Portraitures of History

s audience members find their seats, a woman in disheveled Civil War dress with unkempt hair glides aimlessly through the aisles, gently picking lint off a woman’s sweater, then dancing with a man. She’s muttering gibberish to herself when Vernice Simms Jackson, portraying Mary Elizabeth Bowser, a Union spy in the Confederate White House, appears on stage. “Now Miss Bet, you leave these nice folks alone,” she says, coaxing Ruth Pangrace, as Elizabeth Van Lew, toward her. Looking around, Ms. Jackson adds, “It’s safe.”

Ms. Pangrace makes all who meet her character, known as Crazy Bet, believe she’s deranged. She is anything but and, along with Ms. Bowser, helped hasten the end of the Civil War by secretly relaying information about the Confederate army to Union forces.

Chances are you never learned about Mary Elizabeth Bowser or Crazy Bet. Women in History is striving to change that. The nonprofit organization is dedicated to sharing the important role of women in US history through dramatic re-creation of their lives.

Launched by Ms. Jackson (GRS ’97, organizational behavior) and four other women in Lakewood, Ohio, the group saw the lack of documented recognition of women’s contributions to the development of the nation, plus few educational outreach efforts to counteract this oversight. Women in History’s eighty-five multicultural characters span 300 years, making it the largest group of its kind in the country, according to Ms. Jackson, current president and board chair.

She smiles when she recalls the first time Women in History was called upon in 1991. Founder Sophia Mastrandreas-Dadas, owner of a vintage clothing collection, was invited to do a vintage fashion show for a Girl Scout Mother-Daughter Tea. She had an idea: Rather than just show the fashions, why not match them with women in history who may have worn them? “She started canvassing all her friends to find out who would fit in the clothes,” says Ms. Jackson. “You have to understand, when Sophia called, you just always said yes.”

Clara Barton and Annie Oakley were two of the five characters performed. Selected subjects need to have had an impact on the country and must be dead, Ms. Jackson explains. Today’s list includes the famous, infamous, and the obscure. “The list is in no way complete; everyone has their wish list of who they’d like to see added.” The group’s roster of women is making an impression on everyone from students seeking information for reports to armchair historians. “We average 30,000 hits a month on our Web site from every English-speaking place in the world. We even get inquiries from Russian and Arab countries,” she says.

The now eleven-member troupe includes a comedienne, a teacher, and a college student, among others. Although not previously trained in the dramatic arts, members have honed their skills through voice coaching, staging, and practice. Ms. Jackson says half of the members use scripts, half use loose outlines. In either case, the performances are based on information about the subject they’ve researched. Members primarily perform in small groups, particularly as characters who share a place in history. They also are mindful of a subject’s dress and dialect and strive to use the language of the time. Authentic vintage clothing is worn; pieces in poor condition are used as patterns for reproduction. Hairdos are replicated using the presenter’s natural hair or wigs, styled by a specialist in historic hair design.

Ms. Jackson’s first enactment was Harriet Tubman, followed by Josephine Baker and Sally Hemings. Coming out of character for the question-and-answer session can be a difficult transition. “You know you’ve made an impact when an audience member says, ‘When you performed in Paris…’ as if I really was Josephine Baker,” she says.

Audiences are generally senior citizens and children, mostly at schools and public libraries. Members have performed at Cleveland’s MetroHealth Medical Center and the Western Reserve Historical Society. Several members also traveled three times to Wisconsin from 1995 to 1997, to portray early female lighthouse keepers at the launching of US Coast Guard cutters named for the keepers.

When possible, members visit the locales where the subject lived and worked, plus interview the subject’s family, friends, and biographers. One of her newest characters, Stagecoach Mary Fields, had a long association with the Ursuline nuns. Ms. Jackson met with archivist Sister Mary Rose Krupp at the Ursuline convent in Toledo, Ohio, and went through two large boxes of documents.

Born a slave in 1832 in Tennessee, Stagecoach Mary was an African-American lay worker at an Ursuline convent after moving to Toledo. The nuns left to start a mission in Montana, and Stagecoach Mary came later after learning that Mother Amadeus had taken ill. As a favor for nursing the Mother Superior back to health, the nuns helped Mary become the proprietor of a cafe. When the business folded, Mary delivered mail by stagecoach. She lived her life in Cascade, Montana, and, in her latter years, baby-sat the children in town. No one would know of her, says Ms. Jackson, except that one of those children made a reference to her while reminiscing in an interview: actor Gary Cooper.