FACES OF COURAGE: Celebrating Madison County women on International Women's Day

Mar. 8—EDITOR'S NOTE — Long before Kentucky was a state, and Richmond and Berea were proper towns, women were leaving their mark on Madison County, the state and world. That tradition of service has continued throughout the years and in honor of International Women's Day, the Register is highlighting just a few of the long list of notable women who have lived and served in our community.

Rebecca Boone

Rebecca Bryan married Daniel Boone on Aug. 14, 1756. She was just 17, and was born June 9, 1739, in Virginia. The Bryans moved to North Carolina around 1750, where they became neighbors of the Boones.

Rebecca and Daniel began their courtship at a family wedding in 1753. After the marriage, Rebecca and Daniel stayed 10 years in the same place in North Carolina (Sugar Tree Creek). Rebecca had 10 children — James, Isreal, Savannah, Jemima, Levina, Rebecca, Daniel, Jesse, William and Nathan.

The Boones moved to Kentucky in 1773, but after Indians killed James, they went back to North Carolina. They returned in 1776, settling at Fort Boonesborough, in what is now Madison County. In 1778, while Daniel was a prisoner of the Indians, Rebecca and family moved back to North Carolina. After his escape, Daniel went to North Carolina and brought his family back once again to Kentucky.

A skilled woodsman, crack shot, and tireless traveler, Daniel Boone journeyed into Kentucky for long periods of time, hunted, then brought back the furs to trade. This often left Rebecca and their 10 children to fend for themselves. She was adept at surviving on her own, and the solid foundation the family relied on for their survival.

Daniel's long absences made Rebecca the head of their household. She was responsible for feeding and clothing her family. Feeding her family involved planting, tending, harvesting, and preserving fruits and vegetables grown in her kitchen garden and crop fields. She managed the care of typical farm animals such as chickens, pigs, sheep, and cows. According to the Columbia Branch of AAUW, Rebecca's daily chores involved gathering eggs and churning milk to make butter and cheese. Her seasonal chores included butchering and preserving meat and gathering sap to make maple syrup.

The Boones lived for a while at Limestone (now Maysville) and in 1799, they moved on to Missouri. Rebecca died March 18, 1813, and was buried in Defiance, Mo. In 1845, the remains of Daniel and Rebecca were moved to Kentucky and their graves may be found in the Frankfort Cemetery.

Laura Clay

Clay was born near Richmond, Kentucky, on February 9, 1849, at White Hall, the estate of her father, Cassius Marcellus Clay. She was the youngest of six children. Laura's mother, Mary Jane Warfield Clay, came from a wealthy Kentucky family and inherited land and farms. Mary oversaw the family farming operations, including the White Hall estate, during her husband's absence from home while serving as ambassador to Russia under Abraham Lincoln.

In 1888, Laura Clay became the first president of the Kentucky Woman Suffrage Association. She remained president until 1912, the same year the organization was named the Kentucky Equal Rights Association (KERA). Among the organization's most critical contributions to women's rights under Clay's leadership were changes to Kentucky laws to protect married women's property rights and the joint guardianship of children.

She worked with the Women's Christian Temperance Union against liquor. She hosted Susan B. Anthony during her 1879 visit to Richmond. She opposed the national constitutional amendment for women's suffrage, advocating rather its passage state by state. Her work in this area with the legislature of Kentucky being successful, her organization eventually evolved into the League of Women Voters. Unlike her Republican father, Miss Clay was a Democrat, attending that party's convention in 1920 and receiving one vote for nomination as president. She was an officer in the Kentucky Federation of Women's Clubs and helped organize the Democratic Women's Club of Kentucky. She ran for state senator in 1923, but lost to a Republican.

Prior to these changes, women had no claim to property or wages, and they could not make a will without their husband's consent. Laura witnessed first-hand the potential effect of these laws when her father divorced her mother in 1870. Although Cassius Clay never exercised his right to all claims of Mary Jane's property, nor prevented her from access to her children, he could have done so under Kentucky law. Interestingly, Cassius Clay, an avid anti-slavery reformer, was bitterly opposed to women's suffrage.

