Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 5, 1993 TAG: 9306050711
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: AMANDA KELL Associated Press
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
Less known are the two portraits and one memorial to women. But the developers of "The Women of Virginia Historic Trail" hope to change that. They are trying to remind Virginians of the accomplishments of women by providing a path to 30 sites in the state honoring women, including American Indian Pocahontas and country musician Maybelle Carter.
`It's important to try and teach young women, and older women, too, the history and contributions of women to the state of Virginia," said Karen R. Keesling of Falls Church, project director for the trail sponsored by the Virginia Business and Professional Women's Foundation.
The foundation will induct the New River Valley's Mary Draper Ingles on June 24 at the season opening of "The Long Way Home" outdoor historical drama in Radford. The play depicts her abduction, escape and return from Indian captivity.
Ingles was captured in 1755 by the Shawnee from Drapers Meadow - now Blacksburg, but then part of the Virginia frontier. She escaped and found her way home after a 42-day journey of nearly 500 miles.
"The Long Way Home" will host a contingent of Business and Professional Women on opening night.
At the Capitol, Queen Elizabeth I and Lady Nancy Astor, Great Britain's first woman member of Parliament, are honored with portraits. There also is a marble memorial to Lila Meade Valentine - an early 20th century lobbyist for children's and women's issues as well as voting rights.
Keesling said the Virginia trail is modeled on ones she discovered in Michigan and Boston and inspired by Suzanne Lebsock's 1987 book, "A Share of Honour," a history of Virginia women from 1600 to 1945.
Among the better-known names on the trail are Dolley Madison and Martha Washington. Lebsock, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said the wives of the founding fathers have a place on the trail in their own right.
"For one thing, they are the names that people tend to know before they come to Virginia. The other thing is there's more appreciation by the decade that wives had important roles," she said.
"It's especially true for the 18th and 19th century when women had no access to formal office. The wife would be the closest woman to the president - the kitchen cabinet."
A trail brochure includes short biographies, a map and a list of important sites. The business women's foundation printed 26,000 copies in October with a $3,120 grant from the Virginia Foundation for Humanities and Public Policy.
Keesling said the brochure will be available at trail sites. She hopes that a visitor to one of the locations, such as the Richmond home of Maggie Walker, the nation's first woman bank president, will pick up a brochure and discover the other locations.
At Montpelier, the Orange County plantation of James and Dolley Madison, the wife of the fourth president was inducted into the trail in a ceremony on her birthday, May 20. A plaque, similar to those the foundation will place at other trail sites, was mounted next to her grave.
Including Madison, nine of the 30 women have been inducted into the trail since March 1992, Keesling said.
Keesling said the foundation also is developing a Virginia women's history badge with the National Capital Region Girl Scouts Council, a children's book and a trail video. They also plan to produce additional trails to recognize more women.
"It will let a large public know that women have a history different from what they grew up with," Lebsock said.
by CNB