Spirit in Action

Uncovering Black Independence History (& More)

In Mumbet's Declaration of Independence, Gretchen Woelfle, brings to life the true story of Elizabeth Freeman (Mumbet), whose efforts & determination led slavery to be declared unconstitutional in Massachusetts in 1783. Gretchen writes books for youth on a variety of social justice & environmental topics.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 29 Mar 2015
Audio Format:: other

[music] Let us sing this song for the healing of the world That we may hear as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along And our lives will feel the echo of our healing [music] Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpes Me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sync deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world That we may dream as one With every voice, with every song We will move this world along Guests come to me for Spirit in Action in a number of ways. Sometimes, I have known the work of individuals for years and finally get around to tracking them down. Sometimes listeners contact me with connection to folks doing good, world healing work, and I especially welcome that from folks in the areas where this program is broadcast locally. I discovered the work of today's Spirit in Action guest, Gretchen Woofle, in a book review I read. It was January and I had both Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month on my mind. The story of Mumbet's Declaration of Independence is shockingly missing from mainstream history accounts, as are so many others of the stories that Gretchen has brought to life in her books for young children up through teens. Author Gretchen Woofle joins us by phone from Los Angeles, California. Gretchen, welcome to Spirit in Action. Thank you for inviting me. So, the way that we got together to reprise back in December of 2014 in Friends Journal, they had a review about Mumbet's Declaration of Independence. And I thought that's a story about the history of African Americans in this country that needs to be told, shared with the larger audience. And so, I said, "For Black History Month, we'll get that in." And so, obviously, I'm late by at least a month. So, I apologize to all you listeners about that. What I do really want to talk about is the subject matter of your books, which is transformative for this world. Let's talk about Mumbet's Declaration of Independence. Give me the roots. What led to this book, and you can sketch in the overall story of the book? Well, as with quite a few of my books, the book that I wrote previously and the research I did for that book led me to the story of Mumbet. And just like you, when I read her story, I thought, "This is someone that I'd never heard of, and this is a story that should be told, especially to young people." So, I had written a book about Mercy Otis Warren, who was our first American female historian during the revolutionary era. She dared to write about politics as a woman, though she had to publish anonymously at first. She was very well educated. She was the sister of James Otis, who was called the Patriot back in the 1760s. She loved politics. She came from a political family, so she was a trailblazer. But in my background research, when I was researching Mercy Otis Warren, I did background research on women in the revolutionary era. And that's how I came across Mumbet, whose official name was Elizabeth Freeman. By the way, my book on Mercy Otis Warren is called "Right on Mercy, the Secret Life of Mercy Otis Warren." And it's a picture book biography, which is a form that I really love. So anyway, from Mercy, I went to Mumbet. The story of Mumbet is a really wonderful one. Mercy was a very well-educated, prosperous white woman during the revolutionary era. Mumbet was a slave in Massachusetts. Illiterate, obviously, had very little education and very little power in the world. And yet she used her native intelligence and her courage to stand up to slavery and her own owner, who was the richest man in Sheffield, Massachusetts, which is in the western part of the state and Berkshires. So Mumbet's story is that she was a slave of John Ashley, who was a rich and influential landowner in the area of Berkshires. She worked as a slave for many, many years. Then she went to hear a recitation of the new state constitution in 1780, because of course the states were no longer British colonies, but American states, and they each had to establish a new legal system and court system and a constitution. So there was a public reading of it because the men voters had to vote on accepting it. And she went along and she heard the opening lines that all men are created free and equal. And she decided that she wanted to appeal this in courts and see if that meant her a slave. So she went to a young lawyer in town, Theodore Sedgwick, who was actually a close friend of her owner, John Ashley, and asked him if he would take on the case and see if the constitution really meant what it said in a court of law. So she sued and Sedgwick took her case and they won in court. A couple years later, after she was freed after the judge declared that she was free and that in fact the constitution did mean what it said. Another case came up and the judge then declared slavery