It is likely the divorce of her parents and her mother's potentially tenuous financial situation influenced Laura's activism. Her sisters were equally involved in the women's suffrage movement in various capacities. Laura was also involved at the national level in the American Woman Suffrage Association, where she associated with other key activists, including Susan B. Anthony. Laura Clay died in 1941 and is buried in the Lexington Cemetery.

Mary Merritt

Merritt was born near Berea in 1881 and attended Berea College to obtain her teaching credentials. From there, Merritt taught school in Manchester, but returned to Berea College when she discovered the school had implemented a new nursing program.

She graduated from the program in 1902, but in 1904 was forced to finish her nursing training at another institution when the Day Law forced segregation of the college.

Undeterred, Merritt finished her training at Freedman's Hospital in Washington, D.C., which was affiliated with Howard University.

In 1906, after Merritt graduated from Freedman's training program, she returned to Kentucky and worked as a private duty nurse caring for retired politician Cassius M. Clay.

Merritt then moved to Kansas where she started a nurse training program.

She returned to Kentucky to serve as the superintendent of nursing at Louisville's Red Cross Hospital, which was founded by African Americans during the Jim Crow era when racial segregation kept most African Americans from receiving medical treatment in local area hospitals.

The Red Cross Hospital was the only place in Kentucky where African Americans could be trained as a nurse until 1937 and where Merritt spent most of her career as a nurse educator.

Merritt attempted to serve her country and help the wounded during World War I, but was excluded from service because of her race.

However, after the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918, Merritt treated Black soldiers at Camp Taylor in Louisville.

Merritt was awarded a certificate of merit by United States President Woodrow Wilson for her work during World War I at Camp Taylor.

Merritt was also awarded the Mary Mahoney Medal for distinguished service in nursing from the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses in 1949 and was inducted into the Kentucky Hall of Fame.

The Merritt Building at Central State Hospital was named in her honor.

Belle Bennett

Belle Harris Bennett led the struggle for and won laity rights for women in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. She was the founding president of the Woman's Missionary Council of the Southern Methodist Church.

According to Wikipedia articles, much of her work included fundraising and organizational efforts to provide higher education for a new professional class of social workers and community organizers in the Southern Methodist Church in the U.S. and abroad. Her carefully collaborative support for African Americans and immigrants was considered radical at that time by Southerners. She was a suffragist and supporter of temperance as well.

The younger daughter of the eight living children of Samuel and Elizabeth Chenault, Isabel "Belle" Harris Bennett was born on December 3, 1852, at the family estate "Homelands" (aka the Bennett House on Main Street) located in Madison County, Kentucky.

In 1888 Samuel Bennett died, and Belle left "Homelands" with her mother, older sister and two younger brothers to live in a new house her mother built in Richmond. There, she ran the household while her sister Susan "Sue" Ann Bennett took on new initiatives with the Southern Methodist Church. One of Sue's most ardent wish was to organize a Methodist-affiliated school in south-eastern Kentucky — she had studied the region in 1886 as part of the Southern Methodist Woman's Department of Church Extension and found no churches of any denomination in many of the counties there. Her report at the Kentucky Conference helped to create a new role for women in the Southern Methodist Extension Department: the Woman's Parsonage and Home Mission Society, led by twelve women in a Central Committee. However, Sue's untimely death in 1891 temporarily put on hold those plans for a Methodist school in eastern Kentucky. The Central Committee invited Belle to come and take the place of her older sister Sue, and Belle's life as a leader in the Southern Methodist Church began.

At 23 years old, Belle attended a revival led by the evangelist Dr. Lapsley McKee and took a vow of church membership. She began visiting the poor in rural Kentucky around Richmond and then with her sister Sue organized a Sunday School in a poor neighborhood.

