Book Recommendations
Two book recommendations - strong women of their time
If you enjoy reading true accounts of admirable women, here are two of the best I've ever read, and neither of them have been on a best seller list. In fact, they are relative unknowns.Fierce Compassion The story of Donaldina Cameron
This lady did obtain some notoriety in her day in turn of the 20th century San Francisco. She became a fierce advocate for the Chinese women enslaved in the harbor town brothels. As a young woman who recently broke of her engagement, this extremely attractive lady from a financially comfortable California family took a position with a Christian ministry in San Francisco for poor and oppressed Chinese women. In just a few years Donaldina began the clear leader of this sanctuary and devoted most of her life to it. If the women and girls could not escape the brothels and come to her, she went to them. Armed with any and all tools at her disposal, including sympathetic policeman, co-workers, and axes to break down the doors to the cribs, off she would go, day or night. Corrie Nation had nothing on Ms. Cameron! She became despised and feared by the wealthy Chinese and others who profited from the misery of the deceived and wretched. She was admired, adored, and well- liked by those who really knew her, including the multitudes of young women whose lives she saved.Read about the decades of Ms. Cameron's work, the lives impacted, and as a side-line, some very interesting San Francisco history.
Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart
Elinore became a woman well known, liked, and respected in her area of rural Wyoming, and later achieved a small measure of success in the literary world when her letters were published in an Atlanta newspaper. Generally speaking, she was one of a breed of amazing women many of us count among our great-grandmothers.Widowed young with a little daughter to feed, Elinor moves to Denver and makes a living doing washing. But she has higher ambitions for herself and little Jerine; she hears there is land available in Wyoming to homestead to anyone ambitious and brave enough to try. With the guidance of a local parson she discovers employment with a respectable landowner in Wyoming who is in need of a housekeeper, and in 1909, she's off.
Thanks to her letters to her previous employer and friend in Denver, we are privy to what life is like for Elinor and her little girl over the next several years. The lady turns out to have plenty of grit, guts, a sense of humor, and not a little brashness! Did I mention she is in excellent health and can work as hard as any man, two qualities that prove essential to the harsh climate and primitive conditions? Her employer is no fool, he realizes a treasure when he sees one....
And once again, one of the reasons I so enjoyed these two books is because they not only tell the amazing story of two such admirable - yet very human - women, but also because of the realistic peek it gives me into a piece of past history.
Here's a treat for you: As I write this, Letters of a Woman Homesteader is a free e-book download.
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