EGT 📚

@egtfirefall

Writer, editor, researcher; curates a newsletter amplifying women leading the church around the world, throughout history. *Migrating soon from Substack. elizabethglassturner.substack.com/

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EGT 📚@egtfirefall· 13d

Found her as a stray kitten mewling in the downtown twilight so loudly I scanned the rooftops thinking a hawk was screeching. When I saw her across the street I blurted "well hello there!" in surprise at the source of the sound, and she started to trot over to me. She's a fearsome guard cat.

Cat curled like a croissant giving side-eye.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· 23d

I have something to share, but you're not prepared.

Nieman Marcus digital ad for Givenchy women's fringed black heels. Unfortunately the fringe falls in a rounded cascade from just below the front of the ankle to the floor, while the open-backed heel protrudes ever so slightly above and behind. Hooves. The shoes look like uncanny hooves.

Another Nieman Marcus digital ad for Givenchy shoes that look like hooves. They're over $2,000.

Nieman Marcus product description for Givenchy hoof shoes: "Crafted from leather, these fringed sandals from Givenchy are sure to make a statement."

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jul 11

Also:

Cover of "Women Religious Leaders in Japan's Christian Century, 1549-1650" by Haruko Nawata Ward

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jul 4

did they fall in the reflecting pool

White guys in a metro station wearing soaked, dark long sleeved shirts, partially soaked tan baseball caps, and/or partially soaked khaki pants, either protesting John Hancock by hiding their identities or masking against viral spread by wearing white gaiters pulled up over the lower half of their faces. The floofy microphone of a video camera suggests they're documenting their outing. No one appears to have brought deodorant wipes. They appear at significant risk of dehydration, or just lost a team-building water balloon fight, or did a no-no in the reflecting pool. Each has a patch and American flag ironed on to their sleeve but the flags vary and one is upside-down, but it's impossible to tell if it's on purpose. Commenters note the drenched men appear to belong to a group called the "Patriot Front." Immediate electrolytes/IV fluid recommended; deodorant wipes recommended for all.

Close-up of Soggy Bottom of one of the following:
White guys in a metro station wearing soaked, dark long sleeved shirts, partially soaked tan baseball caps, and/or partially soaked khaki pants, either hiding their identities or masking against viral spread by wearing white gaiters pulled up over the lower half of their faces. The floofy microphone of a video camera suggests they're documenting their outing. No one appears to have brought deodorant wipes. They appear at significant risk of dehydration, or just lost a team-building water balloon fight, or did a no-no in the reflecting pool. Each has a patch and American flag ironed on to their sleeve but the flags vary and one is upside-down, but it's impossible to tell if it's on purpose. Commenters note the drenched men appear to belong to a group called the "Patriot Front." Immediate electrolytes/IV fluid recommended; deodorant wipes recommended for all.

Close up of different Soggy Bottom of the following:

White guys in a metro station wearing soaked, dark long sleeved shirts, partially soaked tan baseball caps, and/or partially soaked khaki pants, either hiding their identities or masking against viral spread by wearing white gaiters pulled up over the lower half of their faces. The floofy microphone of a video camera suggests they're documenting their outing. No one appears to have brought deodorant wipes. They appear at significant risk of dehydration, or just lost a team-building water balloon fight, or did a no-no in the reflecting pool. Each has a patch and American flag ironed on to their sleeve but the flags vary and one is upside-down, but it's impossible to tell if it's on purpose. Commenters note the drenched men appear to belong to a group called the "Patriot Front." Immediate electrolytes/IV fluid recommended; deodorant wipes recommended for all.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 30

Also FWIW: 3 decades earlier in 1660, Quaker woman preacher Mary Dyer was hanged in Boston. Before that, she'd been accused of birthing a monster, after she had a stillbirth w/severe deformity. Maybe later, Salem had contaminated food, etc- still, note hat in this print of Quaker woman preaching!

Print of Quaker woman preaching, wearing tall black pointy hat.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 22

So, some screenshots that provide context to all the "manly tariffs" and "feminine diplomacy" and "masculine energy" - from Dr Doris Bergen (from open.substack.com/pub/elizabet... )

Quote from Doris Bergen's "Twisted Cross" on obsession with "manliness" in 1930s Germany

More on German nationalist Christians in 1930s obsessing over making faith super manly.

More from Bergen on 1930s German nationalist Christians fretting over how to amp Jesus Christ from image of humility to essentially roid rage

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 10

Yep.

