I broke a reading slump by reading something different from my normal fare: Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson, which is a nonfiction book about the sinking of the RMS Lusitania.
Turns out that the Lusitania had a lot of kickass women on board when it sank. One of its survivors was Theodate Pope Riddle, one of the first women to be a certified architect in America. She was also a spiritualist, a feminist, and an artist. At one point considered to be one of the most influential women in America, she is all but forgotten today. Many other women on board were also kickass, including Belle Naish, the woman who saved Theodate's life.
I chose to write about these two women because they express different types of kickass-ness, and because I love the fact that this friendship between women was literally lifesaving. Theodate was rich and privileged and kickass as a feminist trailblazer in the public sphere. Belle Naish was a privileged but otherwise ordinary person who behaved extraordinarily during and after a harrowing situation and followed the sinking with a quiet life of philanthropy and service.
A quick word about the Lusitania and its historical importance. TW for tragedy, mass death, death of children and infants.
The Lusitania was a British ship that had already crossed the Atlantic safely 201 times when she was sunk by a German U-boat while en route from New York City to Liverpool. She was sunk off the Irish coast in 1915, directly causing 1,198 deaths. While often paired in the public mind with the Titanic sinking, there were some key differences:
The most likely people to survive the Titanic were upper class women and children. On The Lusitania, the opposite was true. You can find a breakdown of survival rates in this article from Time Magazine. About 51% of children and infants on the Titanic survived while almost every pre-teen child and infant on the Lusitania died, and the Lusitania happened to be carrying an unusual number of babies and young children on her final trip.
The Titanic took two hours and fourteen minutes to sink. The Lusitania sank eighteen minutes after being hit by the torpedo.
Although the US did not enter WWI for another two years after the Lusitania sank, the public outrage at the ship being torpedoed despite being full of civilians (including 159 Americans) was a factor in public support for the US entering the war. The high number of women, children and infants who died played a large role in the outrage and was heavily featured in anti-German propaganda.
Lusitania mysteries and conspiracy theories abound.
RMS Lusitania
Theodate Pope was born on February 2, 1867 in Ohio. She was raised among the Gilded Age American wealthy in Ohio and Connecticut by emotionally absent parents. She was well-educated and determined to be an architect. She used her own money to hire tutors in architecture but was frustrated in her efforts to get jobs because of her gender. Theodate's parents intended for her to become a socialite, but instead she became a suffragette and a socialist who refused to seek marriage.
Theodate Pope
Theodate designed Hill-Stead, a stately home in Connecticut, as a home for her parents and their extensive art collection. Hill-Stead was intended to become a full-time museum, and it remains in operation today. She also became interested in Spiritualism, as were many progressive intellectuals of the time. Theodate was an intellectual leader, socializing with author Edith Wharton, artist Mary Cassatt, author Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and many other intellectuals and artists of the day. Her dream was to design a school for boys that would implement progressive ideas about education in a beautiful setting.
Hill-Stead
Theodate suffered from depression all her life and found that she could sometimes relieve especially acute bouts of it by traveling. At the age of 48, she set sail on the Lusitania accompanied by her maid, Emily Robinson, and her friend, Edwin W. Friend, a fellow spiritualist whose pregnant wife had chosen to stay home. They hoped to win English support for a new American spiritualist society.
When the Lusitania sank, Theodate, Edwin, and Emily jumped into the water together but were immediately separated. Theodate lost consciousness but was wearing a life belt. She was pulled onto a rescue boat and taken for dead until a woman she had befriended on the journey, Belle Naish, saw her and thought she saw a sign of life. She begged sailors to try to revive her and after two hours of effort Theodate regained consciousness. Edwin and Emily did not survive.
Belle Naish was the kind of Kickass Woman who lives under the radar until a moment of crisis when she truly shines. She was a schoolteacher in Michigan until, at the age of 45, she married Theodore Naish, a civil engineer and landowner who lived in Kansas City. Prior to the sinking she and her husband led "an unusually wholesome life."
