The press had a field day when it heard Cher’s story, and the public ate it up. The New York Herald wrote, “Cher Ami is her name, and that she proved herself truly a dear friend of liberty is attested by the circumstances that she left a leg in the Argonne; that across her dauntless breast there is a ghastly scar that marks the trail of a German bullet that spilled her blood but failed to chill her spirit, and that she wears the symbol of her homeland’s gratitude for her brave and able service—the Distinguished Service Cross, conferred upon her by Gen. Pershing himself.”[16]
When the war ended, Cher sailed the Atlantic as few birds in history have done, riding in the cabin of John Carney and undertaking a press tour upon arrival. The media hailed Cher Ami as a hero who was a “faithful servant” who “never complained.”[17] And that’s how eventually, when Cher Ami’s life was cut short by his war wounds, he ended up in the Smithsonian, where he remains, his bulgy eyes peering out from behind the glass.
Tellingly, Cher enjoyed more retirement benefits than the Hello Girls. That didn’t change until 1977, when Merle Anderson of the Signal Corps, with the help of lawyer Mark Hough, finally got the attention of Congress. Hough put his cards on the table, essentially saying, “We will sue you and we will win, or you can take action on your own and give the handful of remaining Signal Corps members their due.”
The Army treated them as members of the military when they were in Europe, he said. They wore military uniforms and insignia. Some, like Grace Banker, received military awards, and even the most senior commanders believed they were in the military and acted accordingly. The lawyer pointed out that it was actually illegal for people to wear military uniforms and insignia in this context if they were not in the military, and it was the Army who told the women they had to wear (and pay for) the uniforms.
Congress finally listened, and passed a bill granting the Hello Girls their official military status, a bill that the newly elected Jimmy Carter signed into law.[18]
By the end of the Great War, Woodrow Wilson’s posture toward suffrage had softened considerably. On September 30, 1918, he went to Congress and said, “This war could not have been fought, either by the nations engaged or by America, if it had not been for the services of women…. Are we alone to ask and take the utmost that women can give—service and sacrifice of every kind—and still say that we do not see what title that gives them to stand by our sides in the guidance of the affairs of their nation and ours? We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of sacrifice and suffering and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and of right?”[19]
Two more long years wore on before the Nineteenth Amendment was finally passed by Congress and ratified by enough states to be added to the Constitution. Make no mistake. For the suffragists like Inez Milholland, who gave her very life, for the members of the military who were willing to give theirs, for women of every belief and stripe: justice and freedom—suffrage—was not granted, it was seized. Suffrage was not a gift bestowed, delivered in a basket on a doorstep. Suffrage was the hard-won harvest of seventy years of toil.
An Orientation of the Spirit
Fourteen
Anna Thomas JeanesPhiladelphia, 1822
If you google Anna Thomas Jeanes, you’ll see there is but one portrait of her, painted after she died. While she was alive, she didn’t believe in having her picture taken or her portrait painted. She wears a simple black dress, a thick white shawl pulled over her shoulders. Her gray hair is tied back and covered with a lace cap. Her expression is kind. Knowing. Her gaze says that seeing you is a very pleasant sight, indeed.[1]
Anna spent her childhood as the apple of her father’s eye, doted upon and given simple privileges that reflected her upbringing in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. As the last baby of the family, baby number ten, every new milestone was a delight to her parents. She was marvelously bright, reading fairy tales before she could even begin school.
But by the time Anna made her earthside debut in 1822, only six of her nine siblings were alive, and by the time Anna was four, her mother was also dead.[2]
Anna’s father was well-off. Born before the Revolutionary War, he made his money as a merchant of imported goods, and the family lived near the Philadelphia harbor in a handsome home that was well appointed but lacking the ostentatiousness of wealthy New York society. The Jeaneses didn’t bedeck themselves in jewels. They didn’t go on the Grand Tour to revel in the palaces of Europe. They dressed mostly in black cotton, finding even dark silk too garish for their modest Quaker convictions.
Mary was Anna’s older sister by several years, and she stepped into a maternal role after their mother died. The Jeanes children devoted themselves to learning. Several of Anna’s siblings were quite successful in their own right—one of her brothers was a doctor and three were merchants. Only one of the six children who lived to adulthood ever married, and that marriage only produced one child, who died in infancy.
Anna’s brother Jacob, the doctor, started Hahnemann Medical College, which would later become part of Drexel University.[3]
Her brother Joseph was fascinated by fossils. It’s long been a source of amusement to me that some of the greatest thinkers in history, the people of the Enlightenment, the humans who wrote the Constitution and founded the world’s oldest democracy, didn’t know about dinosaurs. Though scientists had started complex systems of classification of animal and plant life, and understood that the fossil record illustrated life on earth that had long since gone extinct, the field of what would be called paleontology wasn’t officially defined until 1822. (That didn’t stop Thomas Jefferson from being obsessed with mastodons, though.)
Yes, over the years, farmers and builders had dug up large bones and seen things they didn’t understand. But paleontology wasn’t a field until the nineteenth century. No one was out there Ross Geller-ing fossil identification. (By the way, did anyone actually buy the idea that Ross on Friends had a PhD and worked at a very prestigious facility? Come on now.) As part of the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for the natural sciences, the Jeaneses were highly instrumental in building the fossil collection of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences.
One record says Joseph Jeanes helped donate 248 bird species from Africa and Mexico. Another says he donated a “fine suite of California shells,” while Anna donated some glass models of mollusks.[4] They donated elephant skulls, and Joseph was one of a few dozen men who contributed to help purchase a collection of more than a thousand human crania.
