Saturday, March 2, 2013 at 10:00 AM

This panel will be moderated by current SLC women’s history student, Tiffany-Latrice Williams. 

Finding Wilhelmina Geipel: An Immigrant Midwife in Queens, 1884-1914

Jennifer Garvey

Immigrant midwives played a large role in helping other immigrant women assimilate into the American Dream, creating a more comfortable and familiar space than a foreign American hospital. German-American midwife Wilhelmina Geipel was one such midwife; she delivered babies for many years in Queens. This project explores why Geipel continued her midwifery practice after her family was financially stable and she was not required to work,, sometimes traveling as far as eight miles to deliver babies.
Jennifer Garvey is a current MA candidate in women’s history at Sarah Lawrence College. She earned her bachelor’s degree at Pace University. 

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Seeing Red: Mother Bloor’s Crusade for Justice in Industrial America

Maureen Sherrard Thompson

Labor activist Ella Reeve Bloor was perhaps one of the most radical of the late-19th and early 20th century women reformers, yet remains relatively unknown. From early on, Bloor had a passion for the underprivileged. She spent much of her life with the poor, getting to know them in their homes and organizing for them in the face of much opposition, including several arrests. She later became an advocate for the imprisoned, especially for conscientious objectors to world War I. Throughout her life of activism, Bloor traveled the country several times, gaining support and raising funds for her many causes. When she became disenfranchised within the Socialist party when the party agreed not to strike in World War I, Bloor became a charter member of the American Communist Party, for which she campaigned until her death in 1951.

Maureen Sherrard Thompson earned a master’s degree in history from Temple University, where she also received bachelor’s degrees in women’s studies and history. Her master’s thesis is titled, “Rural Solutions in the Industrial age: Joseph Fels, the Single Tax, and Land Reform.”