Women's History Month: Don't Mess With These Galz!

It's hard not to feel horrified, overwhelmed, and deeply discouraged by the unending onslaught of criminal activity and human rights violations foisted upon the world by our government. I read that the rate of U.S. Americans seeking therapy and mental health support is higher than ever—and it's no surprise. It feels like the very essence of our values and identities as people who care about culture, solidarity, and basic humanism has been neutralized in favor of an ongoing barrage of murderous abuse, rights rollbacks, and horror.

In my low moments, I find it helpful to remember that many women who came before us faced down danger and repression that may have been even more immediate (though not with social media constantly attacking us with more outrage).

And still, these women DID GREAT THINGS.

I read a quote somewhere recently that said, “she accomplished so much with so much less.” Think, for a minute, about the lack of rights endured by women in general—and notably (enslaved and not) Black women, working women, Latina women of the borderlands (and many other places, of course!), Asian, Indigenous, Brown, and other discriminated-against women whom I celebrate in our Foremother #SistoryLessons.

When I consider all they had to navigate, I have to ask myself: What can we emulate in these times, when we do have more agency? (Even this newsletter we share is an example of how far we have collectively come: I get to write it, I get to share it, you get to read it, we get to discuss it with others, and maybe some of us get to come up with and implement actions that make the world a little less of a dark and fearful reality—even in small ways.)

As we close out Women’s History Month, let’s learn a bit about two of the women from my book—Bessie Stringfield and Mary “Stagecoach” Fields—and a very interesting historical figure, who I didn't have room for, Juana Briones. We are so grateful for the examples they provide us of how to DO GREAT (or even just simply GOOD) THINGS, even in the face of such, well, badness.
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Mary "Stagecoach" Fields: "Neither Snow Nor Rain Nor Heat Nor Gloom of Night..." - ca. 1832 – December 5, 1914 — Dashing All Sorts of Stereotypes

Mary Fields was born enslaved in Hickman County, Tennessee, around 1832, though few records survive to mark the early life of people who were treated as property rather than as human beings.

After emancipation, most newly liberated people struggled to find ways of making a living—especially since enslaved people had been prohibited from learning to read or write. Mary did what she could, working on steamboats along the Mississippi River and picking up river culture, freight work, and the rough-and-tumble skills of frontier spaces.

In the 1870s she found work at an Ursuline convent in Toledo, Ohio, where she formed a close friendship with the superior, Mother Amadeus Dunne. When Mother Amadeus later fell ill while establishing St. Peter’s Mission in Montana Territory, Mary traveled north to nurse her back to health and stayed on to help build and maintain the convent and school.

At St. Peter’s Mission, Mary hauled freight, chopped wood, tended a thriving garden and poultry yard, and oversaw construction—quickly becoming indispensable to the sisters. Her salty language (yes, she loved to curse!), her flair for a good argument, her six-foot, 200-pound frame, and her refusal to accept disrespect earned her a reputation as “someone not to be messed with.” She carried a pistol on her hip and a shotgun in her buggy, and, fiercely loyal, never hesitated to defend herself or her friends—local legend recalls her driving off wolves to protect freight and marching back into a saloon that had refused her service until the proprietor backed down.

Mary “didn’t take no mess,” and that same refusal to back down led to a dispute with a male worker at St. Peter’s Mission that escalated into a physical fight and an exchange of gunfire. Although both parties survived, the spectacle shocked the community, and fearing scandal, Bishop Brondel ordered Mary to leave church property.

Undeterred, Mary settled in nearby Cascade, Montana, and reinvented herself yet again, picking up whatever work she could find—she tried running eateries but abandoned that once she discovered too many people couldn’t pay for their meals, then tried opening a tavern, then a small laundry out of her home. In 1895, when she was around sixty years old, she secured a Star Route contract with the U.S. Post Office Department, becoming the first known Black woman—and only the second woman of any race—to carry mail on such a route. To win the job she had to hitch a team of horses faster than male competitors, which she did with ease, impressing officials who cared more about speed than race or gender.

