history

theminimalist-show:

“Members of the Young Women’s Republican Club of Milford, Conn., explored the pleasures of tobacco, poker, the strip tease and such other masculine enjoyments as had frequently cost them the evening companionship of husbands, sons and brothers.” 1941 (x)

eros-turannos:

The Four Marys: Fleming, Livingston, Seton, and Beaton, ladies-in-waiting to Mary Queen of Scots. Referenced off various court portraits from the 1560s, since there are no existing contemporary portraits of the four, but it was fun to interpret what we know about them. I’ll quote some bits from Fraser:

  • Mary Fleming: Descended from the royal Stewarts, like her queen. “As her beauty bloomed, her remarkable combination of looks and vitality made her, in the opinion of Leslie, ‘the flower of the flock’… which the fair Fleming owed perhaps to her share of Stuart blood.” She was nicknamed “La Flaminia” and Thomas Randolph described her as “a Venus for beauty, a Minerva for wit, and a Juno in wealth”.
  • Mary Livingston: Nicknamed “Lusty”, she was athletic and lively. As part of John Knox’s efforts to blacken Mary’s court he wrote of Livingston, “It was weill knawin that schame haistit mariage between Johne Sempill, callit the Danser, and Marie Levingstoune, surnameit the Lustie”. However, Fraser says, she “owed her nickname of the Lusty to her energetic habit of dancing rather than to any raging physical appetites… The truth was that Mary Livingston was a girl of high spirits and exceptional vivacity, two qualities which were scarcely likely to commend her to Knox.”
  • Mary Seton: More sober and quiet than the others, Fraser describes her as “The meekest of the four… The only Marie to remain unmarried, and the only one therefore to follow her queen into captivity, Mary Seton had a naturally devout nature, and also a certain amount of pardonable family pride – the Setons being among the grandest of the Scottish court families, and her father and brother in turn playing a leading part as magnates, loyal to the crown.” After the queen’s execution Seton spent the last years of her life in a convent.
  • Mary Beaton: Huh, well, we don’t know too much about her life and Fraser doesn’t have too much to say about her, though she calls her “the most classically beautiful of the four”. The description most bandied about regarding Beaton is that she was “pretty and plump, with fair hair and dark eyes”. Like the other four Marys she was educated alongside the queen and her handwriting was most similar to the queen’s, and it’s been long speculated that it was Beaton’s hand that wrote the infamous Casket letters that incriminated and discredited Mary, but I think it would be heartbreakingly awful if it were true.

HBICs of history » Amelia Earhart

Amelia (1897-1937) was a U.S. aviator, the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean. Earhart worked as a military nurse in Canada during World War I and later as a social worker in Boston. In 1928 she became the first woman to cross the Atlantic in a plane, though as a passenger. In 1932 she accomplished the flight alone, becoming the first woman and the second person to do so. In 1935 she became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California. In 1937 she set out with a navigator, Fred Noonan, to fly around the world; they had completed over two-thirds of the distance when her plane disappeared without a trace in the central Pacific Ocean. Speculation about her fate has continued to the present.