Vintage photo of Alice C Evans in a lab. In 1918 she published findings on the link between infected cows, raw milk, and human brucellosis. Took about 10 years for colleagues to affirm her findings and advocate for pasteurization.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 4

I wrote about "A Wrecking Ball to the Work of Women in America" about 13 months ago. It...has not lost relevance.

Photo of Alice C. Evans in lab circa 1910s. Caption text explains that in 1918 she published findings linking transmission of brucellosis with raw milk and human consumption. She was met with skepticism but knew her work was sound. Sure enough other researchers confirmed her findings several years later, and when pasteurization became common around 1930, brucellosis infections plummeted. In spring 2025, the FDA halted quality testing of milk.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 2

Well if I ever need to cast 17thC university student, polymath, theologian, defender of women's education, house church founder, artist, Reformed turned Pietist and possible-now-mummy Anna Maria van Schurman, I'm paging Kristen Schaal. Magnificent side-eye in this self-portrait.

Anna Maria van Schurman self-portrait engraving, 1633, she looks like actress Kristen Schaal giving side eye.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

worked on a bipartisan bill to increase refugee children numbers. Bill didn't even get out of committee. Perkins tried everything to increase refugee numbers. She's why we have "The Sound of Music." This is the kind of Charles Coughlin stuff that circulated:

1935 antisemitic conspiracy pamphlet courtesy Columbia University archives, with editorial digital markup.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

oh look women's rights and people working together, like at the 1934 Cairo women's suffrage conference, or a 1922 newspaper graphic of women's voting, or the 1935 Istanbul International Woman Suffrage Association conference.

1934 Cairo women's suffrage conference, photo courtesy LSE.

Burlington Daily News 1922 suffrage map of Europe

1935 International Woman Suffrage Association international convention held in Istanbul. Photo courtesy LSE. Some women in hats, saris, or head coverings, yet quelle surprise! no fisticuffs erupt.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

Dr S Josephine Baker (in car) worked w/ immigrants and lowered mortality rates in tenements so well, her work scaled into 1920s Sheppard-Towner Act (that was opposed by the AMA & by women anti-suffragists, who tended to be nationalists). Hey look! People working together.

Dr S Josephine Baker heading to work circa 1910-1912, courtesy Harvard Square Library

1909 Library of Congress public domain photo - demonstration against child labor, with multilingual banners.

1937 racially integrated ILGWU union basketball rec league game, photo courtesy Kheel Center at Cornell.

The New York Age, Oct 18, 1917, on suffragists donating to YMCA unit for facilities for Black troops.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

Women weren't deployed as military medics but women surgeons, doctors, & nurses (some volunteers) were busy on both sides of the conflict (German nurses in trenches below). In France, women physicians from US, Canada, & UK were shelled at times. A fact a woman doctor had to bring up...

German nurses in gas masks in the trenches of World War I. Photo public domain, courtesy NIH.

"British women carpenters near the Front" during WWI, photo courtesy Library of Congress

Dr. Charlotte Fairbanks, chief surgeon of American Women's Hospital #1 in France, 1919

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

women preachers commonly known as Salvation Lasses or Doughnut Lassies. There are people alive today because young Salvation Army women preachers hauled someone out of the way of live shelling 108 years ago. (Re: women under fire in #WWI: a Russian all-woman "death battalion" had its own chaplain)

The all-woman Russian "Battalion of Death" in WWI had their own chaplain - Mother Maria Michailovna, who went with them to the front "under fire on several occasions." Other archival newspaper reports mention the regiment sustained heavy casualties. Montgomery Times, Sept 27, 1917

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

but their presence in France at the end of the war permanently shifted public opinion in the US (inc Teddy Roosevelt's son). They became the subject of popular songs, parades were held for them, Evangeline Booth accepted a medal for their efforts, and a cargo ship was named for...

San Francisco Call Bulletin, May 1919: "Ship to Be Named 'Salvation Lass' - the text mentions Adjutant Beatrice Hammond, "who spent eighteen months overseas with the American expeditionary forces...will be the sponsor."

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

...some of that, there was already an instinctive culture of dodging projectiles baked into the Salvation Army before bullets whizzed as they fried doughnuts outside. So Salvation Army street preachers who navigated angry mobs and jail proved pretty adaptable to the Front (a few got injured)...

The Daily Star Mirror of Moscow, Idaho (yes, that Moscow, Idaho) ran a support appeal ad in 1919 that pretty accurately described part of what women preachers were doing in France at the end of WWI. (Highlighting these kinds of activities was easier reading than sharing some of the more grim anecdotes.)