For about eight years Mary drove a stagecoach loaded with mail through Montana’s brutal winters and rough terrain. She was such a reliable driver that when blizzards stalled her horses, she slung the mail bags over her shoulder and finished the route on foot.

Fond of whiskey, cigars, and socializing in saloons with the men—often dressing with distinction, wearing men’s coats over more feminine dresses—Mary blended ferocity with generosity: she fed schoolchildren, gave away money she barely had, and kept an open home for the poor. Once age and injury made stagecoach work impossible, the local people pooled funds to help her open a small eatery, where patrons knew they’d better behave themselves or be kicked out before they could enjoy their hearty meal.

When “Stagecoach” Mary died of liver failure in 1914, her funeral in Cascade reportedly drew so many mourners that the town’s saloons and businesses closed so people could attend—a pretty amazing and appropriate tribute for a hard-working and hard-living Black woman.

Today Mary’s legacy provides a counter-narrative to the “typical” cowboy iconography: she was Black, she was a woman, and she was community-minded. The Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum features her story, and she has been inducted into the Montana Cowboy Hall of Fame. She was totally unapologetic, and we love her for this!

Reflection: Where in your life do you defy others’ limited expectations of you, just by showing up?

Bessie Stringfield: "The Motorcycle Queen of Miami"

Bessie Stringfield entered the world probably as Betsy Beatrice White (she used many names throughout her life, part of her self-branding), likely in North Carolina, with early years marked by loss and reinvention. According to the story Bessie loved to tell—she loved to play with the details of her own origin story, so we’re not quite sure which pathway led her there—she was orphaned as a child and raised by a wealthy Irish Catholic woman in Boston, an unusual cross-racial household at a time when rigid segregation defined American life. She had a flair for the flamboyant, which for a Black woman at the turn of the 20th century was already remarkable.

As a teenager, Bessie spotted her first motorcycle and was instantly spellbound, later saying that riding felt “like flying on the ground,” a freedom she knew she had to claim. Her foster mother indulged the obsession and bought her a used 1928 Indian Scout, Bessie’s first bike. At sixteen, without lessons or guidance, she simply climbed on and taught herself to ride.

In 1930, when she was about nineteen years old, she set off on the first of what would become at least eight solo cross-country trips on her Harleys, flipping a coin over a map to choose her next direction. She navigated the open road in a time without GPS or credit cards—and even more impressively, without the basic safety that white riders took for granted. Many hotels in the Jim Crow South would not admit Black people, so when she had to, Bessie slept on her bike at gas stations or in the yards of welcoming Black families. Once on the road, she had to meticulously plan every detail—learning to service her own bike, memorize back roads, and read the moods of the local folk in towns that could be dangerous for a Black woman traveling alone. To earn money, she performed stunt riding at fairs and carnivals, standing on the saddle or racing men on the track, and she traveled as far as Europe, Brazil, and Haiti.

During the Second World War, Stringfield turned her love of the road into service, working as a civilian courier for the U.S. Army, carrying classified documents between domestic bases while facing segregation, harassment, and constant danger—riding over gravel, mud, and unlit highways on heavy bikes, and facing hostile drivers who tried to run her off the road.

After the war she settled in South Florida, trained and worked as a nurse, but continued to ride. At first, her new hometown received her with hostility: local police told her that “negro women” were not allowed to ride motorcycles in their city, and she answered by out-riding the very officers who tried to block her. She went on to found the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club, mentor younger riders, and dazzle crowds at stunt shows, where local media dubbed her first the “Negro Motorcycle Queen” and later the straight-up “Motorcycle Queen of Miami,” titles she wore with a mix of modesty and mischief.

Off the bike, she kept her home open to neighborhood kids, teaching them to ride and insisting on respect and discipline in equal measure. Her personal life, however, was not as pleasant: she married and divorced multiple times, losing the children she had borne in her first marriage in infancy. She was known for her sharp wit, too—joking that all but one of her husbands were twenty-two to twenty-four years younger than she was, and that she wouldn’t give a second look at a man over age thirty-five!