unconstitutional in Massachusetts. And so the slaves were all 5,000 slaves and Massachusetts were freed. At that point, as a result of the judicial decision, Massachusetts was the only state in which slavery was abolished through the courts and not through the legislature and it was abolished immediately. And virtually all the other states of the north where slavery was abolished after the Revolutionary War. It was a gradual emancipation such that there were slaves in Pennsylvania and New York, a few remaining slaves well into the 19th century. But in Massachusetts, because of Mumbat, they were all gone by the end of the 18th century. So anyway, I thought this was a remarkable story for children. Her own courage and determination gave a wonderful example to kids to question the status quo, question authority, and do what they feel is right. This is just amazing to me that I've never seen it in history books. That's not to say it's not in any books. I'm sure it is. How deep did you have to dig to find this? Well, Mumbat was illiterate. After she was freed, she went and worked as a housekeeper and basically a nanny for her lawyers, Theodore Sedgwick, who himself became a prominent politician in Massachusetts. And she lived with that family for many, many years. One of the daughters of the family became a writer herself, Catherine Sedgwick. And she wrote novels as well. She wrote journals and a memoir that included quite a few anecdotes about Elizabeth Freeman, Mumbat. That's how I know several of the anecdotes that I narrate in my book. So we're very lucky because many, many slaves, all they are are names on a list of the slave owners or in the tax accounts. But we have Catherine Sedgwick to thank for giving us some specific incidents and events and even conversations which may or may not be strictly accurate because she was remembering them in later years. But it was enough of a primary source that I felt I could honestly use it in a biography. Now again, Gretchen, the way that I got to know you as I stumbled on the review about Mumbat's Declaration of Independence in Friends Journal. And when I contacted you, you said you didn't even know about that one. How does this compare? Is this getting wide reviews? Are there a lot of people hearing about it? And how do you know when a review is good? Oh, well, I must say that Mumbat has gotten more reviews than any of my other books. It's over a year now that it's been out. And I'm still getting Google alerts about blog reviews and things. And it was also the first time my books have been reviewed in the New York Times, which said very nice things about it. But the review that you led me to in the Friends Journal is the most insightful review. It really nailed what I was trying to do in the book. And so I was very happy that you led me to it because I did not get a Google alert for Friends Journal. I guess they're not on the Google radar for... But they should be. They should be because they've got so much good stuff in there. Again, the book, folks, is Mumbat's Declaration of Independence by Gretchen Wiffley here today for Spirit in Action. The name Mumbat is not going to be obvious to people until they read your book, and I think they should find it there. M-U-M-B-E-T, but that's actually a contraction. You said her name legally became or was Elizabeth Freeman, but I don't think that's how she grew up and lived much of her life. I think she was Mom Beth or something like that, which got contracted to Mumbat. Do you know when she actually took the name Elizabeth Freeman? Yes, it was one of her first acts after she became free. She went back to the courthouse and applied to have her name legally changed to Elizabeth Freeman. In fact, Freeman was a very common name for many slaves who became free, both at that point and also after the Civil War, after the Great Emancipation. Choosing a last name was a very significant action for many of the freed slaves because some of them used last names, but many of them didn't. They were only known by a first name that was given to them by their parents or might have been given to them by their owners. That was the name that Mumbat was chosen for, but when she chose her name, which would then become a family name, and she was now allowed to have a free family, she chose Freeman. Some slaves who had kinder owners would use their owner's name because that's where they had grown up, that had been their homes. But she chose Freeman to loudly declare, "I am free, and this is what I value in my life." My wife and I chose when we got married a little over 20 years ago. I tried to say, "What is this relationship about? Who are we about?" It's actually a pity that more people don't make a conscious choice about their name. My so-called maiden name, Judd Kenz, is my middle name now, so I still got genealogy there, no problem. But choosing a name, and choosing the name Freeman in Mumbat's case, is a powerful statement to the world. How many people actually chose that? I would think there would be a lot more African Americans named Freeman today, perhaps. I guess there's Morgan Freeman, isn't there? There is, yes. The story of Mumbat is all the more surprising because, as you said, she was illiterate, she was not educated. And she was fighting two big strikes against