Belle attended a missionary meeting in Carlisle, Kentucky in 1887 with her sister Sue where they discussed the poor preparation of Methodist missionary workers. She kept this in mind when, at the end of the 1888 conference of Kentucky Woman's Missionary Society, she was elected the state president. Together with her friend from Louisville, Mrs. S.C. Trueheart (formerly Thompson) who was a delegate on the Southern Methodist Woman's Board of Foreign Missions, Belle traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas for the Board's annual meeting in 1889. There she was invited to speak about her idea of a missionary training school and the Board appointed her to the Committee on the Examination of Missionary Candidates to learn more about the status of women choosing to undertake this foreign service. By the end of the conference, Belle had garnered support to start gathering funding from throughout the Southern Methodist Church to establish a training school. Within one year Belle had secured the funding and a site donated by Dr. and Mrs. Nathan Scarritt of Kansas City, Missouri. The Scarritt Bible and Missionary Training School opened in the fall of 1892 with three students. Thousands were trained there in the next thirty years.

Belle continued fundraising for both the Scarritt school and her sister's plan for a school in southeastern Kentucky. She worked with Dr. Walter Russell Lambuth, Secretary of Foreign Missions, to talk with the citizens of London, Kentucky who matched the Woman's Parsonage and Home Mission Society's pledge of $20,000 for an endowment for a school. Belle recruited Rev. John J. Dickey a school principal from Jackson to come to London, Kentucky where they purchased a campus of 22 acres.

The cornerstone of the new building was laid on June 25, 1896, and eight cottages to house students along with a dormitory for girls were built for what came to be named the Sue Bennett Memorial College.

Belle Bennett was elected president of the Woman's Parsonage and Home Mission Society in April 1896. This group reported to the Southern Methodist Board of Church Extension, led completely by men.

In response to the large increase in immigrants from the Pacific Rim in California, the Society started up night schools and organized Korean and Japanese Southern Methodist Churches. With the Society's headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, the local City Mission Board established a settlement house which then served as an example to other cities—12 institutions by 1903. With some negative reactions by local preachers who felt the settlement houses were imitating Northern social workers and not evidencing what they considered women's church work, Bennett recommended to her societies that they rename them to Community House: Wesley Community House for white neighborhoods and Bethlehem Community House for serving people of color.

Cooperatives for young, small-wage-earning women also became part of the Southern Methodist women's city mission program.

Dr. Louise Hutchins

Dr. Hutchins, a mother of four, served as the only pediatrician in Berea from 1939 to 1967, and spent much of her life providing vital family planning services to thousands of Eastern Kentucky women for the first time.

Born to missionary parents in China, Dr. Hutchins graduated from Wellesley College in 1932 and married Francis S. Hutchins the following year. Louise Hutchins earned her M.D. from Yale University in 1936.

In 1939, she returned to the U.S. after her husband, Francis Hutchins accepted the presidency of Berea College and Hutchins and dedicated herself to improving maternal and child health. She served as medical director and board president of Berea's Mountain Maternal Health League for nearly 50 years, and was Berea's only pediatrician for decades.

Soon after her arrival in Berea, Louise Hutchins became the board president and medical director for the Mountain Maternal Health League and continued in that role for 47 years. The Mountain Maternal Health League, established in 1936, served rural women in Estill, Harlan, Garrard, Jackson, Lincoln, Madison, Powell, Rockcastle, and Whitley counties.

The League offered medical services to women in these communities by traveling to reach geographically isolated patients. Most of their work, however, involved providing contraception information in their clinic while providing refills on contraceptive supplies via mail. During this time, Kentucky law prohibited government officials from funding or disseminating birth control information.

In 1944, the Mountain Maternal Health League established a clinic in Berea Hospital and soon after, became affiliated with Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

In 1967, Francis Hutchins retired from Berea College and the couple returned to Hong Kong for three years.

During this time, Louise Hutchins completed a residency in gynecology while working with the city's Family Planning Association. The couple returned to Berea in 1970 and until her death at age 85 in 1996, Louise Hutchins continued to work to improve the health of women and children in Kentucky.

bell hooks

bell hooks was a groundbreaking author, educator and activist whose explorations of how race, gender, economics and politics were intertwined made her among the most influential thinkers of her time. She passed away in December 2021 at the age of 69.

