Ann S. Epstein Writer

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was influenced by UNESCO’s 1950 statement “The Race Question,” which scientifically and morally condemned racism, and by the research of Harvard psychologists Kenneth & Mamie Clark whose “doll test” studies showed how racism hurt the self-esteem of young black schoolchildren. Read more about race relations in Topeka 100 years ago in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

In the early 1900s, tansy was a frequent choice to induce abortion. The perennial flowering plant, native to Eurasia and found throughout mainland Europe, had been used there as an abortifacient since the Middle Ages. Although ineffective and toxic to the liver in large doses, poor women used it because the cost of a doctor’s abortion was $25 to $75, or two to six times the average weekly wage. Read more about abortion options for women 100 years ago in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

In 1941, in San Diego, Robert Oscar Peterson opened his first drive-in restaurant called Oscar’s. Ten years later he founded Jack In The Box, the first drive-through restaurant at 63rd Street and El Cajon Boulevard. Discover more San Diego history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).

In Bunting v. Oregon (1917), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a 10-hour work day for men and women and required businesses to pay time-and-a-half for overtime up to three hours a day. It granted states the right to let workers and their employers implement a wage scheme agreeable to both. However, minimum wage laws were not changed until 20 years later. Read more about labor conditions and labor laws over the last century in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS https://www.asewovenwords.com/novels/).

In November 1909, 23-year-old labor activist Clara Lemlich Shavelson led a strike of 20,000 women to protest the working conditions in New York City’s garment industry. Male union leaders had cautioned against the strike, but in February 2010 the “Uprising of the 20,000” got factory owners to agree to a 52-hour work week and recognition of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), which subsequently achieved better safety regulations and higher wages. One holdout was the Triangle Waist Company, where just a year later, in 1911, a fire killed 146 workers, mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women. Read more about the Triangle Waist Company fire and immigration in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS). Learn more about this labor pioneer in BEHIND THE STORY.

The city of was Topeka incorporated in 1857, benefitting at first from the Oregon Trail, which crossed the Kansas River there, and later from the railroads when the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad system was established in 1878. After a decade of conflict between abolitionist and pro-slavery forces, the Kansas territory was admitted to the Union in 1861 as the 34th state with Topeka as its capital. Read more Topeka and Kansas history in Tazia and Gemma (see NOVELS).