Unsung Heroines: Rebel Girls of the Bay Area

Women have dramatically influenced San Francisco Bay Area history since before the Gold Rush, but their stories are often far less well known. Rae Alexandra’s new book, Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area shines a light on these untold stories, highlight these women’s impact on the social, cultural and political life of the Bay Area.

Olivia Allen-Price: Rae Alexandra, an arts and culture reporter here at KQED was frustrated.

Rae Alexandra: I think I learned there were no statues of women. Or, there were very few.

Olivia Allen-Price: It was 2018 and she had just found out that just 12 percent of San Francisco’s street names, statues, parks and public art honored women. 

Rae Alexandra: And that made me angry.

Olivia Allen-Price: Meanwhile, the names of important men were everywhere. Anza, Coit, Sutro, Sutter, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore. I could go on. So for Women’s History Month, she made a pledge to find and honor five women from local history to write about for KQED. 

Rae Alexandra: So that just in case somebody wants to add a statue later, they might have an easy list to look at.

Olivia Allen-Price: It seemed like a simple idea, but once she started looking, she found troves of stories to tell. Countless women whose impact on local life, culture, and politics was profound yet overlooked.

Rae Alexandra: Then I kept dipping back in because I kept finding more women. Couple. I’ll just do another couple.

Olivia Allen-Price: What started as a month-long project grew into an ongoing series, and now a book. It’s out this month. It’s called Unsung Heroines, 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area. Rae Alexandra is here to talk with us about it. Welcome, Rae.

Rae Alexandra: Hello.

Olivia Allen-Price: I think for a long time, people would look back on history and see a lack of women and think, well, women weren’t able to participate. They often didn’t have as much education as their male counterparts. It’s no wonder they couldn’t contribute as much. But that isn’t really true, is it?

Rae Alexandra: People kept saying to me, well, San Francisco is a gold rush town, and maybe there just weren’t many women here, and maybe the women here weren’t in a position to do anything, and I just, it didn’t ring true to me. Because where there is life, there are women, and where there are woman, there are useful things being done. So I just didn’t believe it. And, of course, now that I’ve done the digging, that’s absolutely not true. 

Olivia Allen-Price: So many of the people who you profiled in this book are names that are new to me. And I work on a podcast that does a fair amount of history stories. How did you find these women and their stories? 

Rae Alexandra: I was literally at one point going through the indexes at the back of books and finding a woman who’d been mentioned twice and then trying to do some research on newspapers.com in newspaper archives to see, did they do anything else? And sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. The oral histories that libraries have online and archives have online were very useful. I was constantly looking, I got obsessive about looking for. Teeny-tiny plaques on the side of buildings. Is there a woman on that? Is there a woman that? So there were an awful lot of dead ends but when you find a good one it’s a real joy.

Olivia Allen-Price: Do you feel like this book, do you hope that it will create sort of a more complete history of the Bay Area? 

Rae Alexandra: Absolutely. The thing that I found in the course of writing this is that now that the book has put the women in chronological order, you kind of do get an overview of the Bay Area from the very beginning up to the present day, and it does reflect the social and cultural events of our entire history. But once I started looking at even major events that we think we all know, like the 1906 earthquake, when you start looking at it from an individual working class woman’s perspective, it gave me a completely different idea of what that whole crisis was at the time. Breaking history down to small individual people is very different to hearing it from fancy historians perspective.

Olivia Allen-Price: I love that. And that’s part of what makes your book, I think, so compelling is really, you know, looking at everything through that individual female lens. Yeah. I’d love to get into one of these stories now. Can you tell us about Tianfu Wu, whose contributions in Chinatown have led San Francisco city leaders to rename a street in her honor just this month? So this is very topical.

