The Book of Gutsy Women Read online

  Margaret was fascinated by her father’s work. But she was more interested in looking at insects through a magnifying glass, collecting turtles and frogs, and poring over maps. “I pictured myself as a scientist,” she said, “going to the jungle, bringing back specimens for natural history museums and doing all the things that women never do.” After graduating from high school, she enrolled at Columbia University in New York to study art. That year, Minnie bought Margaret her first camera, a twenty-dollar Ica reflex with a cracked lens. Perhaps driven by her explorer’s spirit, she bounced from school to school, never staying for long in one place or with one major: She studied art, swimming, dancing, herpetology, paleontology, and zoology. After six universities and one brief marriage, Margaret transferred to Cornell, her seventh; she chose it because she’d heard there were waterfalls on campus.

  At Cornell, she discovered her calling. After struggling to find a part-time job to support herself, Margaret took the camera her mother had given her and used it to photograph the buildings on campus, selling the images to fellow students and the alumni newspaper. Soon she started getting calls from architects who wanted to know whether she was studying to become a photographer—something she had, up to that point, never considered. One day before graduation, she marched unannounced into the offices of York & Sawyer, a major architectural firm, with a folder full of her photographs, demanding an unbiased opinion of her work. She left assured that she had a future in architectural photography, if she wanted it.

  After graduation, Margaret moved to Cleveland, her sights set on photographing the city’s steel mills. Even though the mills were closed to women, she talked her way in with her camera. “Nothing attracts me like a closed door,” she said later. “I cannot let my camera rest until I have pried it open.” The same fascination with industrialization that she first experienced as a child was evident in her pictures, which provided an up-close look at a changing American economy.

  “By some special graciousness of fate I am deposited—as all good photographers like to be—in the right place at the right time.”

  —MARGARET BOURKE-WHITE

  Margaret’s photos caught the eye of Henry Luce, the publisher of Fortune magazine, and she signed a part-time contract. The magazine eventually sent her to Germany, then to the Soviet Union. Though the latter was as closed to journalists as the Cleveland steel mills were to women, Margaret wouldn’t take no for an answer. She lobbied the Soviet embassy in Germany for weeks, and the officials there finally relented; she became the first foreign photographer to gain unlimited access to the region in 1930.

  Back in the United States, she signed on to a book project working with the writer Erskine Caldwell, who would become her second husband. It required the two of them to travel together for months on end. Margaret, used to working on her own, didn’t take kindly to Caldwell’s instructions. They had barely left home when he tried to call off the trip because the two weren’t getting along. Ultimately, Margaret felt the book was important and decided to do everything she could to make the project work. The end product was You Have Seen Their Faces, a book documenting people and families in the South.

  In 1936, her photograph of Montana’s Fort Peck Dam debuted on the first-ever cover of Life magazine. The stunning black-and-white image showed a towering concrete structure that looked almost like a castle, a symbol of economic revitalization during the Depression. Her photos were used not just as captivating images to supplement a story but to comprise the first photo essay. The issue sold out in hours, and the photograph would later become a postage stamp as part of a series about America.

  While working as a staff photographer for Life, Margaret also spent time in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, photographing the rise of Nazism. She and Caldwell traveled through Europe, recording the violence and anti-Semitism they saw. They worked in combat zones and, in 1941, traveled to the Soviet Union just as Germany was invading. As bombs exploded around them, Margaret and her husband hid from the officers who were evacuating residents, which allowed her to take the only photographs of the attack. Her book Shooting the Russian War is a candid behind-the-scenes look at her tour through China and the Soviet Union.

  When Margaret returned to New York, she took a job at a local paper, at Caldwell’s urging, that would allow her to stay close to home. But to her, the daily assignments and low-resolution snapshots were deeply unsatisfying. Though her husband pressured Margaret to have a child, she couldn’t bear to give up her career or her independence, and she returned to Life (I’m grateful I didn’t have to choose between my work and having Chelsea!). When she informed Caldwell that she was going back to England to photograph American B-17 bombers headed to war, he asked for a divorce.

  Margaret became the first female war correspondent accredited by the U.S. military. When she learned about top-secret plans to invade North Africa, she sought permission to follow Allied troops. When the boat she was traveling on came under torpedo attack, Margaret escaped on a lifeboat, snapping photographs with the one camera she managed to rescue. She moved with American troops through Italy and Germany, reporting along the way. She later said she had never been as scared as she was on the front in Italy, with enemy fire raining down around her. When General Patton’s troops marched across Germany in 1945, Margaret was there, too. She photographed the horrors of Nazi Germany and the liberation of concentration camps. She didn’t tell anyone until after she returned that her father was Jewish, adding an even more painful dimension to what she saw. I recently came across this description of her by author Sean Callahan: “The woman who had been torpedoed in the Mediterranean, strafed by the Luftwaffe, stranded on an Artic island, bombarded in Moscow, and pulled out of the Chesapeake when her chopper crashed, was known to the Life staff as ‘Maggie the Indestructible.’ ”

  By the end of her career, she had photographed the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, World War II, Gandhi in the midst of the struggle for Indian independence, and apartheid in South Africa. All told, she published eleven books.

