Berks County Women In History

From the 17th century to the present, thousands of women have lived and worked in Berks County, Pennsylvania. This book celebrates their accomplishments and honors the women who have contributed to the quality of life in Berks County.

From the 17th century to the present, thousands of women have lived and worked in Berks County, Pennsylvania. This book celebrates their accomplishments and honors the women who have contributed to the quality of life in Berks County.

“Graceful yet precise, poetic yet deeply rooted in research, this exploration of an overlooked painter is gorgeous — a joy to read. Molly Peacock’s insights and empathy with her subject bring to life both Mary Hiester Reid and her luscious flower paintings.” — Charlotte Gray, author of The Massey Murder Molly Peacock uncovers the history of neglected painter Mary Hiester Reid, a trailblazing artist who refused to choose between marriage and a career. Born into a patrician American family in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mary Hiester Reid was determined to be a painter and left behind women’s design schools to enter the art world of men. After she married fellow artist George Reid, she returned with him to his home country of Canada. There she set about creating over 300 stunning still life and landscape paintings, inhabiting a rich, if sometimes difficult, marriage, coping with a younger rival, exhibiting internationally, and becoming well-reviewed. She studied in Paris, traveled in Spain, and divided her time between Canada and the United States where she lived among America’s Arts and Crafts movement titans. She left slender written records; rather, her art became her diary and Flower Diary unfolds with an artwork for each episode of her life. In this sumptuous and precisely researched biography, celebrated poet and biographer Molly Peacock brings Mary Hiester Reid, foremother of painters such as Georgia O’Keefe, out of the shadows, revealing a fascinating, complex woman who insisted on her right to live as a married artist, not as a tragic heroine. Peacock uses her poet’s skill to create a structurally inventive portrait of this extraordinary woman whom modernism almost swept aside, weaving threads of her own marriage with Hiester Reid’s, following the history of empathy and examining how women manage the demands of creativity and domesticity, coping with relationships, stoves, and steamships, too. How do you make room for art when you must go to the market to buy a chicken for dinner? Hiester Reid had her answers, as Peacock gloriously discovers.

The tiny villages along what is now known as the Route 100 Corridor are Bally, Eshbach, Bechtelsville, New Berlinville, Boyertown, and Washington Township, which consists of Schultzville, Barto, and Forgedale. In the late 1800s, the area's prosperous industry attracted such figures as Thomas Edison. The rich history of the area also includes the worst fire in U.S. history, the first Mennonite house of worship, one of the first Catholic missions in the thirteen original colonies, and a young missionary woman who traveled to India and perished on the Titanic. Through vintage photographs and descriptive captions, Along the Route 100 Corridor is a trip down these historic dirt roads with the early settlers.

Along the Route 100 Corridor Revisited documents the villages and townspeople along the Route 100 Corridor that were instrumental in the beginnings of many industries in the area. They also played a significant role in the formation of religious organizations, including the Mennonite, Catholic, and Schwenkfelders. Heavily populated by the Pennsylvania Dutch, industries such as furniture making, pottery, shoemaking, and tinsmithing all developed. Businesses known as hucksters serviced the nearby communities by traveling via horse-drawn wagons. Travel back to the dirt roads, country doctors, and rural lifestyle through this collection of vintage photographs.

Investigation into a child's gruesome murder. New findings on a justice system that failed a young woman. The real story behind the legend.

The history of the execution of women in the United States has largely been ignored and scholars have given scant attention to gender issues in capital punishment. This historical analysis examines the social, political and economic contexts in which the justice system has put women to death, revealing a pattern of patriarchal domination and female subordination. The book includes a discussion of condemned women granted executive clemency and judicial commutations, an inquiry into women falsely convicted in potentially capital cases and a profile of the current female death row population.