By the time she died of a heart condition in 1993, Stringfield had ridden through all of the lower 48 states, as well as Europe, Haiti, and Brazil. In 2002 she was posthumously inducted into the American Motorcyclist Association Hall of Fame, and the organization created the Bessie Stringfield Award to honor people who bring new communities into motorcycling; ride-outs and rallies are named in her honor as well. Go, Bessie!

Reflection: What do you do that makes you feel most alive and "Bad-ass"?

Juana Briones: Healer, Landowner and Provider of Community Care - March 12(?), 1802 – December 3, 1889 — Hands in the Soil, Eyes on the Law

I didn't come across Juana de la Trinidad Briones y Tapia de Miranda until after I had published Our Brave Foremothers, but her story is one of such brio, I wanted to include it here in this Women's History Month celebration.

Juana Briones was born around 1802 in the Presidio of Santa Cruz or nearby, in a California still ruled by Spain, and she lived long enough to see Mexican independence, the U.S. annexation of California, and the Gold Rush transform the world around her. (As you may be familiar, many Hispanos of the border regions say “we didn’t ‘come’ to America; America came to us.”) Her parents were part of the military-mission system, and from an early age she learned to move among Spanish, Indigenous, and later Mexican communities, picking up herbal healing and midwifery traditions that would anchor her reputation as a curandera.

As a young woman she married soldier Apolinario Miranda, raised a large family with him, and earned her living as a farmer, curandera, and businesswoman. But her husband’s alcoholism and violence eventually pushed her to pursue a church-sanctioned separation—an extraordinary step for a nineteenth-century Catholic woman. Refusing to let his behavior define her future, Juana dropped his surname and began building independent income through farming, cattle raising, and small-scale trade, running her own dairy and produce operations and selling to ships in Yerba Buena, the 1834 anchorage spot and settlement that became San Francisco.

Juana’s first household in San Francisco stood near what is now North Beach, in an area then known as Loma Alta; her home there is often described as the first house in that part of what would become Telegraph Hill. She sold dairy products, produce, and prepared food to sailors and neighbors, becoming known for both her business acumen and her healing hands.

In 1844 she purchased the roughly 4,400-acre Rancho La Purísima Concepción—in what is now Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto and Los Altos Hills—from José Gorgonio and his son José Ramón, Indigenous men associated with Mission Santa Clara. The land gave her space to expand her cattle operation, orchards, and gardens, and she divided her life between this rancho and her Bay-front home.

After the United States seized California in 1848, the new government imposed a land claims process that stripped many Californio and Indigenous landholders of their property. Juana, however, refused to surrender her rights: she hired lawyers, gathered documentation, and went to court to defend Rancho La Purísima Concepción against challenges—including disputes with the Murphy family, early Anglo settlers whom she believed were trying to claim more land than they had purchased. Although she eventually sold much of the rancho, she secured recognition of her ownership and negotiated on her own behalf, a rare example of a nineteenth-century Mexican woman leveraging both Spanish-Mexican and U.S. legal systems to assert property rights—remarkable for an era when Mexican and Indigenous women’s property rights were routinely challenged.

Juana’s home was more than a business hub; it was a sanctuary. Visitors wrote about her tending the sick with herbal remedies, hands-on healing, and a calm presence that crossed language barriers. She sheltered sailors abandoned in port, Indigenous neighbors navigating the violent aftermath of the mission era, and migrants arriving during the Gold Rush who needed food, shelter, or medical care. Oral histories describe her as firm but generous, a woman whose hospitality came with expectations of mutual respect and whose table brought together people who would otherwise never have shared a meal—earning her a lasting reputation as a “founding mother” of early San Francisco and the Peninsula.