Lincoln Star, Jan 25, 1919 - sometimes married Salvation Army couples were referred to by husband's rank and the wife was "Mrs" but couples were the same rank, so properly speaking Captain Mrs. Holbrook and her husband Captain A.M. Holbrook returned after Captain Mrs. Holbrook, who I'm sure had a first name, was wounded by shelling. No matter what activities Salvation Army "officers" undertook then or now, all are, by training, preachers. So an American woman preacher in a combat zone in France in WWI was injured by shelling.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

sometimes jailed. On principle, they often refused to pay the fine and refused to allow supporters to pay the fine, spending the time in jail instead in #protest. This was BEFORE the #suffragists /suffragettes/ Occaquan. So while some of the women at the Front in WWI were too young to remember..

The Hampshire Advertiser, Oct 12, 1889, England: members of the Skeleton Army sentenced for assaulting Salvation Army preachers, including a woman.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

rotten eggs, rocks, old vegetables, or sometimes unfortunately not ducking them (there were some fatalities). The violent "Skeleton Army" sprang up in opposition in England, responsible for a lot of unrest there. In the UK and US, many Salvation Army women preachers found themselves arrested...

Hartford Courant 1884 newspaper clipping about the Salvation Army "jail birds" banquet held as a celebratory fundraiser when four women preachers finished their term in the Bridgeport jail.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

actually kind of well-suited for that. Women and men in the #SalvationArmy in the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s were almost universally loathed (see "bonnet strings" above). They quickly had to learn "stand-up comedian being heckled"-level improvisational and crowd-reading skills, frequently ducking...

St Louis Post Dispatch, 1897, about Salvation Army women preachers in Colwich, Kansas, having rotten eggs thrown at them.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

Activity scope shows absence of basic logistical support in WWI. The women in active combat zones & absolute butchery of #WWI were providing medical care, dietary supplementation, and spontaneous evac assistance for wounded. Interestingly, the Salvation Army street preaching culture was...

Book cover for volume about the Salvation Army officer McAllister sisters with vintage photo of two very young women at makeshift cooking station outdoors, wearing aprons. Title: The Doughnut Sweethearts: The Diary of Alice McAllister during World War I.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

Though international headquarters were in London, so WWI was not an easy time [understatement]. (An international #suffragist organization managed to keep its international newsletter going across warring borders during WWI. Epic.) Salvation Army women were busy everywhere:

1915 - The German Salvation Army in Berlin feeding children during World War I; photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Chicaago Daily News postcard featuring Salvation Army women preachers making doughnuts in improvised circumstances in France during WWI.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

In the 1910s/20s,Evangeline was US Commander of The Salvation Army. She twisted arms to get the US military to allow Salvationists at the front: on paper, those women preachers technically had to be listed as privates to be allowed in combat zones. But the Salvation Army was active in Germany too-

Post-WWI: Salvation Army officer in Tubingen, Germany, in 1925. Music was a big part of Salvation Army culture from the beginning - a way to draw a crowd in public.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

Evangeline met several US presidents and received a medal for the Salvation Army's support work at the end of WWI (women preachers were on the front lines in France), met Emperor Hirohito in 1929, and stood in her nightgown arguing with Nazis on a train in 1935...

Montreal Star, Nov 12, 1929 newspaper clipping on Salvation Army US Commander Evangeline Booth visiting Japan and meeting with Emperor Hirohito.

The Examiner (Tasmania), July 5, 1935. In the 1930s, several women evangelists and preachers were well-known around the world: California Pentecostal pastor Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of The Foursquare Church denomination; Anglican lay preacher and theologian Dr. A. Maude Royden; and Salvation Army US Commander, then world General Evangeline Booth. All three were regularly heard on the radio, and all three traveled extensively around the world in the 1920s and 30s. Many other women pastors, preachers, and evangelists traveled internationally in the 1910s, 20s, and 30s (like Rev. Florence Spearing Randolph, Rev. Kubushiro Ochimi, and others) but many were not as well-known - though sometimes "firsts" made it into newspapers in other countries (Scottish Rev. Vera Kenmure was in Australian newspapers, and Rev. Kubushiro Ochimi occasionally was mentioned in newspapers, sometimes in part because of her aunt).

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

If you include The Salvation Army under the general Wesleyan Methodist/holiness denomination category, the number of Wesleyan Methodist women preachers worldwide since the 1860s absolutely skyrockets (Indonesian preacher below). Including internationally famous eventual-General Evangeline Booth.

