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Soft Launch of MARIE EQUI a Success in Berkeley

9/11/2015

Matt Chayt & Will Scott

MARIE EQUI appeared in Berkeley last night to a round of applause, great interest, and book sales. Will Scott and Matt Chayt opened their home to friends and neighbors for the occasion on a lovely evening as the sun was setting. Thanks to their generosity, enthusiasm, and support for this book project, the evening was a great success. For me, it was gratifying and exciting to introduce people to the remarkable Marie Equi. Questions from the guests were spot-on and helped me get ready for an interview this afternoon with San Francisco’s BAY AREA REPORTER newspaper.

Last night was the first of several upcoming book talks beginning with the Portland launch on September 14 followed by the San Francisco launch on Wednesday, September 23, and then the Berkeley launch on October 7.

Photo by Will Scott

MARIE EQUI -- Portland Book Tour Begins September 14

9/8/2015

MARIE EQUI -- Portland Book Tour Begins September 14
Author Events at Four Venues – Two Radio Interviews
Watch for daily blog posts, tweets, and Facebook posts from the book tour:
www.Michaelhelquist.com
@MHelquistWriter
MichaelHelquistWriter

Portland Launch
Monday, Sept. 14, 7 – 8:30 pm
Oregon Historical Society
In collaboration with Oregon State University Press
1200 SW Park
Reading, Book Purchase & Signing
With Special Guest: Kimberly Jensen, Western Oregon University
Oregon’s premiere venue for everything history-related, located downtown amid the lush Park Blocks. Marie Equi enthusiasts will gather in the open pavilion for the official launch.

Author Event at New LGBTQ/Queer Coffeehouse
Tuesday, Sept. 15, 7 – 8pm
Triumph Coffee
201 SE 12th Avenue
Reading, Book Purchase & Signing
Portland’s newest coffee house, Triumph Coffee welcomes LGBTQ, Queer, and Cisgender folks – and everyone else – to take a break from the heat with the Rose City’s most prominent lesbian activist of 100 years ago.

Author Event at Marie Equi’s Medical School
Thursday, Sept. 17, 10am – 11:30 am
Oregon Health Sciences University Library
3181 SW Jackson Park Road
Reading, Book Purchase & Signing
Marie Equi completed her medical studies at the University of Oregon Medical Department, now OHSU. She slapped a strapping male student for calling her a fool? What was that about?

Author Event at Much-Loved Bookstore
Thursday, Sept. 17, 7pm-8:30 pm
Broadway Books
1714 NE Broadway
Reading, Book Purchase, & Signing
A favorite neighborhood stop-and-linger bookstore and now the site of the bookstore launch of MARIE EQUI. Equi was well-read and would have held court telling stories until finally escorted to the door.

*** Plus Two Radio Interviews ***

KBOO Community Radio for Portland and Beyond
Monday, Sept. 14, 11:30am – 12 noon
On Radiozine at KBOO 90.7 FM Portland
Hear the first remarks about research and writing from the author. What was that about the hatpin dipped in a deadly virus to ward off cops? Then plan to attend the launch at OHS the same evening or any of the author events.

Wild Planet Radio, the Nation’s Only Full-Time LGBTQ & Questioning Radio
Tuesday, Sept. 15, 11 am
KPQR 99.1 FM, Streaming at wildplanetradio.com
Get primed on the don’t-tread-on-me lesbian Marie Equi before meeting the author the same night at Triumph Coffee.

For Labor Day 2015 - Top 10 Labor Day Songs

9/7/2015

Remember the purpose of this national holiday: to honor America’s working women and men for their contributions to “the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.”

Peter Rothberg, writing for The Nation blog, undertook “the impossible task of naming the best songs ever written about working people.” Here’s his choices: http://billmoyers.com/2015/09/04/top-10-labor-day-songs/

What’s your favorite?

1. Pete Seeger’s Solidarity Forever
2. Sweet Honey in the Rock’s More Than A Paycheck
3. The Clash with Career Opportunities
4. Tennessee Ernie Ford with Sixteen Tons
5, Judy Collins’ Bread and Roses
6. Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5
7. Woody Guthrie’s Union Burying Ground
8. Phil Ochs’ The Ballad of Joe Hill
9. Hazel Dickens’ Fire in the Hole
10. Gil Scott-Heron’s Three Miles Down
OR Bonus Track: The Kinks with Get Back in Line

I’m going with Seeger, The Clash, Guthrie, Ochs and Dickens.