 Rae Alexandra: She was trafficked from China in the early 1890s. She was sold by her father to pay off gambling debts. She wasn’t told anything that was happening. She was just, she was told that she was gonna be going to visit her grandmother. She was dropped off, put in a boat. She was left with her supper and a toothbrush and her father just said, you know, stay here, be quiet, didn’t say goodbye. And that was it and she never saw her family again. And it wasn’t for lack of trying years later, she did try and track them down and was unable to. And she found herself in San Francisco. She was under the age of 10 at the time. She was basically a domestic slave and the second place that she found herself was a gambling den and the owner of that gambling den was very physically abusive to her. So she wound up getting rescued in 1894 by a group of Presbyterian missionaries who operated out of the Occidental Mission House. 

I found a newspaper report about it, and the reporters said that she was in such a bad way that the police officers who were escorting the missionaries had tears in their eyes when they found her. 

Olivia Allen-Price: And what was the Occidental Mission home? What was their larger purpose at the time?

Rae Alexandra: I mean, it was literally taking in children and young women, because what happened to the trafficked children is that once they reached a certain age, once they got to be adolescents, then they’re sold into the brothel system. And the girls working in the brothels had very short life expectancies because of what they were coping with physically. So the missionaries would take the girls. They were giving them Christian educations. There was an element here of trying to rescue these people from a life of sin, as they saw it. But they were educated, they were housed, they had playtime. So Tien ended up going there. She was raised in the mission house. Within about 15 months of her being there, there was a new superintendent who came in named Donaldina Cameron. And she became a mentor and a teacher to Tien. When Tien was little and she first got there and Donaldina was quite a strict teacher and Tien was quite strong-willed, they would butt heads a lot. And they somehow met in the middle. And it became a very mother-daughter relationship. And the two of them wound up, as Tien reached her teens, they wound up working together. She started off as Donaldina’s aide, just because Donaldina needed a translator. She didn’t speak Chinese. And when they were on rescue missions, it was really important that someone be able to communicate clearly with the poor girls in these situations. The two started working more and more closely together. She was going on rescue mission. She was a travel guardian for any girls trying to get out of the country. She went to court against brothel owners, which was extremely dangerous. She got death threats all the time. And she even, as the girls got older and were trying to leave the home, she would even vet fiancees. She’d bring in the grooms and interview them about whether or not they were appropriate and financially stable enough for her young ones.

Olivia Allen-Price: Truly an auntie in that way.

Rae Alexandra: They called her Auntie Wu. Donaldina retired at a certain point and Tien basically took over the whole running of the Mission House. She was working as a fundraiser as well by that point. She didn’t retire until 1951 and at the time that she did retire from the Mission House, Donaldina was living down in Palo Alto and offered Tien the cottage next door to hers that she also owned and they lived side by side for the rest of their and they’re even buried next to each other. In Los Angeles, which I think is quite remarkable. 

 Olivia Allen-Price: Yeah, quite a partner over many, many years, and get us to modern times. I mean, Tien was an unsung heroine, perhaps getting a little bit of flowers now. What’s happening with her naming in the city? 

 Rae Alexandra: So, the old Mission House is still at 920 Sacramento Street, they still work with women dealing with domestic violence every day. I mean, if you go in there in the afternoon, it’s full of kids having the time of their lives. They’re still doing great work. And last year, at the end of last summer, the manager of special projects at Cameron House, her name’s Leanne Mar came up with the idea of trying to get a street named after Tien And then they roped in District 3 Supervisor Daniel Sauter. And they now, the street behind the mission house where all of the children used to play is now named for Tien. It’s part of Joy Street.

Olivia Allen-Price: When we come back, we meet another unsung heroine from Bay Area history. Stick around.

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Olivia Allen-Price: Rae, last night I attended one of your book launch events, a night of bingo here at KQED, where you told stories of the unsung heroines between each round. It was super fun, even though I didn’t win a single game, and I’m a little salty about it. But of the women you spoke about, one that especially stuck with me was the story of Charlotte Brown, who you suggested should be as much of a household name as Rosa Parks. Can you tell us about her? 

