It's time for another blog about awesome manly role models! (Not that I particularly need role models for being manly (I'm manly enough already! Tee hee (I wonder just how grammatically wrong all these parentheses are? This is like a matryoshka doll sentence now.).) but there are lots of people out there who, I'm sure, would profit immensely from a nudge in the right direction. (Not that any of them are likely to read this blog! Still, I enjoy myself...))
Today we feature a real person, Mr. Henry Browne Blackwell.
A little story about how I found out about this admirable man... A while back, I bought meself this book, because it looked interesting (and it is). If I were writing a book about female role models it might come in handy - only occasionally, though; I wouldn't recommend the behaviour of, say, Mary Surratt or Wu Zetian as an exact guide... ANYWAY. I was reading this book, when I chanced upon a story about a lady named Elizabeth Blackwell. Her story is amazing, very inspirational stuff: first woman to graduate from an American medical school (her sister Emily was the third person), worked with Frances Nightingale (but then, everybody in medicine in the period seems to have done that).
A lot of her many siblings died, but... as I discovered later, they all seem to have been raised with the same awesome attitude towards human equality and justice... So, I finish reading about Elizabeth and skip back a few pages to read about Lucy Stone. Also, a brilliant, right-thinkin' woman: abolitionist and suffragist, what more could one ask?
Weeeell, in 1851 a certain gentleman named Henry Blackwell, within an hour of meeting her, proposed marriage - and was refused. He then spent the next two years courting her before they finally married. He supported Lucy's (many) causes, ran the Woman's Journal with her, let her keep her own surname and drew up this document with her to be read and signed at their wedding. I haven't been able to find out a whole ton of information about him other than these interesting facts, but I think that this man deserved a hearty pat on the back - in a period when women with brains were ridiculed and any sort of public status made women instantly unattractive in the minds of the general populace! And you have to admire a man who doggedly pursued (and succeeded in) a relationship with a woman who compared marriage to death!
Plus... guess whose brother Henry Blackwell happened to be? Of course Elizabeth! Their other brother, Samuel Charles Blackwell, married the first woman minister in America, Antoinette Brown Blackwell.
:-D
No comments:
Post a Comment