Shady Ladies Nineteen Surprising And Rebellious American Women

Chapter One Bethenia Owens-Adair You will change your mind when I come back a physician, and charge you more than I ever have for your hats and bonnets. The phrase mad as a hatter derived from the addlepating (often fatal) side effects of the nitrate of mercury haberdashers once employed to shape and stiffen felt. In 1870, Bethenia Owens's family questioned her sanity when she announced her intention to shutter her successful millinery shop and study medicine. As word of Bethenia's lunatic ambition spread through Roseburg, Oregon, a respected female friend confided that she'd never "submit" to a woman doctor. If the woman explained why she preferred a male doctor, the reasoning was never elucidated. It surely stemmed from gender bias rather than common sense, as less than a fourth of frontier doctors in those days actually held degrees from accredited colleges. The rest either apprenticed themselves to formally, or equally unformally, trained physicians, were self-taught by means their patients were probably better off remaining ignorant of, or simply tacked doctor on a shingle in front of their Christian names and slapped it upside their office door. Bethenia was wounded by the criticism and dearth of support, but had already overcome enough hardships in her then thirty years to feel she'd earned the right to pursue a career in the healing arts. Ironically, her father might have contributed the inspirational impetus and necessary stubborn streak. "Thomas Owens is not afraid of man or the devil," Bethenia once said of the former Pike County, Kentucky, sheriff, who'd arrived in Oregon Territory in 1843 with a wife and two children and naught but fifty cents in his pocket. Less than a decade of farming the fertile Clatsop plain at the mouth of the Columbia River parlayed Owens's four-bit nest egg into a princely net worth of twenty thousand dollars. Though a self-proclaimed tomboy, Bethenia was the second eldest of Thomas and Sarah's nine children and the eldest daughter. This virtually preordained her role as "the family nurse, and it was seldom that I had not a child in my arms and more clinging to me. Where there is a baby every two years, there is always no end of nursing to be done...." That is, when she wasn't engaged in farm chores or feats of strength to impress her older brother. According to Maverick Women by Frances Laurence, the petite Miss Owens once bet him she could tote four fifty-pound sacks of flour at once. Ever the gentleman, as he graciously loaded the sacks onto her back and under her arms, he was likely divining how he'd spend such easy money---after, of course, he rescued his boastful sister flattened in the dirt beneath two hundred pounds of flour. Bethenia won the bet and probably several others, yet as the adage goes, sometimes when you win, you lose. Her mother vocally and often disparaged her unladylike daughter's shenanigans. When a former farmhand named Legrand Hill asked Thomas Owens's permission to wed then fourteen-year-old Bethenia, Sarah seconded the approval and quite possibly sighed with relief. Lest contemporary readers be appalled by the Owenses' blessing, both boys and girls in their midteens were considered to be adults. Life expectancies were short, families large, and children expected to pull their own weight, practically as soon as they could walk upright. That Legrand Hill's assets consisted of twenty dollars in cash, a horse and saddle, and a rifle didn't concern Bethenia one whit. "I thought my husband was the equal of any man living," she said. Chalk it up to love's reputed blinding effect, or a heavy helping of wishful thinking. Before their soLedbetter, Suzann is the author of 'Shady Ladies Nineteen Surprising And Rebellious American Women' with ISBN 9780765308276 and ISBN 0765308274.