In a statement issued through William Morrow Publishers, hooks' family announced she died in Berea, Kentucky, home to the bell hooks center at Berea College.

"She was a giant, no nonsense person who lived by her own rules, and spoke her own truth in a time when Black people, and women especially, did not feel empowered to do that," Dr. Linda Strong-Leek, a close friend and former provost of Berea College, wrote in an email to The Associated Press. "It was a privilege to know her, and the world is a lesser place today because she is gone. There will never be another bell hooks."

Starting in the 1970s, hooks published dozens of books that helped shape popular and academic discourse. Her notable works included "Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism," "Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center" and "All About Love: New Visions." Rejecting the isolation of feminism, civil rights and economics into separate fields, she was a believer in community and connectivity and how racism, sexism and economic disparity reinforced each other.

Among her most famous expressions was her definition of feminism, which she called "a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression."

Ibram X. Kendi, Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom were among those mourning hooks. Author Saeed Jones noted that her death came just a week after the loss of the celebrated Black author and critic Greg Tate. "It all feels so pointed," he tweeted regarding hooks' recent passing.

Hooks taught at numerous schools, including Yale University, Oberlin College and City College of New York. She joined the Berea College faculty in 2004 and a decade later founded the center named for her, where "many and varied expressions of difference can thrive."

hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 in the segregated town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and later gave herself the pen name bell hooks in honor of her maternal great-grandmother. She loved reading from an early age, majored in English at Stanford University and received a master's in English from the University of Wisconsin, where she began writing "Ain't I a Woman."

Her early influences ranged from James Baldwin and Sojourner Truth to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Martin Luther King was my teacher for understanding the importance of beloved community. He had a profound awareness that the people involved in oppressive institutions will not change from the logics and practices of domination without engagement with those who are striving for a better way," she said in an interview that ran in Appalachian Heritage in 2012.

Hooks examined how stereotypes influence everything from movies ("the oppositional gaze") to love, writing in "All About Love" that "much of what we were taught about the nature of love makes no sense what applied to daily life." She also documented at length the collective identity and past of Black people in rural Kentucky, a part of the state often depicted as largely white and homogeneous.

"I pay tribute to the past as a resource that can serve as a foundation for us to revise and renew our commitment to the present, to making a world where all people can live fully and well, where everyone can belong," she wrote in "Belonging: A Culture of Place."

Leigh Ann Hester

Sfc. Hester is one of the few women to be awarded for valor in close-quarters combat, according to the Foundation for Women's Warriors.

Leigh Ann Hester was a sergeant with the National Guard's Kentucky-based 617th Military Police Company based out of Richmond, when she was deployed to Iraq, and in 2005, she was scanning and clearing a route for a supply convoy near Baghdad when her squad was ambushed by enemy fire.

She was trained for this, as it was a risk that came with her daily job in Iraq. Thus, when they became under attack, she knew exactly what to do. She directed her team away from the enemy's intense fire and into a flanking position that exposed multiple irrigation ditches and an orchard that the enemies were using to stage the attack.

She was initially directing fire, then began fighting on foot. Sgt. Hester displayed incredible bravery as she had walked directly into the line of fire to kill at least three enemy combatants at close range, resulting in numerous convoy members' lives being saved. With thirty-three insurgents killed or wounded and one captured, every member of her unit survived.

Her heroic actions led her to become the first woman since World War II to earn the Silver Star Medal and the very first to ever earn it for combat valor.

Sgt. Hester separated from the National Guard and became a police officer after she returned to the United States; a job she had wanted since childhood. But she enjoyed being a soldier so much so that she rejoined the National Guard shortly after.

In 2014, she spent 18 months in Afghanistan, where she was promoted to sergeant first class. And in 2017, she was sent to the Virgin Islands as part of the international humanitarian effort in the wake of Hurricane Maria.