Elizabeth Taylor as the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies? Listen to the intro of Phil Ochs’ The Ballad of Joe Hill.

Oregon Passes 1st State Law for Labor Day Holiday in 1887

9/7/2015

Oregon became the first state to enact an official recognition of Labor Day on February 21, 1887. The first initiatives began through municipal ordinances passed during 1885 and 1886. Four more states followed Oregon’s lead that year. By 1890 twenty-three additional states adopted the holiday. The U.S. Congress established the first Monday in September of each year as a national holiday.

Not surprisingly, the Oregonian took exception to the notion. In an editorial on February 10, 1887, the paper declared:

“About the silliest of all the demagogical methods of “aiding labor” is the bill to declare a special holiday in June to be known as “Labor Day.” There is sufficient inclination to idleness, there are sufficient incentives to productivity already. Just in what way labor is to be benefited by an invitation to shut up shop or stop the plow upon a particular day in the busy season, or indeed, at any other time, does not appear.”

In February 1887 Oregon’s eight governor, Sylvester Pennoyer, signed House Bill #102, declaring the first Saturday in June a public holiday, to be known as Labor Day. Pennoyer, a Democrat, took office the month before. He supported labor unions and favored use of American labor over that of Chinese immigrants.

The paper managed a “Brief Mention” on June 4, 1887 about the new holiday: “Today (Labor day) is a legal holiday and no session of the state courts will be held, either justice’s or circuit.” Two other articles the next day briefly described Labor Day activities in Salem and Eugene.

Sources
US Department of Labor (www.dol.gov/laborday/history.htm)

Editorial, Oregonian, February 10, 1887, 4.

“Bills Signed by the Governor,’ Oregonian, February 23, 1887, 2.

“Brief Mention,” Oregonian, June 4, 1887, 8.

Terry, John. Oregon's Trails: Death shroud a suggestive footnote to a gadfly's death. Oregonian, November 9, 2003, as noted in Wikipedia.

Kimberly Jensen on MARIE EQUI

9/6/2015

Kimberly Jensen’s scholarship has informed and guided my work on the biography of Marie Equi, and I am indebted to her insights into the role and value of public history.

Her contributions to the history of women’s activism in Oregon and the nation have been profound. She recast the struggle for women’s suffrage in Oregon, expanded our understanding of women’s roles during World War I, and has intrigued audiences with her research into the emerging surveillance state in the early 20th century.

Jensen is a professor in the Department of History and Gender Studies Program of Western Oregon University at Monmouth in the mid-Willamette Valley. She is the author of Oregon’s Doctor to the World: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and A Life in Activism and Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War. Jensen is currently researching a book project tentatively titled “Civic Borderlands: Oregon Women’s Claims to Citizenship and Civil Liberties, 1913-1924.” Check her blog for more info.

Here’s what she wrote for MARIE EQUI:

Michael Helquist’s compelling biography of lesbian activist Marie Equi, M.D. creates an indisputable place in our collective history for this fearless advocate for workers, women, reproductive rights, and civil liberties, a “political individualist” jailed at the close of the First World War for challenging limits to free speech and powerful negative cultural views about same-sex relationships. Helquist navigates the personal and political aspects of Equi’s life and career to present her distinctive story. A must read for those who wish to understand more about women’s history, LGBTQ studies, the history of medicine, radical history, and Oregon and Pacific Northwest history.

Kimberly Jensen will be a special guest at the Portland launch for MARIE EQUI on Monday, September 23, 7-8:30 pm at the Oregon Historical Society.

Larry Lipin on MARIE EQUI

9/5/2015

The manuscript of MARIE EQUI accompanied Larry Lipin on a flight from Oregon to Iowa this past June. He generously agreed to read the narrative and compose a book blurb during the only time period available during a busy summer. I’m honored that he did so. Lipin is a distinguished and much-awarded professor and chair of the Department of History at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. (Pacific University, founded in 1849, is the second oldest university in the state).

Lipin has published two books and has received awards from the Oregon Historical Society for his articles in the Oregon Historical Quarterly. He notes on his university website that he is currently researching the career of a woman journalist, Eleanor F. Baldwin, who wrote a column in Portland’s Evening Telegram newspaper for several years. She regularly “expounded a consistent social justice form of progressivism, including concern over gender equality and worker rights, as well as an interest in spirituality, particularly those directions that engaged women actively.”