  Guided in part by her example, I declared in seventh grade that I wanted to be a journalist. I wrote a column for our school newspaper and visited the offices of one of the local Chicago newspapers for a school report. Although I eventually decided on another path, Margaret’s determination, her independence, and her fearless explorer’s spirit left an impression that has stayed with me throughout my life.

  Maria von Trapp

  Chelsea

  By the time I was five years old, I’d watched The Sound of Music dozens of times. It was my go-to when I wasn’t feeling great, or if it was my turn to choose our family Saturday-night movie. From the opening scene, when Julie Andrews as Maria is twirling about the hills, to the von Trapp family’s escape over those same hills to freedom, I was mesmerized. By first grade, I knew all the words to every song and would often sing “So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodnight” before going to bed. My dramatic flair wasn’t confined to home. Playing on the playground at school, I would sometimes speak in an affected Maria/Julie Andrews voice. Thankfully, my best friend, Elizabeth, told me in the nicest possible way that I sounded silly. She probably saved me from untold amounts of teasing. I didn’t stop imitating Maria—I just started to do it by myself, in my own backyard. (I still know the words to “My Favorite Things” and “Do-Re-Mi.”) The more I learned about the real-life Maria, the more I looked up to her.

  In the movie, although free-spirited Maria is committed to her life as a nun, the Mother Abbess suggests she might prefer life outside the walls of the abbey, and recommends her as a governess to Captain Georg von Trapp, a widower with seven children. Maria throws herself into her new job and life, bringing joy back into the children’s lives and music back into their home. She stands up to Captain von Trapp, telling him that his children need fun and his love. And she fights for his love, too. Shortly after their beautiful wedding, filled with music from the nuns and smiles from all the children, the newly married von Trapps refuse to support
the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria. Though most Austrians supported their new occupiers, the von Trapps did not.

  With every viewing I was on the edge of my seat. I don’t think that’s a metaphor—I remember actually being perched on the edge of our couch. I knew that in the end, the von Trapps would calmly sing their final concert, then hide in the abbey; that the sisters would take the oil out of the Nazis’ cars; and that Rolf (erstwhile boyfriend of the oldest von Trapp daughter, Liesl) would do one right thing in his Third Reich uniform by not immediately exposing their hiding place. But I worried every time, hoping that this time, too, every member of the family would reach safety. Each time I watched the movie I thought of my friends whose grandparents had survived the Holocaust, and their family members who hadn’t.

  Inspired by Maria’s bravery and the courage of the von Trapp children, as a child, I wrote President Ronald Reagan a letter in 1985. I had just turned five when I learned he was planning to visit a military cemetery in Bitburg on a trip to West Germany, to mark the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II. I strongly believed an American president should not pay his respects on behalf of the American people at a place where Nazis were buried. So I wrote him a letter sharing my views, respectfully telling him that I knew the Nazis were “not very nice people” because I had seen The Sound of Music. (I also included a couple of my favorite rainbow and heart stickers on the letter and an entire additional sheet of my favorite stickers with the letter as a gesture of goodwill.) President Reagan never responded. I went to our mailbox every day for weeks to see if he had. I was so disappointed that no one wrote me back, but I was much angrier that President Reagan went to Bitburg. Afterward, he tried to justify his visit by explaining that he was there for only eight minutes. One was too many.

  HILLARY

  Because Chelsea didn’t receive an answer, I made sure when we lived in the White House that we had a team of staff and volunteers dedicated to answering children’s letters. I didn’t want any other child to be disappointed like Chelsea had been. In fact, when Bill and I asked Chelsea in late 1992 what she hoped for from our move to Washington, the only thing she asked was for every child to get a response if they wrote to the president, the first lady, or the White House.

  When I got older, maybe the summer after sixth grade, I read the real Maria von Trapp’s book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. In some ways, the true story was even more dramatic than the movie. The book described their unexpected encounter with Hitler while visiting Munich, and then their decision to flee. “We learned the shocking truth that ‘home’ isn’t necessarily a certain spot on earth,” she wrote. “It must be a place where you can ‘feel’ at home, which means ‘free’ to us.” There was one development in which reality was slightly more mundane than the movie, though just as heroic: They left Austria not by trekking over the Alps but by boarding a train to Italy. “We did tell people that we were going to America to sing,” said one of Maria’s stepdaughters, coincidentally also named Maria. “And we did not climb over mountains with all our heavy suitcases and instruments. We left by train, pretending nothing.” From the book, I learned that Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s head of the SS—the Nazi’s elite paramilitary unit and the unit of some of those buried at the Bitburg cemetery—had later used the von Trapps’ home as his local headquarters. Himmler also founded Dachau, the Third Reich’s first concentration camp and the site where tens of thousands of Jews, homosexuals (as LGBTQ people were labeled then), political prisoners, Communists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were held and murdered.

  “One of the greatest things in human life is the ability to make plans. Even if they never come true—the joy of anticipating is irrevocably yours. That way one can live many more than just one life.”

