Shortly after Miriam Reed received her Ph.D. (Comparative Literature UCLA 1980), she discovered how little she knew. Most particularly, I discovered how little I knew about the lives of women and woman’s place in society at large, fo I had discovered the remarkable Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her friendship with the more politically conservative Susan B. Anthony, who become a venerable iconic footnote to respectable American history, while the more radical Stanton, who dared to write and publish The Woman’s Bible, was consigned to lesser regard
My discovery of the activism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her friendship with Susan B. Anthony determined me to save all women from this ignorance, and so I created solo theatre plays that constituted Women’s History 101. Unfortunately, I probably saved very few from their ignorance, but I did turn on a few lights, and I had an interesting time. I developed other solo plays, taking as my scripts the words of the individual featured: “Louisa May Alcott: Living Little Women”; “Oscar Wilde’s Women”; “Talking Abortion”; and most particularly, the ninety-minute solo play, “Margaret Sanger: Radiant Rebel 1940, 1916.”
My performances found audiences in various colleges, universities, and small theaters. I learned a great deal and took my savings to write a book that would reach yet more women. Barricade Books in New Jersey published Margaret Sanger: Her Life in Her Words (2003), and it is available as an ebook and on used-book sites. The book generated my YouTube video under the title, “Margaret Sanger: Her Life.”
The Margaret Sanger research led to writing and creating a documentary on Clarence James Gamble, who founded Pathfinder International, an organization with global outreach offering health and contraceptive education.to women. And that documentary research led to the discovery of a small album with one-hundred-twenty photos taken in Japan in 190of 8 by a fourteen-year-old Clarence James Gamble .
In 1908, David B. Gamble (son of co-founder James Gamble of Procter & Gamble) and Mary Huggins Gamble took their two youngest sons, Clarence James Gamble and Sidney David Gamble, fourteen and seventeen years old respectively and both avid photographers, on an extensive Asia tour of Japan, China, and Korea.
In 1908, David and Mary were then building The Gamble House, now a national historical landmark. Both wanted to visit the Presbyterian missionaries they were supporting in Asia, and Mary wanted authentic Japanese appointments for their elegant house. Designed by the progressive architects Greene & Greene, The Gamble House is today a designated National Historic Landmark, recognized as especially important to the American Arts and Crafts Movement and incorporating many elements of Japanese design.
The extraordinary photos, hand-colored by Japanese artists, taken by Clarence and Sidney during theAsia tour, are the basis for the Orient Trilogy: Japan 1908, China 1908 , and Korea 1908, now sold at the Gamble House Bookstore. and on Amazon.
These three volumes offer a personal and on-site account of a rapidly changing world, the photos a beautiful and absorbing glimpse of another time and space.The reader of today can share the witnessed experiences of the Gambles in 1908 and consider from the standpoint of the Twenty-First Century what has been gained, what has been lost.
The two-week visit to China was the beginning of Sidney’s lifework. Sidney David Gamble became the foremost sociologist and Sinologist, his statistical surveys of then Beijing and of rural northern China were soon to be recognized as classics in the field of Sinology. His more than 5,000 black and white photos of a China and Asia in transition from 1908 to 1932 are archived at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
In 1992 , I co-founded with Adilah Barnes the Los Angeles Women’s Theatre Festival to present women artists in performance. Adilah Barnes took that concept and ran with it, creating an organization that each year demonstrates through acting, dance, and storytelling the power of women and of women’s lives. Almost three decades later, LAWTF is only becoming more and bigger and better, a vital contributor to empowering women in the Los Angeles theatre and cultural scene.
Currently, I am living in Ashland, Oregon, and researching the life of Christian Führer, pastor (1980-2008) of St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig, Germany, whose Monday Prayers for Peace and peaceful protests contributed to the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
Regarding Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger demanded that every child be a wanted child.
Margaret Sanger taught that the birth of a child was to be planned and prepared for. Contraception allowed this. Margaret Sanger never condoned, never advocated abortion. To say that she did so is a lie and has absolutely no documented evidence.
When Margaret Sanger learned that a committee of male Eugenicists were to decide who were to be parents, she severed herself from that affiliation. The mother, only the mother is to decide when and under what circumstances a child is to be born.
Margaret Sanger was buried, at her request, by the side of her black maid, Daisy. Margaret Sanger desired for all women of all color the right to choose her time for motherhood. Margaret Sanger worked to give to black women the same advantages she offered white women, the right to decide when and under what circumstances her child was to be brought into the world.
No less than Martin Luther King, Jr. acknowledged the legacy of Margaret Sanger: the right of women to control their own bodies and so to be the best mothers possible, the right of all children to be loved and wanted and valued.
The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings. —Robert Louis Stevenson