More Than Petticoats: Remarkable Ohio Women (review)

Ohio has been home to many notable women whose influences were responsible for altering the course of local, state, or national history. Greta Anderson's More than Petticoats: Remarkable Ohio Women, which is geared toward a popular rather than a scholarly audience, introduces us to twelve diverse women with Ohio roots whose ambitions often brought them face to face with the social or political mores of their era. Undeterred, their lives symbolized a popular nineteenth-century adage that urged, "Let us be up and doing."

The profiles, chronologically arranged, depict a diverse lineup of public minded women. The list includes Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eliza Trimble Thompson, Mary Ann Bickerdyke, Victoria Woodhull, Hallie Quinn Brown, Annie Oakley, Helen Taft, Jane Edna Hunter, Florence Allen, Ella Stewart, Lois Lenski, and Dorothy Fuldheim. Readers learn not only about their causes and achievements but also the personal and social contexts within which they developed.

These women envisioned lives that went beyond themselves. Stowe's widely read Uncle Tom's Cabin, which began as serial installments in 1851, made slavery's inhumanity to black women, men, and families starkly and emotionally real to northerners. In doing so, it moved the nation closer to Civil War. Rough-mannered "Mother" Bickerdyke, who once assisted fugitive slaves in the Underground Railroad, found her life's mission doing "the Lord's work" as an unpaid sanitary and medical volunteer in the Union army, and later in fund-raising for the Northwest Sanitary Commission. Her devotion to soldiers was as strong as she was sharp tongued; yet, Gen. William Sherman steadfastly defended her as "the one person around here who outranks me" (25). Like many, "Mother" Thompson had become swept up in the temperance movement, which identified alcohol as the ruination of American society. In 1874, largely as a result of her spearheading campaign in Hillsboro, the Ohio Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was formed, followed almost immediately by the creation of the national WCTU in Cleveland.

Some of the women here cultivated a rich public life. Notorious Victoria Woodhull, an ardent spiritualist, free-love advocate, and women's rights lobbyist, pursued an entrepreneurial career that took her to New York City in the late 1860s. There she sold personal products to the major brothels and, in the process, came to know some of the powerful men who frequented them, such as Cornelius Vanderbilt. Through Vanderbilt she made a fortune in the stock market. Annie "Little Sure Shot" Oakley had already built her reputation as a fine hunter and game supplier while still a young woman. She later became the first white woman to join Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. African American pharmacist Ella Stewart consistently confronted and prevailed over racial barriers as she engaged not only in her business but also in her wide-ranging club activities in Toledo and beyond.

This is not a scholarly work and students of women's history may be put off by the pejorative series title, More Than Petticoats. Yet readers will find these women interesting, if not inspiring.