Growing up in the U.K., the Welsh Rae Alexandra was bored to tears by history in her high school classes. It wasn’t until she visited San Francisco, fell in love with it, moved here and learned about some glaring discrepancies in…
Rae Alexandra, author of “Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area,” started the project as a reporter at KQED writing a series of five essays highlighting forgotten, influential Bay Area women.
The project only grew from there. Growing up in the U.K., Rae Alexandra, who is Welsh, was bored to tears by history in her high school classes.Today in History: March 26, bodies of Heaven’s Gate religious cult members foundIt wasn’t until she visited San Francisco, fell in love with it, moved here and learned about some glaring discrepancies in local women’s representation that she began to dig deeper into San Francisco history — or should we say, herstory. “Because I was always in love with San Francisco, my wanting to find out more about it was always there,” she said. We sat down with her to learn more about her new book, “Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area” , which was released March 17 and tells the story of an array of remarkable female figures who have been all but forgotten, despite their significant contributions to Bay Area history.Back in 2018, I’d been at KQED for a couple of years, first as a freelancer, and then part-time for a section that was specifically about pop culture. I kept finding out about the dearth of things named after women in San Francisco. At that point, somebody did a study of the statues in San Francisco, and found that of something like"Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area" by Rae Alexandra, illustrated by Adrienne Simms is now available, following its March 17 publication date. Initially, I persuaded my reluctant editor to let me write five essays for Women’s History Month. Then, in 2020, thewent around San Francisco and counted the parks and the buildings and the streets and anything that was named after somebody, and thewere so anger-inducing, I developed a fury that took seven years of writing this series to get rid of. It was something like only 9% of public art was female and 7% of streets were named after women. We weren’t even in the double digits for some of this. It motivated me to commit to doingas a monthly series. Then, in the pandemic, I got more obsessive about it. Everyone got obsessed with weird things in the pandemic, like jigsaw puzzles or baking sourdough. Mine turned into chasing history books and trying to find women.That’s kind of remarkable. The thing is, a lot of my research was done in newspaper archives. These were all women who were known during their lifetimes, and then they just got kind of forgotten about, which is frustrating.Sofía Mendoza was a legend. She moved to East San Jose after she got married, and realized very quickly that Latino students like her son were being treated as second-class citizens in their own school. White kids were given textbooks, while the Latino kids were given sheets of paper, and there were a lot of racial slurs being used in the school. She got together with several parents and complained to the school board about the racism in the school, and nothing happened. She came up with the idea of, well, “Let’s make the kids do it.” The kids organized a walkout and were picketing at the school gates, and that’s what ultimately made a change. She empowered all of those kids to realize that they could make a difference. She did that throughout her entire life in San Jose. Sofía Mendoza was a community organizer in East San Jose who helped her son organize a youth walkout to protest racism against Chicano teens at his junior high school. She also helped to organize a Community Alert Patrol of concerned citizens to provide observation to combat concerns of excessive use of force by the San Jose Police Department, according to "Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area" . She was part of an organization that organized patrols to monitor the police, making sure that they were behaving themselves, which changed how the police department was run in San Jose. In terms of ordinary people doing extraordinary things because of crappy circumstances, she’s a really good example of that. She really did change San Jose significantly and quickly, and built a large community in the process.Delilah L. Beasley was the author of "Activities Among Negroes," a groundbreaking column in the Oakland Tribune that began in 1923. She also self-published the history book "The Negro Trail-Blazers of California" in 1919, inspired by history classes she took at UC Berkeley, about Black pioneers, according to "Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area." Delilah is really special to me because she was only the second woman that I wrote about, and she was extremely prolific. I would really love to see a collection of her writing come out. Researching in the newspaper archives, so often I would glance up to see who’d written this article, and it would be by Delilah. I always felt like Delilah Beasley was the guardian angel of the Rebel Girl series. If there was anyone nudging me from beyond the grave, it was her. We wrote about so many of the same women. Even though Delilah wanted to write since she was a teenager, circumstances of survival dictated that she wasn’t able to really start writing until she was in her mid to late 30s, and the fact that she did so much in such a short space of time is really remarkable.What were some of your other takeaways from this process of pulling together the history of so many decades of these women’s influences in the Bay Area?Viewing these very famous periods of Bay Area history from individual female and usually working-class perspectives has given me a completely different idea of Bay Area history. I felt pretty well-versed in what happened with the earthquake and the rebuilding of the city in 1906, and thencompletely upended all of my ideas about what that looked like. I didn’t know that the relief corporation that was supposed to be helping refugees was corrupt. I didn’t know that people were protesting their treatment. I didn’t know that they were being evicted from the parks. I didn’t understand that there was a tier system based on who gets the help first, and that the poorest people were being left to languish the longest. I didn’t know any of that, and the only reason I know any of that is from looking at Mary. I’d also always been an admirer of the Panama Pacific International Exposition that happened in 1915. Then someone suggested I write about, because of her work on voting rights and women’s suffrage. And when I started looking into her story, that’s when I found out how much egregiously racist B.S. was at that exposition. I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t looked her up and figured out why she had organized a protest against it. Looking at history from individual female perspectives has completely changed how I think of these major events. Frances Albrier was the first Black female welder at the shipyards in Richmond during World War II. The former Red Cross nurse and first aid instructor also volunteered at the De Fremery Park Hospitality House in Oakland, a recreation center for soldiers, then went on to volunteer as a nurse at the Black Cross, an organization inspired by the Red Cross that focused on the health needs of the Black community. Over her life, she was involved in many civic and community organizations focused on different causes around the Bay Area. Many of the women profiled in this book demonstrated a lifetime, or at least decades, of civic and community work toward the causes they supported.That was an intentional part of this project as well. At a certain point, I was researching in the indexes of old history books, and if there was a woman mentioned more than twice, then I tried to find out more about her. And I tried to lean into the stories of the women who never stopped working. They’d get one thing solved and go, “OK, well, now what can I fix?” So that’s how you end up with someone like I was just looking for someone who had worked in an unusual masculine field, like Rosie the Riveter. Then I found Frances, and it was just astonishing, her lifetime of service.is another one. A lifelong dancer and a writer, I learned she also helped to start the Black Panther Party free breakfast program. She’d been remembered primarily for her dance work, but she did so many other things. Those were the women that I found most inspiring, who were willing to stretch beyond their comfort zones over and over and over again to get things done. “Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area,” by Rae Alexandra, illustrated by Adrienne Simms ‘You allowed her to suffer and die’: Mother of Hayward girl found decomposing in bathroom is sentenced to prisonEl Niño is on the way: What that means for California’s weatherMotorcyclist dies in crash on Highway 4 A girl fled Oregon foster care to find her mom. Four days later she was being trafficked on Vallejo streets, feds say A girl fled Oregon foster care to find her mom. Four days later she was being trafficked on Vallejo streets, feds sayOfficers violate probation of wounded man who survived Oakland mass shooting
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