her in terms of asserting her rights. Number one, yes, she's African American, she's black, she was a slave by the standards there, and they weren't even reckoned as people. In the Constitution, the US, the areas get, what, three-fifths of a volt or something for each black person. But the other thing is, she's a woman, and as the statement went, all men are free and equal. Why was it that it was a woman who advocated this instead of an African American man? Well, I think it comes down to her character. There are statements by Sedgwick that she was extremely intelligent, she was extremely wise, extremely brave. But, interesting that you mentioned that, the actual legal case, even though it was Freeman's actions that brought about the lawsuit, they felt it would be a much stronger case if they included a man in the case as well. So, one of Ashley's male slaves was also a plaintiff in the case. We don't know anything about what happened to him after his freedom, but because Mumbet was in the household of the Sedgwick, we do know more about her. But, yes, as a woman and as an African American slave, she had two so-called strikes against her. Were there other states who did a similar challenge? You said that these were changed in other states by legislative action instead of by constitutional people are free, and these are people, so they should be free. How could it be that Massachusetts was the only one? Did the other states act very quickly? Is that what it was about? I understand that this happened, by the way, between 1781 and 1783, that it took about two years for this to go through the courts in Massachusetts and to have the ruling that Mumbet was free. So, what about the other states? What was the process there? Why didn't all the courts there strike it down? Well, it was an economic reason, I believe, because even though slavery was less widespread in the North, especially in New York state, there were lots of slaves, not only in the city, but also in the country. And it was a huge economic loss for slave owners, and I haven't studied that specifically, but I think it's because of the investment that they had in the slaves that they didn't want to lose it all immediately. The first abolition law that came into effect was in Pennsylvania, and I'm sure that has to do with Quaker influence down there. And any African-American child born to a slave mother after, I think it was January, it might have been July 4, 1780, would be free, but not immediately. The men had to work for 28 years as sort of apprentices, and the women had to work for 21 years, and then they were free, but of course in that age, that was a large part of a man or a woman's working life. And then at that age, they were free, and then of course their children were born free. So, as I say, I think the last actual enslaved person in Massachusetts died well into the 1800s, maybe 1840s, something like that. But it was an economic thing. I mean, it was an economic system in the U.S. That's why we had it, because it made money for people. And very sad statement, but how many decisions are made about what poisons go on our crops, or which immigrant does or doesn't get citizenship, that are just economic decisions in this country. I think that we'd have, if economics were pulled out of it, I do think that the change would happen much more quickly. Now, you said you got to Mumbet by first writing about Mercy Otis Warren. What's her story? She was a white woman, prosperous, well-educated white woman from a political family in Cape Cod. So she was in the eastern part of the state. She was close friends with John Adams. She met George Washington. Her brother was a major, major mover and shaker in the run-up to the revolution. And she loved politics. Her father was a politician, her husband, her brother, and she just loved the whole rough and tumble. So she wrote about politics. She was also a poet, which was acceptable for women, but it was not acceptable for women to write about politics. And she wrote some anti-loyalist satirical plays that were published in the newspapers in Boston and other places. And then she wrote a history of the American Revolution, which took her 30 years to write. She worked on it for many, many decades. So she wasn't afraid to get involved in politics. And she really stood up for the right of women to speak out in the political arena. So anyway, I thought that she was another trailblazer. In fact, as I was working on these books, I got a Christmas present from my sister. And it's a little plaque that I have on my desk. And it says, "Well-behaved women rarely make history." Which goes along with the sort of biographies that I've been writing. Now, another reason I chose these women was because there aren't books about them. There are many biographies for kids. Especially in terms of African American history, they're usually about the same group of people, Martin Luther King, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman. And there's many, many wonderful biographies about them. But I didn't want yet another one because there's so many people whose stories have not been told. So when I was doing the research for Mumbet's Declaration of Independence, I was doing background research on African Americans in general in the revolutionary