Pennsylvania has graced the world with an inordinate number of influential women throughout its history but looking with a sharper lens at four women in particular highlights not just their achievements, but also key trends in the U.S. and Pennsylvania in the 1800’s. Dr. Christine Senecal, Medieval Historian, shared some of the most important women from Pennsylvania whose lives made a positive impact on the world today.

Mary Cassatt was the only American to exhibit alongside the French Impressionists in France. Cassatt’s artwork was very radical for her time, that is still celebrated to this day.

“So, she did many pictures and paintings of women with children, and while that had been a pretty common scene in art, like Renoir did a lot of that, he was an imperious artist, she tended to focus on women, the labor that women did in care taking. So, if you look at a Renoir and you look at, um, like the women with the children, they're both smiling, sort of smiling for the camera, so to speak. Mary Cassatt's women are like tending to the children. And there's a lot of love and affection in her paintings, but also it shows women working. Moreover, there's pictures of women, many women, looking intently at things.”

Nellie Bly was an investigative journalist who was known for her undercover reporting on a mental asylum, her trip around the world, and her advocacy for women’s rights.

“She would throw herself into some news, a kind of important journalistic story. The most infamous or famous of this is a piece she wrote called Ten Days in the Madhouse. Off of the coast of New York, Manhattan, there's an island, it's an island that's now called Roosevelt Island and there was a woman's lunatic asylum, and it was supposed to be really corrupt. Nellie Bly got herself into the asylum. She did it by like going overnight, like she didn't let herself sleep. And so, she looked all crazy. And she checked herself into a kind of like dormitory to get into it and acted really crazy. Once she was in, she was eventually accepted into the woman's lunatic asylum. She was, you know, able to really record the horrible abuses and broke the story.”

Listen to the podcast to hear about Union Organizer Fannie Sellins, and abolitionist Sarah Mapps Douglass.

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