Juana died in 1889, but today she is honored as a “founding mother” by local historical societies, the National Park Service, and community groups, who draw on her story to discuss women’s property rights, Mexican and Indigenous presence in Silicon Valley, and leadership rooted in care and land stewardship. Scholars note that, unlike many Californio elites, she conducted major business in her own name and appears in land records as a primary actor rather than an attachment to a husband or father, making her a key figure for understanding women’s economic roles in the region.

A full-length scholarly biography, Juana Briones of Nineteenth-Century California, has gathered scattered archives, court documents, and family stories to present her as entrepreneur, healer, and community anchor. Today she appears in school curricula, walking tours, and museum exhibits, and is often invoked by Bay Area activists fighting for housing justice and preservation as they confront forces that still threaten to displace working-class communities. Remembering Juana invites us to see land ownership as a springboard for mutual aid, healing, and resistance.

Reflection: Who in your lineage or admiration carved out space for community care, against the odds?

Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone

Thinking about women like Stagecoach Mary, how do you show your hidden strengths? Recall a time you surprised others with your abilities.

Inspired by the derring-do of Bessie Stringfield? What does adventure mean to you? Describe a journey you took alone and how that did you "good."

When you consider the life of Juana Briones—healer, landowner, single mother, community anchor—what does it mean to you to build a life that nourishes others?

HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color

Living a little more like Stagecoach Mary: What strength do you possess that others don't automatically expect or understand?

Thinking about Bessie – When have you chosen your joy over other folks' judgment?

Considering Juana Briones, how do you honor the layers in your own life: making money, offering care, or fighting for dignity — particularly in systems not built for you?

Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends

Honoring fearless Stagecoach Mary, challenge narrow depictions of the “American West” that reduce Black and Indigenous women to mere asterisks. Challenge a stereotype when you hear it.

Thinking of Brave Bessie, honor Black women’s role in road culture and resistance. Support organizations that encourage BIPOC women in sports or travel.

Celebrating the legacy of Juana Briones, learn about Latinx land claims and dispossession in U.S. history. Seek out local histories, museum exhibits, and community groups that document land theft and support present-day struggles for land, housing, and environmental justice in Latinx communities.

What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember

Stagecoach Mary, Bessie Stringfield, and Juana Briones each modeled a kind of fierce, collective care that we can seek to emulate in our times. Mary turned a life that began in bondage into a testament to Black women’s reliability and courage as everyday forces for good. Bessie claimed the open road, daring Black girls and boys—and the white onlookers who doubted her—to imagine who else belonged in spaces that had been marked off‑limits. Juana rooted herself on contested land and used law, healing, and hospitality to show that ownership isn’t measured in acres, but in how many neighbors find safety and solace at your door.

Taken together, their stories can show us how women create solidarity and unity even in the context of a shredded social fabric. We can emulate their valor, not just this month, but all the time.

P.S. Macho Man is No Match for Mary!

American movie star Gary Cooper became the symbol for a certain mid‑20th‑century American man: the “strong, silent type.” Critics and biographers describe his screen persona as a tall, shy, western‑bred hero who embodied male freedom, courage, and honor.

But as a boy, Gary Cooper spent parts of his childhood in Montana, including near Cascade, where Mary Fields lived after her years driving the mail. Like most local children, he knew “Black Mary” as a formidable, towering, and somewhat imposing presence, but also someone who bought treats for kids, slipped flowers into baseball players’ buttonholes, and looked out for them as they roamed town.

Cooper later recalled that Fields babysat neighborhood children and that her combination of toughness and kindness left a deep impression on him. Decades later, when he was a Hollywood star, Cooper wrote a reminiscence about her for Ebony magazine in 1959. In that piece he described her as “one of the freest souls ever to draw a breath—or a .38.” Isn't it fascinating to think about how the future screen cowboy and mythological "strong, silent hero" grew up idolizing a real Black frontier woman whose grit and independence shaped his idea of what courage looked like?!

Thanks for reading this edition of #SistoryLessons, a biweekly newsletter that uses the lessons from Foremothers who led the way as encouragement and guide for these times of resilience. The series is based on stories from my award-winning book, Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History, and other, ongoing research.

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