppin Homestead Building downtown, before moving to its first permanent home in the Waterman Building at 11 Waterman St. in 1893, Austin said.

Mrs. Metcalf directed the school for nearly 20 years, until her death in 1895, when her daughter, Eliza Greene Metcalf Radeke, took over until her death in 1931, Austin said.

The Waterman Building today houses the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab, named for the woman who founded it in 1937 as a workshop to provide students with natural models for their art work. It has more than 85,000 objects -- including animal parts, plants, seashells and other objects from the natural world.

On one side of the Providence River -- across Market Square and over the College Street bridge -- stands a granite plaza and fountain at what is now One Financial Plaza, formerly the site of Industrial National Bank.

This also was the home of one of Narragansett Electric Co.'s showrooms -- where the utility company sold all kinds of then-newfangled appliances to take advantage of the utilities that were newly available to most homes.

Enter Lillian Moller Gilbreth, an "efficiency expert" and mother of 12 whose family was immortalized in the book, Cheaper by the Dozen. She'd been hired by the Brooklyn Gas Co. to help design kitchens to make housework more efficient. She questioned 4,000 women to come up with the proper height for stoves and sinks. She also is credited with coming up with the traditional triangle design of placing the refrigerator, sink and stove at three points of a triangle, Lancaster said.

Her designs were on display as far away as California and Germany, as well as here at the Narragansett Electric Co.'s showroom. "She was the high priestess of efficiency," Barnes said. Gilbreth, who lived in Providence from 1912 to 1919, also served as a consultant to several local department stores to help make the workers more efficient, Lancaster said.

The Rhode Island Black Heritage Society, housed in the downtown Providence Arcade, has two of the gowns worn by Sissieretta Jones -- one of the best known and highest paid black singers in America at the turn of the century.

Born in Virginia, she lived most of her life in Providence and started singing for the public at an early age, at school functions and during festivals at the Pond Street Church. By age 18, she was attending the New England Conservatory in Boston and began attracting national acclaim.

She went on to sing for four presidents in the White House, the Prince of Wales, the German Kaiser and other nobles here and abroad. She also formed a traveling minstrel show, Black Patti's Troubadours, that drew sell-out crowds for nearly 20 years before she retired to her home on Wheaton Street in Providence. She eventually died, penniless, at that home, Barnes said, but her legend lives on.

Long before scientists proved the link between exercise and mood, Charlotte Perkins Gilman discovered that exercise makes you feel good.

So she opened the Providence Ladies Sanitary Gymnasium, the first gym in the state designed specifically for women, in what was then the Butler Exchange Building on the block between Westminster and Dorrance Streets.

Gilman was a 19th-century author whose most famous short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," told of a woman who was so depressed that her husband convinced her to rest in a dark room -- but she dreamed she saw women crawling out from behind swirly yellow wallpaper.

In fact, Gilman had suffered a terrible depression after giving birth to her first and only child. A "nerve specialist" in Philadelphia recommended lots of rest in a dark room. Instead, she divorced her husband and went back to exercising -- especially calisthenics and gymnastics, Lancaster said.

"You don't imagine the Victorian women doing gymnastics," Lancaster said, "but they did."

Christiana Carteaux Bannister was a renowned "hair doctress" who operated a string of hair salons in Boston and Providence, with several sites on Westminster Street -- including in the O'Gorman Building and the former Gladdings department store, which are now being transformed into condos and lofts.

Long before Rogaine and other drugs existed, she used herbs and tree bark she imported to "make hair grow again," Lancaster said. "Madame Bannister's" hair salons also specialized in preventing hair from turning gray or becoming diseased, as well as providing people with the latest hair styles of the time.

She also spent much of her life trying to help the less fortunate, whether speaking out against the meager salaries paid to black soldiers in the Civil War or aiding homeless black domestic workers by helping found the Home for Aged Colored Women, which is now known as Bannister House.

Katharine Ryan Gibbs had to borrow money from friends to start her secretarial school in two rooms of the former Caesar Misch Building at 400 Westminster St. in 1911.

She began with one student -- and the belief that women deserved more job opportunities and needed to be trained for those opportunities.

She'd learned that lesson firsthand, when her husband died while working on his sailboat at the Edgewood Yacht Club in Cranston and the mast broke off and struck and killed him. Gibbs was left without a way to earn a living. So instead, she took a chance on starting a school to teach women business skills.

Most secretaries at that time were men, but as they were called off to serve in World War I, more women stepped into those jobs, Barnes said. And Gibbs was ready to help train them at the first of what would become a string of secretarial schools that bear her name.

Gertrude Johnson and Mary Wales also saw the need for formal secretarial training, so these two friends -- who were teaching business courses at Providence's Bryant and Stratton Business College -- decided to open their own school: The Johnson & Wales Business School.

They launched the school in 1914 from Johnson's home on Hope Street with seven secretarial students. But it blossomed over the years, especially after they sold the school in the late 1940s and the new owners expanded its focus to include culinary training while also seizing the opportunity to recruit servicemen returning home after World War II to study under the G.I. Bill.

Thus began what is now Johnson & Wales University, which includes a sprawling downtown complex on the site of the former Outlet Building on Weybosset Street.

Each of these women, Barnes said, "took a chance" in striking out on their own. "They were not typical women of the their day at all."

But they're among the entrepreneurs who contributed to the creation and ongoing transformation of downtown as we see it today, she said.

"There are literally hundreds of women we could have included," Lancaster said, "But these [stories] show what women can do. Wait until next year and we'll tell you some more."