An Indonesian woman Salvation Army woman preacher, pre-1925. Photo part of a National Geographic essay on people around the world and The Salvation Army. So far, I haven't yet been able to identify the woman in the photo, though recently I sent a long-shot email to the Salvation Army in Indonesia inquiring if their archives might provide additional information, so fingers crossed we get lucky and positively identify a name. Some parsing of the visual may be helpful: on the one hand, yes, The Salvation Army name, ranking, and so on explicitly borrows from military imagery. Not all indigenous Salvation Army uniforms looked pseudo-military, though some, like this one, did. In the context of colonization, yes, that is loaded. The simultaneous dynamic is that the Salvation Army always affirmed the equality of women, including indigenous women, to preach and lead. In contrast to the frequent anonymity of indigenous so-called "Bible women" who were basically lay evangelists and cultural interpreters alongside missionaries, and who rarely were photographed or named, an indigenous woman wearing the same thing as the Salvation Army preachers who first went to Indonesia signaled visual equality with western men and women. The flip side of this Indonesian woman wearing this outfit is that some English Salvation Army preachers who went to India, including some Booths, rarely or never went back to fully western-style clothing; some went barefoot for the entirety of their time in India, which for some was decades or most of their adult lives; that was several decades before India's independence.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

Including "The Marechale" Katie Booth Clibborn, who snipped her bonnet strings and pinned them in place so they'd break away the next time Parisian gangs tried to stop her street preaching by strangling her with her bonnet strings. Her street preaching later got her expelled from Switzerland...

Salvation Army preacher/one of the daughters of William and Catherine Booth, Katie Booth Clibborn, and her infamous bonnet ribbons. Clibborn, like her siblings, had strong ideas and opinions and later had a falling out with her famous family. Booth Clibborn's biographer wrote, "Blood and fire - that is what she was at the beginning and that is what she will be to the end."

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

(Often, many.) Strictly speaking, The Salvation Army isn't explicitly a Wesleyan Methodist denomination, though co-founder William Booth had been a Methodist preacher previously, co-founder Catherine Booth wrote a pamphlet on women preaching, and Salvationists had women preachers from the outset-

Salvation Army co-founder, activist, writer, and preacher Englishwoman Catherine Booth. She also managed to wrangle a household of very opinionated offspring and all their pets, which at one point included a mischievous monkey. Catherine Booth and other women in the Booth family worked with Josephine Butler to repeal the horrific Contagious Diseases Acts in Victorian England - before women could exercise the right to vote. The Booths and the Salvation Army tackled Victorian-era poverty, exploitation, unfair labor, hunger, and animal abuse; they were vegetarians. Browsing their history and their photos, one comes away with the impression that this was an energetic and not altogether neurotypical family.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

They should've just listened to Illinois layman S.A. Stock. Though Rev. Mary A. Will was likely the first Wesleyan Methodist woman ordained, she was far from the first #Methodist woman preacher- from John Wesley (1700s) til now, there have been Wesleyan Methodist women preachers in every decade.

Bristol Journal (UK) newspaper clipping from 1844, on Black American Methodist lay preacher Zilpha Elaw preaching at City Chapel on Milton Street in London. Bristol Journal, Oct 19, 1844.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

(The Seneca Falls women's rights convention had been held in a Wesleyan Methodist chapel, and Wesleyan Methodist Connection founder Luther Lee had already ordained Congregationalist Antoinette Brown Blackwell.) Sadly, Rev. Will's 1861 ordination was revoked in 1864, then reinstated in 1875...

Photo of Rev. Antoinette Brown Blackwell in the Springfield Daily Republican, Nov 8th 1914.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· Jun 1

Thread: from 1861 to WWII & back- In 1861, Wesleyan Methodist Rev. Mary Will was listed "joint pastor" with her husband. So CHAMPION LAYMAN S.A. Stock clarified: "We do not wish it to go out that sister Will does not have charge of the Nora Circuit. We are glad to say our church never has been...

This isn't Rev. Mary A. Will's rural Illinois Wesleyan Methodist congregation, it's the reconstructed Wesleyan Methodist chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, where the first U.S. convention for women's rights was held in the 1840s. This is the abolitionist denomination to which Rev. Mary A. Will belonged. Photo courtesy Kenneth Zirkel.

EGT 📚@egtfirefall· May 25

THEY INJURED SENATOR ANDY KIM. This Andy Kim: