Alice Lord
Alice Lord sparked organization of the Seattle Waitresses Union, Local 240 (now Dining Employees Local #2) in March 1900, and orchestrated the union’s successful campaigns to promote landmark minimum wage and hour laws for working women.
Category Archives: Activism
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Bess Sheehan
An early staunch advocate of the first “Save the Dunes” movement of the 1910s
Mary Farquharson
Activist, Washington state senator, and organizer of support committee for Gordon Hirabayashi during World War II.
Gretchen Van Tassel
Gretchen Van Tassel (1918–2011) was hired by the War Relocation Authority’s “Reports Division” in Washington, D.C., where she worked from 1943 to 1946. Van Tassel was the office manager in charge of editing, filing, and distributing official WRA still and moving images. Because of her background as a photographer, she eventually also went out on shoots and supplemented the WRA Photographic Section’s (WRAPS) photos on the eastern seaboard.
Gretchen Van Tassel was born in New York City. Hailing from an old American family with Dutch roots, she had a comfortable upbringing. Perhaps in contrast to the practices of the day, her parents and a favorite aunt encouraged Van Tassel to make the most of her abilities.
After high school, Van Tassel studied at Bennington, an innovative, arts-oriented women’s college. Majoring in art, Van Tassel studied photography and architecture at Bennington, and learned to both shoot and develop in the darkroom while she was an undergraduate.
Graduating in 1939, Van Tassel went to New York to work. First finding employment with a fashion photographer, she next worked for Mattie Edwards Hewitt who specializing in architectural photography, and then worked for a well-known photographer, Jeffrey Marmes.
When the U.S. entered the war, Van Tassel moved to Washington D.C., where she was employed for a time as a draftsperson at the Naval Research Laboratory there. When she heard about the WRA, however, Van Tassel was interested and applied for a job. She was hired by the Reports Division that among other things managed all of the official WRA images that were being produced by the WRA’s Photographic Section in Denver, Colorado. Van Tassel began by keeping the photo files, which consisted of the original negatives of approved shots plus a print, in order. When media, civic organizations, or authors requested images, it was her responsibility to select and send them the size and number of required. She was also involved in the Reports Division’s film projects, and the issuance of PR publications such as a RD pamphlet on Nisei soldiers in the U.S. Army.
As of 1943, resettlement became the WRA’s main objective, and Van Tassel went out on assignment. Although she took some shots of the WRA camps, her main focus was on the Japanese Americans who had left camp and moved to the eastern seaboard, in part because she was closer to these sites, and it was more difficult for the WRAPS photographers based in Denver to come out to the east coast to shoot.
Van Tassel has a little over 200 images online at the Japanese American Relocation Digital Archive (JARDA) web site. Although her photos are largely portraiture of resettlers and discharged veterans, she also took a series of shots at Jerome and Rohwer, the easternmost of the ten WRA camps.
After the WRA closed in early 1946, Van Tassel continued to do photography for the Federal Housing Authority and the International Bank. When she married and eventually had children, Van Tassel retired and devoted herself to being a mother. Of interest is that one of her children, Alison Shaw, followed in her mother’s footsteps and became a well-known American photographer working out of the Northeast.
Gretchen Van Tassel-Shaw passed away on January 11, 2011, at her home in Brunswick, Maine, just a few weeks short of her 93rd birthday.
Dr Elizabeth Karlin
Elizabeth Karlin was a tireless advocate for women’s rights and health issues. In 1992, she was honored as “feminist of the year” by the Wisconsin chapter of the National Organization for Women. Throughout her career she was an outspoken advocate for women’s reproductive rights.
Born in New York City, Karlin graduated from the prestigious Bronx High School of Science when she was 16 years old. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Antioch College in Ohio, and an M.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical School. After working abroad as a general practitioner in Tanzania, she returned to Madison to establish a practice in internal medicine.