era. And I came across many, many wonderful stories. So then I made the crazy decision that I would write a book about a whole bunch of these people. Crazy? Why do you say crazy? Because it's taken me six years and this very morning, I'm finally working on the final copy edits of the source notes and the bibliography of this book, which was massive. It was basically, it's about 13 different people. So it was basically writing 13 different books. Each person has a chapter. And I think I'm going to go back to the picture book by how good we did after this. But it was absolutely wonderful because I think my book is going to introduce students to a part of history that they don't study much in high school or in school at all because the US history curriculum for African American history basically focuses on the 19th century. On the movement toward abolition, the underground railroad, the Emancipation Proclamation of Lincoln. But the American Revolution had an enormous impact on African Americans. I mean, they heard all that talk about freedom and liberty and natural rights and equality. And like Mumbat, many, many of them thought, well, I wonder if that includes me or I believe it includes me or I'm going to see if that includes me. And so some of the people that I include in this new book, which is called Answering the Cry for Freedom, African Americans in the American Revolution, it will be published in the fall of 2016, is about the choices that 13 people made in the American Revolution and the impact that those choices and the Revolution in general had on African American history. Now, one especially interesting thing about that book, which I never learned in history, is that the British offered freedom to any of the patriot slaves that went over to their side. And in fact, it was a mass exodus. It was the biggest emancipation until the Civil War. Approximately 20,000 slaves ran to the British and got their freedom. I didn't learn about that in school. I don't know about you. No, I didn't. That's amazing. And things that get glossed over. Oh, the things that get deleted. Yeah. So of my 13 people, three of them are slaves who escaped to the British. And their stories are especially interesting. There weren't very many that I could find very much about, again, because many of them were illiterate, or even if they could read and write, they didn't write autobiographies. But one of them did, and his name was Boston King. And all three of these people had interesting histories. They escaped to the British. Boston King joined the British Army and fought for the British. He ended up in New York City, which, of course, was occupied by the British almost all the time during the war. Then he and Mary Perth, a slave from North Carolina and John Gizzle, a slave from South Carolina, they all ended up in New York. And then at the end of the war, the peace treaty said that the British had to hand over all the property that they had confiscated during the war. And the most important stuff was all the slaves, which were so valuable. But the British said, but they're no longer slaves because we freed them. So they kept their promise to the African Americans that they had freed, but they knew that they couldn't stay in the US or they'd be enslaved again because Americans that didn't recognize this freedom. They went all sorts of places. A few of them went to England. Some of them went down to the West Indies. But my three who were in New York went to Nova Scotia along with 3000 other black loyalists, as they were called, along with 27 white loyalists who descended on the wilderness that was Nova Scotia at that point. They were promised land and provisions by the British, but the white loyalists got the best land and they got it first and black loyalists had a hard time up there, but they were free. Then, about nine years after that, in the early 1790s, a group of British abolitionists, Wilberforce and Clarkson, who were not Quakers, I think they were methodists, decided that they would start a colony in Sierra Leone with some of these freed slaves to open up a trading network, but also to give an example to the slave traders down there, the Africans down there, another way to make a living and to try to put a dent in the slave trade. Anyway, all three of my American slaves ended up in Sierra Leone as black loyalist settlers in Freetown. Their stories are all really, really interesting. I have a woman and a couple of men who ended up in Sierra Leone. These American slaves who did escape to the British had very interesting odyssey ending up in Africa. One of them had actually been born in Africa, the other two had been born in America. But most of the people in my book "Answering the Cry for Freedom" did stay in the US and did side with the Patriots, but they lived interesting lives as well, and they include Phyllis Wheatley, who was at the poet from Boston. They include Richard Allen, who was the founder of the AME churches, the African Methodist Episcopal churches. They include Paul Cuffie, a Quaker from Massachusetts, who was actually half African American and half Native American. His mother was Native American. He was born free. He became a very rich man, very, very, very intelligent, very ambitious. He was a sea captain, and he went over to Sierra