They befriended Theodate, Edwin, and Emily on the ship. Theodore Naish had been born in Britain, and the couple were taking a belated honeymoon. Like most people on the Lusitania, including Theodate Pope, they were worried about German submarines, but were reassured by the fact that the ship was said to be faster than a U-boat and they assumed, along with most passengers, that the British would send a convoy to protect the ship when it got close to Britain.
Both Belle and her husband behaved heroically during the sinking, helping multiple people put on their life jackets and assisting other passengers with getting into boats. They were separated in the water and she never saw him again. When a lifeboat approached, Belle insisted that they pull someone else in instead of her, but a man told her that she was the only person he could reach and so she allowed him to pull her up. She asked him to write his name on the inside of her shoe "lest in the experience to follow I might forget." Passengers who survived along with Belle remembered her for having a positive and encouraging attitude on the lifeboat.
Empty lifeboat prior to loading and launching, designed to hang over the side of the ship and be lowered into the water. Prone to mixed and deadly results.
Belle was picked up by the ship Julia, a trawler which was picking up as many bodies, living and dead, as it could and ferrying them to shore. The crew saw Theodate floating, unconscious, and believed she was dead. They pulled her onto the deck with a boat hook and left her there with the other bodies while they continued searching for others. While looking for her husband, Belle found Theodate and refused to believe that she was dead. She insisted that the sailors cut off her wet clothes, wrap her in a blanket, and massage her vigorously for two hours before she regained partial consciousness. It took another two hours in front of a fire for her to fully regain consciousness.
The next weeks were chaotic as the small town where the survivors were taken struggled to care for the survivors and tend to the dead. Seven-year old Robert Kay was separated from his mother in the water (she did not survive). He had the measles, and Belle took him under her wing for many days until he could be reunited with a grandparent. She also wrote to families who were asking for news, trying to help connect them with their loved ones.
Theodate gave Belle a pension for life in gratitude for Belle's saving her life. Belle spent the rest of her life and much of her pension and settlement money (survivors were able to win some damages from the Cunard Line which owned the Lusitania and, before it, the Titanic) to help others. She worked for the Red Cross right up until her death at the age of 95.
Her obituary mentions that she "was known for her transcriptions into Braille for the Blind," although what she was transcribing, and how she knew Braille, is a mystery. She is best known for her support of the Boy Scouts, which had been founded in 1910. Over the course of her life she donated ninety acres of land and established Camp Naish, which she named in honor of her husband. She spent a lot of her time volunteering at the camp and was remembered as an active outdoorswoman.
Theodate struggled after the sinking with nightmares, exhaustion, and what I assume we would call PTSD today. During Theodate's recovery, her friend Mary Cassat told her, "If you were saved, it is because you have still something to do in this world," something Theodate seems to have taken to heart. After a physically and mentally painful year of recovery, Theodate married an ambassador with whom she traveled the world, touring China, Japan, and Korea in 1919. She took in three orphaned boys and raised them as foster children, one in 1914 who died of polio in 1916, and the other two in 1917 and 1918.
In 1916 Theodate became the first woman to be licensed as an architect in New York, and in 1933 she became the sixth licensed female architect in Connecticut. Among many other projects, she built the boy's school of her dreams and insisted on co-running it and ensuring that it operated in what was then a progressive manner (Avon Old Farms School, which is still in operation). She also designed Westover School, for girls, and Hop Brook School, which was designed to be a charitable learning institution for "the children of foreign laborers" and is a public school today. She was an active suffragette and socialist.
Still an ardent spiritualist, she and other members of the American Society for Psychical Research claimed to visit with Edwin Friend's spirit on several occasions. Allegedly, he was, as one might expect, furious about the "dastardly deed" that had killed him and so many others.
Margaret Gwyer
Before I close, I'd like to leave an honorary mention here for Margaret Gwyer, a honeymooner who was sucked into the sinking Lusitania's funnel and promptly blown back out again (but she didn't actually land IN a lifeboat, as later embellishments would have it, just NEAR a lifeboat, which turned out to be just as good since its occupants pulled her in). In one of the few happy endings from this terrible day, she and her new husband were reunited. She was so covered in soot that at first he didn't recognize her, but she said, "Never mind, we've lost those awful wedding presents." If that isn't Kickass, I don't know what is.