Happy Birthday Betty Smith

I admit I saw the movie long before I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn before I'd read the book. While I considered myself a bookish girl, and read pretty much whatever I could get my hands on (although even then I refused to finish books that didn't hold my interest), I don't believe that I'd ever heard of it until seeing the film on the cable classic movie station when I was a teen.

I watched it all the way through, mesmerized. And then waited for it to appear again, watching it whenever it was on. Eventually, I found a copy of the book and read it over the course of a weekend.

I recognized myself in Francie.

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SRPS Shout-Out - Shonda Rhimes

Have you seen this? The amazing Shonda Rhimes was honored with the Sherry Lansing Award at The Hollywood Reporter's annual Women in Entertainment breakfast on December 10, 2014. In acceptance, she gave this remarkable speech.

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Esther Peterson - worker and consumer advocate

Esther Peterson (December 9, 1906 – December 20, 1997) was one seriously amazing lady who spent her life looking out for those who needed a little extra help.

Worker's Rights
She graduated from Brigham Young University in 1927, with a degree in Physical Education, and then went on to earn a Master's from the Teacher's College at Columbia University, in 1930. She was hired to teach at the famous Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry, where she worked with telephone operators, garment workers, and other working women. The program was created to provide a college level education to women workers, but also to provide an opportunity for women workers to tell their stories and educate the educators. Esther described it as a mix of "Shakespeare, drama, and socialism." And it was. Many of the women involved went on to play active roles in the Labor movement. Including Esther.

Later, while living in Boston, she organized a strike among women seamstresses who mainly sewed pockets on aprons. They'd been forced to switch from simple square pockets to more complicated heart-shaped pockets, without any increase in pay. They won their strike by following her advice to dress nicely, to discourage the Boston police from backing their horses into them, which was pretty common practice at the time.

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Follow Friday

“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.”

I wrote about The Bonsai Babes: A Love Story by Lora Nakamura a while back, when she was funding her Kickstarter campaign.

I'm writing about her now to tell you to check out her social media pages as well. She's always sharing great, uplifting stuff about kick ass girls and women!



You can find her most often on Facebook, but she's also on Twitter.

I can't claim to know Lora personally, but just from following her for the past year, I can tell she's a kind soul working to make the world a better place. She has actually been working on The Bonsai Babes: A Love Story for over a decade, putting it aside when her career as a social worked became more demanding.

The gist of the story is about two girls from very different backgrounds coming together in love. She was quoted in a news article saying, “This is a story of unconditional love, open to anyone. It’s not in a box where it can be classified.”

Nakamura said she hoped to highlight some of the local aspects of the story – the characters live in Alhambra and Downtown L.A. – and wanted to focus on themes including embracing differences, finding beauty in ourselves and others, following our hearts and pursuing our dreams.

This focus on love shines through in everything she posts online as well. Whether she's quoting Angela Davis or promoting Small Business Saturday (as an answer to Black Friday), she's working to spread hope and justice. And love. Lots of love.

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Kickstart This!

How cool is this?! They're making a Self-Rescuing Princess Coloring Book!

Ok, not it's officially a SRPS coloring book, but it IS a coloring book full of princesses doing awesome things. That's close enough, right?

I'm totally getting a couple of these for the coloring-fiends in my life. Well, at least the smaller-sized coloring-fiends. I can't afford to get them for everyone!

Her Highness Builds Robots: Princesses for the 21st Century, by Laura & Beth Winters

Princess Priya loves to play board games with her prince and is passionate about science. She received a PhD. in Chemical Engineering with a focus on improving food processing techniques.

Princess Rafa is an avid artist who also loves to ride horses. In her spare time, she writes and directs plays in addition to sharing her artwork with others.

As I'm sure you know, the Self-Rescuing Princess Society is all about princesses who like to do all kinds of exciting and fun things. So this is a perfect project for us to back!

We want more realistic princesses and we want them now.

Princesses who have science experiments to design. Who open art galleries. Go skydiving. Build robots. Princesses who were a little bit more like....all of the ambitious and smart and talented and courageous little girls you know!

Yes! So, I hope you'll consider backing this project and sharing these great coloring books with the special princesses (and princes) in your life!

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Josephine Roche - trail blazer and activist

Do you ever read about someone and think, 'Why haven't I heard of her before?!'

Well, in the case of Josephine Roche, I actually have heard of her before. See, I've been perusing this fantastic book, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal [Bookshop / Amazon], by Susan Ware (herself a fantastic author of many books about women in US history), and the name Josephine Roche has come up quite a bit. And even so, I didn't know of all of her amazing activities!

The book focuses mainly on women working within the New Deal programs, so I assume that's why I know more about her work with the coal industry and health care. Well, that and the fact that I have only been scanning the book. I keep meaning to sit down and read it, cover to cover, but there's always something, right?

Reading more about her to find something a little more interesting to talk about for this, her birthday post, I discovered much, much more!

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Music Break - Maria Callas

Today's the birthday of one of the finest operatic sopranos of the 1950s and '60s, Marie Callas.

Here she performs one of my favorite pieces from one of my favorite operas, "Habanera," from Bizet's Carmen.

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Dorothy Detzer - feminist, pacifist, activist

Like I mentioned last week, one of my favorite things about this blog is the fascinating women I get to 'meet' on a regular basis. Today's amazing woman is Dorothy Detzer -- peace activist and lobbyist, and all-round kick ass woman. What resonates with me most about her story is that she didn't start off on the path that she eventually ended up on, but instead went following her instincts, and found her personal mission almost by accident.



Dorothy Detzer was born on December 1, 1893, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Her parents, a drugstore owner and a librarian, raised Dorothy and her brothers during the Progressive Era, and that upbringing had a tremendous influences on Dorothy's life.

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