Leone to start a trading network with these other African Americans who had settled there. Some of my people are known, some are unknown, but there's 13 people in that book who all have really fascinating stories and who were all inspired by the revolutionary rhetoric that inspired the white Americans to free themselves from Britain. Amazing. I'm wondering if James Lowen covers this at all. He's the author, as you know, of Lies My Teacher told me I had him on a couple years ago, and history, if we learn what the facts are, can be so transformative for dealing with the current day. I'm really glad you're bringing this stuff up, Gretchen. The book that I saw, the first I saw the review in Friends Journal, got a hold of Mumbets, Declaration of Independence, the book that's coming by Gretchen Wolfley is answering the cry of freedom, African Americans in the American Revolution. You say that's going to be coming out in the fall of 2016. Are you just an incredibly patient person? That's painful. This career, especially if the books are illustrated, which this one will be lightly illustrated, not as heavily illustrated as Mumbet, is not a career for those who need instant gratification. Let me say that. It took me six years to write and sell the book, and then another year or two, well, actually two years. I sold the book about a year and a half ago, I think, or a year ago. So anyway, it takes a long time. But in the meanwhile, I'm working on other books. But I do want to give a shout out to the illustrator of Mumbet, Aleeks Daylin Waugh, who's a Haitian American who lives in Harlem in New York City. I think he did a magnificent job. The illustrations are just gorgeous. I would like to acknowledge him and his part in this book, because these illustrated books are very much dependent on the illustrations to tell more of the story than the actual narrative does. And that book, again, is Mumbet's Declaration of Independence. I'll have a link to Gretchen Wolfley's site. It's Gretchen Wolfley.com. Wolfley is spelled W-O-E-L-F-L-E.com. So Gretchen Wolfley.com, you can find out on NerdinSpiritRadio.org. This is Spirit in Action in NerdinSpiritRadio Production on the web at NerdinSpiritRadio.org, where you'll find almost 10 years of our programs for free listening and download. You'll find links to our guests, like those to Gretchen Wolfley and others. And you'll find additional commentary about them. You'll also find comments that others have posted. And we'd love to have you share your views when you come and visit the site. So please post when you visit NerdinSpiritRadio.org. There's also a place to support NerdinSpiritRadio. This is funded by your contributions. It's not the corporations paying for it. It's not government funding. It's your money that's making a difference. But even before you give a penny to NerdinSpiritRadio.org, I encourage you to contribute generously to your local community radio station, the kind of stations that carry this program. They provide a slice of news and of music that you get nowhere else on the American airwaves, making a true difference in this country. So start number one by supporting your local community radio station. Again, we're speaking with Gretchen Wolfley, author of a recent book, Mumbet's Declaration of Independence. But there's a whole lot of other books that you've written, Gretchen, and I don't even know the total number. But I had a chance to look at at least three others of your books and get a flavor of them. So I want to talk a little bit about them because I want to get an overview of your work so that we can talk about how you're using your work to make this world a better place. Next one I want to talk about. Let's be a little bit whimsical. It's a nice illustrated book. "Catcha the Windmill Cat." "Catcha the Windmill Cat" and "Catcha" at the end is spelled J-E because that's a diminutive in Dutch. So "Catcha the Windmill Cat" evidently a true story, but from way back in 1421, November 5th, 1421, how did you come about this story, Gretchen? Well, it's the same way I came upon Mumbet. I was researching my very first book, "The Wind at Work," which is a history of windmills, a history of wind energy. And I read the story of Catcha, or I read the story of the flood of the Kinderdike. It was a little village where there was a big storm in Holland as there often is, and the sea broke down the dike and flooded the town, and a cat saved a baby's life by jumping on her cradle. So I thought as I was working on the windmill book, well, that doesn't really have a place in my windmill book, but it would make a wonderful story on its own. It first appeared in children's magazines, but I really wanted it as a book as well. So I sent it out to book publishers, and this was in the early stages of my career, and I didn't really know any better. I kept getting rejections, as of course every author does, but I get positive rejection saying, "Well, it's really well written, and it's a good story, but no, thank you." As I say, I didn't know any better, so I kept sending it out. Over the years, I got 42 rejections. Now, I've had many, many rejections of many, many stories, and some of them after a few rejections, I sort of say, "Okay, well, it's not really up there. It's not really worthy of publication, or