On his approach to history in the classroom, Lipin writes: “On my better days, I teach students to appreciate history as an important means of coming to know what it is to be human, and to see that it provides perspectives into the way people create culture and society and, at the same time, are shaped by it.”
(for his full description, see his campus webpage at http://www.pacificu.edu/about-us/faculty/larry-lipin-phd).

Here's what he wrote for MARIE EQUI:

Marie Equi has long intrigued students of radicalism. A defender of women’s and worker’s rights, an opponent of the First World War, a committed medical professional who provided her patients with treatments that included abortion, Equi emerges in this well-researched biography as a generous, strong-willed and committed individual who enjoyed professional success, but openly flouted bourgeois conventions in her politics and her personal life, which was characterized by a series of same-sex relationships. In putting together her fascinating life and placing it in historical context, Michael Helquist has done great service to those interested in Progressive Era radicalism in Portland.

Larry Lipin. Photo: Pacific University

I'm looking forward to meeting and thanking Larry Lipin in person.

Nancy Krieger on MARIE EQUI

9/4/2015

In 1983 Nancy Krieger, a graduate student, compiled much of what was known about Marie Equi and published a biographical profile in the journal Radical America. Her research – along with that of Sandy Polishuk, Susan Dobrof, and Tom Cook – served as the basis for a number of articles, doctoral dissertations, and mentions in books for several decades. She also provided significant assistance and support to my writing a full-length biography of Equi. She opened her files and shared original documents from her research. At one point, she copied for me all 400 pages of the government’s surveillance reports on Equi and its copies of her prison correspondence.

Nancy Krieger is now a Professor of Social Epidemiology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health. I am grateful for all the assistance she has provided and her ongoing enthusiasm for this project. That she agreed to read the manuscript and provide a book blurb with her name on the cover brings the study of Marie Equi’s life full circle.

Here’s what she wrote for MARIE EQUI:

Marie Equi, “stormy petrel” of the Pacific Northwest, has found her harbor in Helquist’s richly detailed and enthralling book. He vividly narrates how, a century ago, this passionate, keen, and caring woman dared to live openly as a lesbian and to fight fiercely for social justice, as a physician, suffragist, abortionist, Wobbly, anti-imperialist, and self-named “Queen of the Bolsheviks” – enjoy!

Note: Stormy petrels are small seabirds that, in earlier days, were thought to warm seamen of imminent storms. On one occasion the radical labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote of her stop in Portland, Oregon for a lecture, “Here I met a stormy petrel of the Northwest, Dr. Marie Equi.”

Nancy Krieger. Photo: Harvard University.

Bettina Aptheker on MARIE EQUI

9/3/2015

I am so honored that Bettina Aptheker wrote a book cover blurb for MARIE EQUI: Radical Politics & Outlaw Passions. She has been an extraordinary activist since the 1960s when she was one of three main organizers of the legendary and revolutionary Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. She fought for civil rights in the South, protested the Vietnam War, and helped lead the legal defense of Angela Davis. Aptheker was born into a family prominent in the Communist Party, and she engaged the Communist cause for much of her youth and early adulthood. The subtitle of her autobiography Intimate Politics says it all: “How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became A Feminist Rebel.” Aptheker’s journey reveals a woman of extraordinary courage, fierce commitment, and intellectual acuity. (I read the 550 pages of her story in just a few sittings – it was literally too riveting to stop).

Aptheker is a professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has taught one of the country’s largest and most influential Introduction to Feminist Studies courses for thirty years. She lives in Santa Cruz with her longtime partner, Kate Miller.

Here’s what she wrote for MARIE EQUI:

Bettina Aptheker. Photo courtesy of UC Santa Cruz.

Michael Helquist has written a marvelous biography of Marie Equi. With meticulous archival research, and access to oral histories he has told the story of this generous, passionate, and complicated woman in a respectful and dignified way that Dr. Equi herself would undoubtedly have appreciated. She contributed to the wellbeing of so many as a doctor, a supporter of workers especially those in the IWW, an advocate of woman suffrage, and an opponent of World War I, for which she paid dearly when she was incarcerated at San Quentin. She was an ‘out’ lesbian at a time when few were. In this well-written, accessible biography of so extraordinary a personage Helquist has made a splendid contribution to both feminist and lesbian history.

All my thanks to Bettina Aptheker and best of wishes on her September 2 birthday.

