Overview

This book is made up of modified scripts used for podcasts about women buried at Laurel Hill East Cemetery in Philadelphia and Laurel Hill West just outside the city in Bala Cynwyd. You will learn about Founding Mother Esther DeBerdt Read whose status in the colonies at the time of her death was second only to Martha Washington. Anna Jarvis founded Mother's Day and Martha Kimball founded Memorial Day - they are both at Laurel Hill West. Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander was the first Black woman in America to earn a PhD in economics and then attended law school. The city of Philadelphia is in the process of erecting a statue for her. Mary Ann Lee was America's first prima ballerina. Rachel Lloyd was the first American woman to earn a PhD in chemistry. Glenna Collett Vare was the first woman to drive a golf ball 300 yards. Nellie Nielson was the first woman president of the American Historical Society. Helen Thompson Woolley turned the entire field of gender studies on its head with her work, and Katherine McBride's graduate thesis on ""aphasia"" remains a classic. Cecilia Beaux painted society's elite, while Christine Wetherill Stevenson founded The Hollywood Bowl. Aimee Ernesta Drinker Bullitt Beaux Barlow was her niece whom she painted several times; Ernesta turned down more than 50 marriage proposals before she turned 21 and during World War II had a radio show as ""Commando Mary."" Frances Anne Wister saved Old City; her sister Mary Channing Wister has a grade school named for her; a third sister Ella Wister Haines made a career out of public relations with the electric company. Princess Olga Demidoff Stoever descended from Russian royalty but worked as a madame in a fancy New York City brothel and got into trouble when she threw a wine bottle. Annie Inglis was the inspiration for a home for incurables, while Anna Magee used her fortune to establish a rehabilitation hospital. Catherine Drinker Bowen wrote best-selling biographies and histories, including four which made Book of the Month Club, while Elizabeth Head Fetter wrote brilliantly about medicine for lay people, and Gladys Hall wrote gossip for the movie magazines. Dr. Irene Koprowska co-discovered the Pap smear, while Dr. Anna Lukens experienced the ""She Doctor Crisis of 1869."" C. Delores Tucker fought battles against misogynistic lyrics of rap music. Anne Francine starred opposite Angela Lansbury on Broadway and Barbara Eden on television. Anna Meister started her own religion. Henrietta Garrett quietly let her fortune build to more than $15 million but never bothered to write a will. Hannah Clothier Hull served a life for peace as a prominent Quaker pacifist. Edie Huggins was your friend on television. Mary Engle Pennington was ""The Ice Lady."" Sara Yorke Stevenson started the Penn Museum. Mae Bibighaus died of a heroin overdose at age 19 in 1900; Maude Rettew and the Merritt sisters went down with the ship Sarah Craig during a sudden squall during a pleasure cruise; Gertie Gorman Webb died of natural causes, but her family was positive that her husband had poisoned her for her fortune. And Marion Stokes recorded everything on the television for more than 30 years. These are some of the women you will meet in this educational and entertaining book about 52 women who shaped the world we live in today and who are buried at Laurel Hill Cemetery.

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Reviews

Excerpt from ""Kirkus Review"" An episodic but fascinating collection of biographies of the women buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery ""...the author tells the stories of some of the hundreds of women from the last three centuries buried in these cemeteries, ranging from historical figures to more contemporary people. In each case, he devotes a few hundred words, based on his research expanding on the meager details of headstones or mausoleum walls, to flesh out the histories of these women. Readers get glimpses into the lives of people like Nellie Neilson, described as ""Medievalist, Scholar, Athlete."" Neilson was the first woman to publish an article in the Harvard Law Review, and in 1943 became the first woman president of the American Historical Association. While there are limits to what can be gleaned from historical records, the fuller picture presented here is definitely one of a real, knowable person. This sense of history in these pages is only enhanced by the author's digressions about his own career in medicine, which is grounded in the long history of medicine in Philadelphia ... The book's greatest asset is the author's skill at fitting a great deal of compelling biographical information about each of his subjects into a compact space. The profile of art connoisseur Bernice ""Bonnie"" McIlhenny Wintersteen is a perfect example; Lex documents her accomplishments, but also includes ample dashes of her personality (when questioned by a reporter in the 1970s about how she planned to dispose of her substantial collection of Picassos, for instance, ""she said that she would have given them to the Philadelphia Museum of Art if the museum's former director ... had treated her a bit nicer."" ... Lex writes, summing up the book's central thesis. ""Many of them defied familial and societal expectations to advocate for change in a time when their voices we were marginalized and felt to be of lesser value.""

Author Information

Joe Lex retired in 2016 after 45+ years in emergency medicine which he started as a combat medic in Viet Nam and ended as a professor of Emergency Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia. When he took a tour of the historic Laurel Hill Cemetery, founded in 1836, he realized that the role of a cemetery docent seemed to suit his personality. After a year or so of giving tours, he decided that both cemeteries, East and West, really needed a podcast to talk about their amazing inhabitants. The result was ""All Bones Considered: Laurel Hill Stories"", followed a couple of years later by ""Biographical Bytes from Bala: Laurel Hill West Stories"". Soon he had accumulated hundreds of scripts loaded with biographical and historical information, along with some pretty astounding stories of movers and shakers, artists, authors, and entertainers, scholars and educators, healers and givers, and the inevitable odds and ends - a woman who started her own religion, another who videotaped everything on television for 30 years, a 20 year-old religion instructor who died of a heroin overdose at the start of the 20th century, and a woman whose family thought that her husband had poisoned her for her wealth. Joe already has enough scripts for ""All Bones Considered: 52 Laurel Hill Men"" and ""All Bones Considered: 52 More Laurel Hill Men."" In a couple of years, he will have enough material for ""52 More Laurel Hill Women."" He is also trying to figure out the best way to share more than 160 letters he sent home from Viet Nam to his family when he served with the 1st Battalion (Mechanized), 5th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Division as a medic from May 1968 to May 1969. After honorable discharge and a series of varying dead-end jobs, Joe earned an Associate Degree in nursing from a local community college. He was accepted into medical school at University of Texas Health Science Center San Antonio and served as class president for more than three years. A residency in Emergency Medicine at Thomas Jefferson followed, then 14 years as a community emergency physician before entering academia in 2003. He was an invited speaker at dozens of national and international meetings and served five years as chair of the education committee for the American Academy of emergency Medicine, which renamed its Educator of the Year Award the ""Joe Lex Award."" He is also considered the ""Godfather of Free Open Access Medical Education (FOAM-ED), which has provided free didactic emergency medicine training to thousands of people around the world. He is also trying to write a musical about the Red Rose Girls and produce a play about a heavily perfumed cross-dressing 300-pound Roman Catholic priest who mentored F. Scott Fitzgerald.

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