it's not well written enough." But this one, I just loved the story, and I didn't give up, and I finally got a wonderful publisher, Candlewick Press, which is owned by Walker Books in England, so I got a British edition as well, and five translations. And a fantastic illustrator, Nicola Bailey, who's English, and her illustrations are absolutely exquisite. They're little Dutch Renaissance masterpieces. So that book came about. Basically, it's historical fiction. It's based on a true event, but I didn't know who the baby was. I didn't know who the family was. But because I had been working on the windmill book, I thought, "Oh, I'll make the child the daughter of a windmiller." So I did. I didn't know anything about the baby or the family, but I'd been working on my history of windmills, so I decided to make it a windmill family. Well, one very interesting thing. A couple of years after it came out, I got an email from a man in Holland who was, I guess, a cultural anthropologist or a folklore person. And he said, "I really enjoy your book, and you say we don't know anything about the baby or her family, but we do." I'm a folklorist, and her descendants still live in Dordrecht, which is the region where it all happened, and we know her name. Her name was Beatrice. Now, I had named her Annika, but if I had known, I would have named her Beatrice. So anyway, I thought that was very interesting, and it shows the power of the Internet. Another thing I'd like to mention is I started writing for children, but when I was almost middle-aged in my 40s, and how that came about, I was an English major in college, and I loved reading, but I never really thought of myself as a writer, but after college, I had many, many different jobs, but many of them were around editing and some writing. And I was working as a scriptwriter in the late '80s and '90s for an interactive multimedia educational company. And we did programs from museums and educational things. This was in the early days, before the Internet, before CD-ROMs, there were lots of different sort of platforms that they were using. Anyway, it was a great job. I loved it. It was lots of research, which I adore, but I was only hired project by project, and I was laid off to half-time. The previous Christmas, my mother-in-law had sent us a transcript and an audio tape of some old family stories from my husband's family who lived in Maine, way back starting in the 18th century, when Maine was a real wilderness. And there were some stories in there that I thought would be really interesting stories for kids. Now, I had never written fiction, only nonfiction, but I started writing. I took a couple of classes in writing for children at UCLA Extension, and I got four or five of those stories published in a children's magazine, Cricket, Cricket and Spider, which is a wonderful, old, venerable institution. So when I go and speak to kids at school, I always encourage them to find out about their own family history, to ask their mothers and fathers and aunts and uncles and grandparents, to tell them their stories about when they were kids. They don't have to go back to the 18th century, but even just knowing about their own family and where I live in Los Angeles, many, many of the kids that I speak to at school have families who are recent immigrants from other countries and other cultures. And I think it's so important, so important for kids to know all about their own histories and their own families. So that's how I got started writing for kids. And it's interesting, this book, Katcha, the Windmill Cat, as you said, it's fiction, although it's based on a real event. And I can imagine feeling a little bit of mortification when you find out, you know, this is Beatrice, not Annika. Did you go through those feelings? There's some vulnerability in saying this is fact. When you write about Mumbet, if you got something wrong, this is your historian now. Yes, yes. Well, I'm an assiduous researcher. In fact, I, along with many other writers that I know, suffer from an incurable disease that's called research rapture. Is that a Christian variety proof? Research rapture, it's a very common illness. It's so much fun to do research. I love doing research. One of the reasons that I'm focusing recently on writing biographies is because the research possibilities are endless. It's so much more interesting and it's so much easier than actually writing the book. How I do research, basically, is, well, if I'm doing biography, which is what I've been focusing on for several years now, first I look and see if there's been a biography of this person written for kids. And as I say, I like to focus on not very well-known people. So if there has been, say, one written for young adults, then I might think that there would be a market for one for younger kids. If there is one already, then I probably won't write that. But anyway, the children's biographies, if there are any, I read all the adult biographies, then I look at the context. I look at the historical period like I did with Merci Oda Swaren and Mumbet, women in that era. Then I look at the footnotes in the books that I've read and I look for scholarly articles. In fact, I do as much research for a short book as I do for a long book for a 1200 word biography that I