EMMA GOLDMAN LECTURES ON BIRTH CONTROL IN PORTLAND

9/2/2015

EMMA GOLDMAN LECTURES ON BIRTH CONTROL IN PORTLAND
Escapes Arrest in 1914 Tour
Portlander Objects to Talk as Lewd and Immoral
Ben Reitman, Manager, Arrested Then Released

One hundred years ago Emma Goldman, the anarchist many Americans feared and loathed, stopped in Portland for her annual lecture tour. She had done so regularly since 1908, usually causing a stir in the Rose City if not an arrest. On this occasion Goldman avoided arrest, although she addressed one of the hot-button issues of the day, birth control.

During this summertime visit - from mid-July to mid-August – Goldman mostly spoke out against the European War. On August 6, she joined an anti-military mass meeting at Scandinavian Hall, at Fourth and Yamhill streets. The European War was underway, and Americans were divided about whether the U.S. should enter the conflict. Three days later she railed against the war as unjustified and unworthy of support in another mass meeting, this time held in the downtown Plaza block. Portland authorities allowed the anti-war demonstrations to proceed without any reported incident.

One incensed citizen, however, complained at length to Mayor H.R. Albee about Goldman’s advertised intention to discuss birth control at Scandinavian Hall on July 25.

James B. Dalrymple (spelling uncertain) wrote that Goldman had announced that she would speak about “the birth strike.” She would explain not only why the number of children should be limited but “how to do it.” As Dalrymple reminded the mayor “a federal statute makes it a penitentiary offense to transmit through the U.S. mails information regarding the prevention of contraception.” He was referring to the notorious Comstock Act.

“Now this anarchist woman comes to Portland and proposes to commit an outrage against public morals and decency, to corrupt and debauch our youth, by publicly stating the vile details before a mixed audience as to how an obscene crime may be committed against human and divine law.”

Dalrymple concluded, “In the name of all that is pure and decent and good, I ask: Are the authorities going to permit it?”

On this occasion, they did.

However, Ben Reitman, Goldman’s manager and lover, was earlier hauled before the Chief of Police for the grave offense of distributing handbills about Goldman’s talks. When informed by the Chief that passing out handbills was against the law, Reitman gave his word to not do so again. The Chief reportedly replied, “Very well then, if you won’t do it any more, you may go, and don’t cause any more trouble than you can help.” (Emphasis added)

The next year the anarchist pair did – and were indeed arrested.

(To Be Continued)

Emma Goldman. Photo, Library of Congress

Ben Reitman. Photo, Library of Congress

Sources:
“Emma Goldman To Speak,” Oregonian, August 6, 1914, 9.
“Orators Scold Warriors,” Oregonian, August 10, 1914, 14.
James B. Dalrymple to Mayor H.R. Albee, July 22, 1914, 0201-01 (Albee) A 2000-03 Correspondence 1914 – D. Emma Goldman, Portland Archives & Records Center.
“Anarchist Is Arrested,” Oregonian, July 19, 1914, 5.

The official Online Launch begins

9/1/2015

MARIE EQUI: Radical Politics & Outlaw Passions is now available for purchase from bookstores and online outlets. Broadway Books in Portland (September 17), Green Arcade Books in San Francisco (September 23), and Books, Inc. in Berkeley (October 7) are slated for official launches.

Pre-orders have arrived in Portland, San Francisco, New York, Boston, Colorado Springs, Santa Cruz, Walnut Creek, Petaluma, Monmouth, and Forest Grove. Early readers are well into the chapters, perhaps...
...Chapter 2: Horsewhip in Hand, or
Chapter 6: Love (Almost) In the Open, or
Chapter 15: The Palace of Sad Princesses, or
Chapter 17: Life with the Rebel Girl

Who’s got theirs already?

Jarie Bolander, San Francisco

Will Scott, Berkeley

Deb Janes, Berkeley

Cynthia Sasaki, San Francisco

Janice Dilg, Portland

Dale Danley, San Francisco

Ken Grosserode, San Francisco

Forward>>

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EMMA GOLDMAN LECTURES ON BIRTH CONTROL IN PORTLAND Escapes Arrest in 1914 Tour Portlander Objects to Talk as Lewd and Immoral Ben Reitman, Manager, Arrested Then Released

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EMMA GOLDMAN LECTURES ON BIRTH CONTROL IN PORTLAND
Escapes Arrest in 1914 Tour
Portlander Objects to Talk as Lewd and Immoral
Ben Reitman, Manager, Arrested Then Released

Website by Dale Danley
Photography by Michael Helquist unless otherwise noted
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