  —MARIA VON TRAPP

  The von Trapps’ lives weren’t all singing and heroism. In the book, Maria shared their family’s financial struggles. “We are not poor,” she wrote. “We just don’t have any money!” Her children would later share that the real Maria wasn’t always as sweet as Julie Andrews’s character; in fact, she had a temper. “But we took it like a thunderstorm that would pass,” said her stepdaughter Maria. “Because the next minute she could be very nice.” The real-life love story was different from the movie, too. When Georg asked Maria to marry him, she was torn about whether to abandon her religious calling, until the other nuns urged her to follow what they saw as God’s will and say yes. “I really and truly was not in love,” she wrote. “I liked him but didn’t love him. However, I loved the children, so in a way I really married the children… [b]y and by I learned to love him more than I have ever loved before or after.”

  My memories of Maria are now an amalgam of the movie, her memoir, and the time when Mom and I visited Salzburg the summer I was seventeen. In kindergarten and first grade, when I needed courage, I thought of Maria standing up to the Nazis, boldly risking so much in order to do what she knew was right and protect those she loved.

  Anne Frank

  Hillary

  On one of my regular visits to our local town library when I was around twelve years old, my favorite librarian told me I should read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. She explained that Anne had been a Jewish teenager, not much older than I was, who wrote in her diary while hiding from the Nazis during World War II. I knew my father was a navy veteran of that war, that America and its Allies had defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and that many millions of people around the world had been killed. I didn’t know yet about the Holocaust and the deliberate plan by Hitler to exterminate Europe’s Jews. Anne Frank’s diary, and the 1959 movie based on it, were my first introduction to the horrors of the Holocaust.

  Annelies Marie “Anne” Frank was born in Germany in 1929 but left with her family when she was four years old, after the Nazis took over. The family—her mother, Edith; her father, Otto; her older sister, Margot; and her cousin Buddy—settled in Amsterdam, but in May 1940, the Germans invaded the Netherlands, and the Frank family was trapped. The Nazis began to segregate and systematically discriminate against the Jews living there, forcing adults out of jobs and children out of schools. When Margot received a deportation order to a work camp in July 1942, the family went into hiding. They moved into rooms behind a door concealed by a bookcase in the building that held Otto’s business. They couldn’t take many possessions with them, but Anne brought with her a diary she had received for her thirteenth birthday and wrote in it throughout the two years of her hiding.

  “The nicest part is being able to write down all my thoughts and feelings; otherwise, I’d absolutely suffocate.”

  —ANNE FRANK

  The Franks and the other Jews who joined them later in the “secret annex” were cared for and protected by a small group of Dutch citizens who had worked for Otto in his business. They provided food, protection, and news for two years. Anne called them “the Helpers” in her diary and wrote of their dedication in spite of the dangers they, too, faced if they were discovered.

  The worst happened in August 1944: Anne and her family were betrayed, found by the Gestapo, and sent to concentration camps. The question of who tipped off the Nazis to the Franks’ secret annex remains a mystery to this day. Anne and Margot were sent first to Auschwitz and then transferred to Bergen-Belsen, where they both died in early 1945.

  Otto, the family’s only survivor, returned to Amsterdam after the war and sought out the Helpers. One of them, his former secretary Miep Gies, gave him Anne’s diary, which she had found and saved along with other papers. Otto worked to get the diary published first in Dutch and then in English in 1952.

  What makes Anne’s diary so special to me and millions of other readers is how honest she was. She described her sometimes ambivalent feelings about her parents and sister; her changing body and growing awareness of her sexual development; her first kiss with a young man in hiding with her; her frustrations at living in a cramped space and missing a regular life outside with her friends;
her occasional fear and despair about the Nazis and the war. Anne’s story became universal because she was an ordinary girl with extraordinary writing abilities who could connect with readers around the world.

  Anne Frank’s diary started out as a private record of her teenage thoughts and experiences and became one of the best-known accounts of facing the horror of war. Eleanor Roosevelt wrote the introduction to the first American edition and described it as “one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and human beings that I have ever read.” John F. Kennedy spoke of her “compelling” voice. Nelson Mandela recounted how he had read the diary in prison and “derived much encouragement from it.”

  In 1999, Time magazine named Anne Frank one of “The Most Important People of the Century.” “With a diary kept in a secret attic,” they wrote, “she braved the Nazis and lent a searing voice to the fight for human dignity.”

  CHELSEA

  During college, when friends would come and visit me in Washington, D.C., we always made a trip to the United States Holocaust Museum, where we would walk through every exhibit, then listen to the survivors’ testimonies at the end. One of those friends was Mattie Johnstone Bekink. Many years later, Mattie was living in Amsterdam with her family when, tragically, she lost her four-day-old daughter, Elouisa. She found a renewed purpose when she began working with the Anne Frank House, supporting their mission of standing against anti-Semitism and all forms of bigotry, and championing human rights, freedom, and democracy. I’m inspired every day by her commitment to carrying on this important work in Anne’s name—work she knows is vital to building the future she wants for her sons, and honoring the memory of their sister.