do for a longer book, which I've also written for kids because you have to know the whole story before you know what you want to focus on in your 1200 words. So all that is so much fun and so much more interesting and so much easier than writing the book itself. Well, let me check on something about how you pick out your topics because, I mean, I suppose you could write a book about Adam Smith. I guess there's a lot written about him. There's a lot of people you could write something about. You chose to write about a cat. Why write about a cat? Why write about Mumbet? Why do you pick certain topics and not others? As I mentioned, I like to write about the people who haven't been written about before, who I find inspiring, who are not necessarily well behaved because well behaved women don't make history. Jeanette Rankin was the first biography I wrote, and that's for older kids. That's a longer biography. She lived from 1880 to 1972. She was a women suffragist. She worked for four years to get the women's vote in her home state of Montana as well as other places. She traveled all around the country speaking out for women suffrage. And then she decided she would run for Congress, and she did. And she was our first Congress woman in 1916, even before most women in the country had the vote because her state, Montana, had given the women the vote. So she goes to Congress, and the first act of the first day in Congress is Woodrow Wilson up there asking the Congress to enter World War I. And she was a lifelong pacifist. And she voted no, along with a few dozen other men in Congress. But who was the one who was vilified? She was. She got all this hate mail, some of which I have in the book, Letters and Telegrams, saying that this just proves that women aren't brave enough or smart enough to be involved in politics. If you don't really understand that we had to go to war. So she did not get reelected in 1918. She went on to work in the peace movement and work for women's social justice during the 20s and 30s. And then when FDR came in, she saw as soon as he came in, he started strengthening the Army and the Navy, and she saw that he was a militarist. And then of course, the whole stuff happened in Europe about growing militarism. So she decided she would run for Congress again. And she was elected again from Montana in 1940, which of course meant that she was in Congress when Pearl Harbor happened. And she was the only person in Congress who voted against going to war in 1941. Amazing. Often you will hear statements saying it was unanimous. It was not unanimous. Jeanette Rankin voted against going to war. She said, "As a woman, I cannot go to war and I'm not going to send anybody else." So anyway, that was another woman who was just so, so brave and so courageous and so out there that I wrote a biography of her. I love the view that you have on history. I still don't think you've answered my question, though, and I'm not calling you to answer this. My real question is, how do you pick these topics? What are these things that attract you? Why be concerned about a person who doesn't go to war as opposed to Joe Schmo, who actually went? I mean, you could have done a book or biography of someone who went and got killed at the Battle of the Bulge. Why don't you choose those topics? What topics do you choose and what is it that appeals to you? I guess the people who share my own values and who do remarkable things, back in the 60s, I got involved in Vietnam marches and things, but basically, I'm not really out there on the barricades. I feel I'm sort of expressing my values in the books that I write, and those values include social justice and environmental justice, so I look for subjects that reflect those values. I'm often asked, why do you write for children and not adults? And the reason that I give is because, say, my first book on the history of wind energy, if I wrote that for adults, the people who would read it were the people who already agree with me. I mean, the people who are anti-wind power who think we should drill and have a pipeline and all that kind of stuff fracking, they wouldn't read my book, but kids haven't made up their mind yet about things because they don't know that much about it yet. So maybe if they read my book, it might influence their own thinking, to think about these things more deeply. So that's how I choose my subjects, and that's the sort of subject that I'm looking for. I love the subjects you're writing about. I'm going to also mention, besides the wind at work, an activity guide to windmills, besides that book which I also read, all the worlds of stage, a novel in five axes, just a really great view of William Shakespeare from the point of view of a kid, who gets involved with the truth and all of that. And it's fictional, but it's great fun, and I think we learn a lot about England there, so I really enjoy everything I've read that you've written. You talk about your values, though, your anti-war protester during the Vietnam era. What got you to that? Now, I'm searching here for this spiritual, religious, the over-pinning view of the world that makes these things worthwhile, that, I mean, you could be a gung-ho capitalist trying to get the next great apple product out there, or who knows whatever. What