Rae Alexandra: Charlotte L. Brown. I can’t remember how I stumbled across her exactly but as soon as I found her I was like why? Why do we not know who this woman is? And I do think that there was an active effort to erase her in some ways. So Charlotte took San Francisco’s omnibus railroad and cable company to court all the way back in 1863. So that’s almost a full century before Rosa Parks and it’s two years before slavery was officially abolished by the 13th amendment. So she was way ahead of her time. And taking on a large company at a time when black people only made up 2% of San Francisco’s population, this was really scary. But she had been traveling in April of 1863. She already had a ticket. She got onto the streetcar. And a conductor told her that she could not be there because there were white passengers.

Olivia Allen-Price: In your book you included some of her affidavit that she presented in court. Could you read from that so we can kind of hear her voice?

Rae Alexandra reading: I lived one block from where I took the car. When the conductor first came to me and refused to take my ticket, I told him I thought I had a right to ride. It was a public conveyance. I told him I had long distance to go. I told him I would not get out. He took hold of my arm. I made no resistance. I knew it was of no use to resist. And therefore I went out and he kept hold of me until I was out of the car, holding on to me until I struck the walk. 

Olivia Allen-Price: Wow.

Rae Alexandra: She went home and she told her family and she had really formidable parents. Her father, James E. Brown, had been enslaved until her mother, Charlotte Sr., who was a seamstress, had raised enough money to buy his freedom. So these were two both very determined people. And so her father and her took the cable car company to court and they won. And then her award got reduced to five cents, which was just the cost of the ticket. At the end of that, she got removed from another bus. So she and her father went back to court, and that time they had a much more sympathetic judge and she wound up winning $500. It was a definitive win. 

Olivia Allen-Price: I love how bold it is. Like you’ve just finished this long drawn out court case with Omnibus Railroad, and then you go a couple of days later and you get back on the railroad.

Rae Alexandra: They just were not having it. This family was not having it. They knew that somebody had to stand up and do something about it. 

Olivia Allen-Price: And what impact did this case ultimately have on the ability for black people to ride streetcars in San Francisco?

Rae Alexandra: Honestly, it kind of didn’t help. That problem persisted. People of color continued to be removed from cable cars for many years afterwards. there wasn’t a state ban on street car segregation until 1893. Thirty years after Charlotte brought her case.

Olivia Allen-Price: The book, by the way, is beautiful. I don’t know what this texture is on the cover, but it’s very pleasing to touch. Along with your 35 profiles, there were very nice illustrations of most of the women in the book. What was the process like to create those illustrations?

Rae Alexandra: Adrienne Simms is a fine artist and illustrator. And I am astonished by what I gave her and what she produced from it, because one of the biggest challenges for this entire series was finding usable images. Sometimes that was impossible. Sometimes it’s me making a copy of a copy of a newspaper that’s 120 years old. So I was giving her like the worst, grainiest images in some cases, and she just sat with them and got to know the women and managed to, I think, give them the shine that they’ve deserved this whole time. I found it very moving to see her illustrations for the first time.

Olivia Allen-Price: Well, it adds such a nice layer to be able to read these stories that have kind of been forgotten, but also see these women’s faces.

Rae Alexandra: Some of these women I’m seeing for the first time with these illustrations. 

Olivia Allen-Price: Rae Alexandra, congratulations on your book.

Rae Alexandra: Thank you so much, Olivia. 

Olivia Allen-Price: Thank you for coming to talk to us. 

Rae Alexandra: Thank you. 

Olivia Allen-Price: Rae’s new book, Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area, is available wherever books are sold. 

We are partway through our limited experiment with dropping two episodes each week, and we’d love to know, what do you think? Write to us at Baycurious at kqed.org. 

Bay Curious Trivia is coming up on April 8th. Join us at KQED’s headquarters for a rousing game of trivia, where all the questions are related to the Nine County Bay Area. Tickets and details at kqed.org/live. 

Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED. You can support shows like Bay Curious and projects like Rae’s Rebel Girls series with a donation at kqed.org slash donate. 

Our show is produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale and me, Olivia Allen-Price. Extra support from Maha Sanad, Katie Sprenger, Jen Chien, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED. 

Some members of the KQed podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. 

I’m Olivia Ellen-Price. I hope you have a great day.