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Images from
A Mixed Chorus: Jewish Women in the American West:
A hybrid history in progress
By
Harriet Rochlin |
Blanche
Coleman (1884-1978)
First woman
to pass the South Dakota State Bar. Practiced law for 50 years
Photograph courtesy, Al Alshuler |
| Blanche Colman was in born Deadwood, Dakota
Territory in 1884, just eight years after rich gold strikes
set off the rush that attracted some 18,000 seekers to the Black
Hills, her father, Nathan, among them. If her birthplace brings
to mind the profane, crime-polluted, greed-crazed Deadwood depicted
in a recent televised series of the same name, forget it. Shortly
after her father arrived, he became lay rabbi for the town’s
Jewish population, and soon after, Deadwood’s longtime
Justice of the Peace, affectionately dubbed “the Judge.”
When Blanche graduated from high school in 1902, she took a
job in the legal department of the Homestake Mining Company
in nearby Lead. From clerk, she rose to stenographer, and then
to legal assistant, all the while studying law on her own. On
October, 3, 1911 she became the first woman to admitted to the
South Dakota State Bar. For much of her career, she was on the
legal staff of the Homestake, described by historian Rodman
Paul as "one of the greatest gold quartz mines in the world."
Colman retired from the firm in 1950 and thereafter maintained
a private practice. In 1961, she received an award naming her
the first woman to practice law for fifty years in South Dakota.
Throughout her long career, local newspapers awarded celebrity
status to the town’s first female attorney. “Admitted
to Practice. Miss Blanche Colman First Woman Lawyer in Hills“;
“Girl Picks Job as Gold Mine Lawyer.” Blanche Colman
To Be Honored by Bar Assn.” “Blanche Colman has
made Deadwood her home for 90 years.”
Drawn from materials collected by her grand-nephew,
Al Niederman.
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Elizabeth Fleishmann-Aschheim
(1867-1905)
Pioneer Radiographer,
Founder of the First X-Ray Laboratory in the West
Photograph courtesy, Peter
E. Palmquist, Arcata, California
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| Born in El Dorado, California, Elizabeth
was supporting herself as a bookkeeper in San Francisco in 1895
when her brother-in-law, a physician, introduced her to the
newly developing field of radiology. In less than a year, Elizabeth,
who had never completed high school, had mastered the technique
of radiophotography and opened the first X-ray laboratory in
California. Located at 611 Sutter Street, the facility was soon
regarded as the best-equipped radiology lab in the American
West. During the Spanish American War (1898) injured American
soldiers were brought from the Philippines to a hospital in
San Francisco where some of the most severely wounded were X-rayed
by Fleischmann. Wrote Peter Palmquist, photography historian,
“Not only did she pioneer in a previously unknown occupation—X-ray
photography—but in her [tragically brief] lifetime achieved
worldwide recognition for her extraordinary skill and dedication
to this life-saving science.” Fleischmann accomplished
all this in one decade, working alone, in a period when most
doors to the medical profession were stubbornly closed to women.
In 1905, the San Francisco Chronicle reported her demise, as
"Death of a Famous Radiophotographer " She was thirty-eight
years old, and had been suffering for several years from radiation
poisoning due to exposure to unshielded X-rays. The epitaph
on her gravestone in the Salem Cemetery, a Jewish burial ground
outside of San Francisco reads, “I think I did some good
in this world.” |
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