In 1990, however, her practice was to change. Her friends, concerned about the lack of local doctors with training, encouraged her to become an abortion provider, which she did after studying with a fellow physician in Madison. As director of the Women’s Medical Center on Madison’s West Side, she offered, in her words, “a full range of medical care and counseling to women who largely have no other access to health care…who least expect kindness, excellence or even cleanliness.”
The mother of two children, Karlin consistently asserted her belief in the value of motherhood and family, while fighting to preserve women’s reproductive rights. “I don’t do abortions because it’s a filthy job and somebody has to do it,” she explained in a 1995 New York Times article. “I do them because it is the most challenging medicine I can think of. I provide women with nurturing, preventive care to counteract a violent religious and political environment. I hope to do it well enough to prevent repeat abortions.”
Through the 1990s, Karlin was both praised and reviled for her public pro-choice stance. In 1992, she was honored as “feminist of the year” by the Wisconsin chapter of the National Organization for Women. At the same time, anti-abortion protestors repeatedly vandalized her clinic. She was the target of constant harassment and abuse. She was forced to wear a bullet-proof vest and hire security to protect her clinic and staff.
Karlin’s involvement with the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy began in 1996, when she became one of four named plaintiffs in the case of Karlin versus Foust, which challenged Wisconsin’s mandatory delay and “informed consent” law requiring a waiting period and counseling for women seeking abortions. Shortly after her death, he Seventh Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals ultimately upheld the Wisconsin law in 1999.
Elizabeth Karlin died in 1998 at age 54, at her home in Arena, Wisconsin, only a few months after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, a close friend of Karlin’s from her days as chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, visited her during her illness and was vocal in her praise. Her friend and journalist Molly Ivins called her “one of the most life-affirming people I’ve ever run across.” The University of Wisconsin Foundation commemorated Karlin with the Elizabeth Karlin Fellowship in Women’s Health. awarded to women who train to become leaders in women’s health and women’s health research.
Elizabeth M Humbargar
Educator and humanitarian. Raised in Salina, Kansas, Elizabeth Humbargar (1903–89) and her sister Catherine (1901–96) became teachers and moved to California in the 1920s, both ended up at Stockton High School in the 1930s, where she taught English and her sister math. Drawn to the Asian American students, Elizabeth became the faculty adviser of the 400-member Japanese American student club and encouraged and cajoled many Nisei to pursue college. When local Japanese Americans were forcibly sent to the Stockton Assembly Center, the Humbargar sisters worked to make sure their students were able to continue their educations, recruiting college students to teach classes there, venturing to the camp every day after school to counsel the student teachers and provide curricular materials and spare textbooks. After the inmates were transferred to the more permanent concentration camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, the sisters remained in touch and wrote an estimated 500 letters of recommendation to facilitate resettlement, college admission, and employment of their friends and former students. When Japanese Americans were allowed to return to Stockton in 1945, they opened their homes to serve as temporary lodging for former students and their families. Elizabeth helped to reestablish the local Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) chapter and remained active in the community after the war. She went on to become a pioneering figure in English as a second language teaching and taught and served as a guidance counselor at San Joaquin Delta College, retiring in 1969. She was honored with an endowed JACL scholarship in her name, awarding the first scholarship in the amount of $500 herself in June 1970. She was also honored by the Japanese government (1978) and by San Joaquin County (1981). In 2012, San Joaquin Delta College established the Elizabeth Humbargar Tolerance Garden and the Elizabeth Humbargar Counseling Center.
Dr Estella Leopold
As a conservationist, she is best known for her work obtaining protection for the stunning fossils near Florissant, Colorado, an area that became a national monument in 1969.
Vi Hilbert
Vi Hilbert, a member of the Upper Skagit tribe, had as her life’s work to preserve the Lushootseed (Puget Salish) language and culture.
Roberta Byrd Barr
Roberta Byrd Barr was an African American educator, civil rights leader, actor, librarian, and television personality.
Flo Ware
Florasina Ware was the quintessential activist, known in Seattle for raising a strong and logical voice on behalf of children, the elderly, and the poor.