During this time, Joseph Leidy, one of the world’s famed naturalists and the father of vertebrate paleontology, was working at the Academy of Natural Sciences, now a part of Drexel University. In the 1830s, John Estaugh Hopkins was digging around in a marl pit in New Jersey and uncovered some very large bones. Marl, by the way, is a mineral-rich clay, and people used it as fertilizer. Hopkins gave some of the curious bones away to friends, but kept one of them at his house as a source of amusement.
More than two decades later, a man named William Foulke was dining at the home of John Hopkins, when he saw this giant bone sitting out. Foulke was interested in these sorts of things, and he was like, “Excuse me? What is this and why do you have it?”
“I dug that up in a marl pit a piece back,” imagine Hopkins saying, taking Foulke to the place where he had found the fossils.
Excitedly, Foulke sent word to Joseph Leidy, and before long they had excavated a nearly complete Hadrosaurus skeleton and put it on display at the Academy. The dinosaur, now known as Hadrosaurus foulkii, is still housed there.[5]
The Jeanes family lived mere blocks from other famous Philadelphians of the time—like women’s suffrage activist Lucretia Mott, one of the earliest pioneers of women’s rights and an organizer of the Seneca Falls Convention. It’s likely Anna Jeanes and Lucretia Mott knew each other—not only were they neighbors, they were both Quaker women, and the Society of Friends was closely knit. They probably attended the same meeting house.
Quakerism was founded in the mid-1600s in England by a man named George Fox. It grew out of Protestantism, but it was a version of Christianity unlike any other. And because of its unique beliefs and practices, Fox and his followers were severely persecuted in England. They were beaten and imprisoned, and it’s no wonder that Quakers wanted to escape and made their way to the colonies. William Penn himself, one of the Quaker founders of Pennsylvania, was imprisoned in the Tower of London more than once.
When Penn was a teenager, his family was visited by a Quaker missionary, and Penn said that “the Lord visited me and gave me divine Impressions of Himself.”[6] Penn lived a privileged life, including being in the court of King Louis XIV, but he was kicked out of his wealthy family’s home because he decided to follow Quakerism.
Why were the Quakers so hated in England? For starters, they refused to do things like bow to their superiors or remove their hats in deference, because they believed in the equality of all people. This was, of course, a direct affront to the king and the aristocracy. They refused to pay tithes and would not swear an oath, both of which were quite problematic in 1600s Britain.
Eventually, after multiple bouts of sitting in jail, William Penn went to the king and the Duke of York and was like, “Hey. Let’s make a deal. Why don’t you leave us alone and let us depart from this dreary little island?”
The king said, “Sounds good to me,” and eventually Penn became the world’s largest private landowner. The king and the Duke of York sold Penn forty-five thousand square miles of territory in America.[7] (Not acres. Miles.)
Penn started calling the area—he hadn’t even been there yet—“Sylvania,” which means “forest” in Latin, and King Charles II added the Penn in front of it, which is how we got the name Pennsylvania.
But it wasn’t like all the Quakers of Europe were prepared to leave everything they had and start over again. Were there houses available for purchase on these forty-five thousand square miles of land in America? No. What were they going to find there? “Sylvania,” remember? Woods. The Lenape tribes, whom they knew nothing about, were they going to want us to live there? To leave Europe would mean constructing an entirely new life from scratch. How are we going to feed our kids while we’re on a boat earning zero pounds sterling?
So William Penn wrote a compelling description of the new land he wanted the Quakers to inhabit. He described this new utopian community in Pennsylvania, where everyone would be free to practice their religion as they saw fit, and no one was going to be imprisoned in a tower for not taking off their hat. The promise of this freedom appealed to many Quaker families and also to religious minorities like the Amish and Mennonites in Germany. Soon, Penn had parceled out hundreds of thousands of acres to willing Christian immigrants from Europe.
William Penn died penniless back in England in 1718. He was a terrible business manager who was cheated out of much of his fortune. But one thing he did was refuse to force Pennsylvania’s Quakerism onto everyone else. He wanted to be free to practice his faith how he saw fit, and while it would have been easier to just set up Pennsylvania as a Quaker colony, he resisted on principle.
Other than the hats and the tithes, the oaths and the equality, what exactly did Quakers believe? For that, we turn to a Quaker historian, a man that Anna Jeanes knew well, Howard Malcolm Jenkins. He presented at the World’s College of Religions in 1893[8] and described what he called “The First Five Principles of Quakerism,” which were:
The Supreme Being, to whom we attribute the supreme qualities of Goodness, Love, and Mercy.
The Divine Immanence, in which God directly reveals himself to the perceptions of Man, that his light shines into our souls.
The Scriptures, which record the visitations of God to the souls of men in the past, and our reverence for them creates desire for the truth and enlightenment they contain.
The Divinity of Christ, and he is regarded as the highest possible manifestation of God in man.
The Christ Rule in Daily Life, which includes love, not hatred; brotherly kindness, not oppression; moderation, not excess; simplicity, not ostentation; sincerity, not pretense; truth, not deceit.
Some Quaker beliefs blended well with other forms of Christianity, but the Quaker belief about the Divine Immanence, sometimes called an Inner Light, a Divine Spark, or the Light of Christ, puts all humans on equal footing—people of all colors, races, and genders. And while it’s true that this is one of the reasons we sometimes find the Quakers at the forefront of the women’s suffrage movements and working for the abolition of slavery—they believed every single human is an equal vessel of God—William Penn himself was an enslaver. And his biographer Andrew Murphy says he “displayed no signs of a troubled conscience over it.”[9] It would be many decades before the Quaker Society of Friends would officially oppose enslavement.