are your core values, your core view of the world from childhood up to now that make you such a powerful witness for children through your writing? Oh, gosh. Well, I had a small-town middle-class upbringing. I grew up in a small town in western New York, Dunkirk, New York. My parents were products of the Depression. My father worked his way through college and worked his way up the corporate ladder. My mother was a housewife and mother, a very good one, I might say. I was brought up a Catholic. I was a very good girl, a very good Catholic. I went to school at the University of California at Berkeley as a transfer student arriving there in 1964, which was when the whole free speech movement happened, and I sort of went home at Christmas, and my parents said, "What happened to her?" Our good little girl daughter. So, I was the product of the '60s, although I must say, maybe my first protest was, by the time I was in high school, we were living in Darien, Connecticut, which is sort of an upscale suburb, probably 98% Republican. In 1960, I got an old bed sheet and painted Kennedy for president on the bed sheet and hung it in the front yard. My father came home and said, "What is that doing there? What are the neighbors going to think?" And I said, "Well, maybe they'll think we're Democrats." He said, "Take it down." But, you know, I sort of listened to the anti-war stuff at Berkeley, and I thought it made sense. Then, after college, I went and I lived in London for six years. It was very strange because the whole hippie thing was going on there, but the anti-war movement wasn't because they weren't in the war. There were Americans over there, and there were some protests, and I was marching on the streets of London over there. Then I came back to the States in 1971, and at that point, I had gotten involved in Transcendental Meditation, and I became a teacher of Transcendental Meditation. So the whole sort of, again, peace and inner light, all those Quakerly things, which I was not involved with at that point, were just a part of what I was adopting as my spiritual practice as a meditator. I started attending Quaker meeting in 1999, which was way, way, way later than that, but it all sort of sits in my values of developing inner spirituality and ethical behavior based on social justice, especially the environment. I've only written one book about the environment, which is the wind at work, but I've got another in mind that I'm going to be working on starting, hopefully, this summer. So I'm going back to that. But in the meantime, biography has really engaged me. I love writing biography because I'm pretty nosy, and I love finding out about interesting people and about their outer lives, but also their inner lives. And another thing about writing biography is that you have all the interesting stuff that I love about novels. You have a protagonist, you have the conflicts and challenges that your hero or heroine has to encounter. You have their failures and their successes. And then finally, how they sort of are transformed in some way, which I love about writing fiction. But you don't have to make up a plot. It's all there for you, so you don't have to worry about that when you're writing a biography. But the downside is that often, especially the ones that I often choose to write about, there may be big gaps in the historical record and you don't really know what happened, or if you know what happened, you don't really know how the people responded to that emotionally. You just know what they did. You don't necessarily know how they felt. Now, in something like Mumbet, it's based on facts, but I did sort of add some conversations in there, so strictly speaking, it's historical fiction that's based on historical evidence. But most of my biographies are strict biographies. I don't make anything up. I might speculate, but it's very clearly based on the evidence that we have. Writing biography is sort of the best of fiction and nonfiction, and that's why I like it. I love what you're doing. Anybody who can make history alive and bring out these valuable things that we've had blind eyes to, I think, is doing a good thing for the world. And I love the topics, of course, that you're choosing. We've been speaking today with Gretchen Wiffley. Her website is GretchenWiffley.com. Wiffley is spelled W-O-E-L-F-L-E. GretchenWiffley.com. Find the link on Nurdenspiritradio.org. A wealth of books. We've only talked about four, five of them here today, maybe six. It seems like there's an awful lot out there. Mumbet's Declaration of Independence is one you probably want to have for the young people in your circles. And there's many others to the coming book answering the cry for freedom. African Americans and the American Revolution is another gem, but you'll have to wait over a year for that. Gretchen, thank you so much for writing, witnessing, living out the values that really make this world a better place. Thank you for joining me for Spirit in Action. Well, thank you so much. I've really enjoyed it. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website. NorthernSpiritRadio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone. With every voice, with every song, we will know this world alone, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)