Bloody Lessons: Victorian San Francisco Teachers–Part Three
This is the final part of my 3-part series on San Francisco teachers in 1880. I hope it helps deepen your enjoyment of Bloody Lessons, the third book in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery Series. “Who were the women who did succeed in passing their examinations and securing jobs in San Francisco, Portland, or Los Angeles? And, what were their jobs like once they got them? Over eighty percent of the female teachers in these three cities in 1880 were single, and over two thirds of them were single and under the age of thirty. In Portland and Los Angeles, over two thirds of the female teachers had native-born parents. Nearly three quarters of the young single women teaching in (San Francisco) were either foreign-born or of foreign parentage, and a least a third of those who lived at home Read more…
Bloody Lessons: Victorian San Francisco Teachers: Part Two
In my newest Victorian San Francisco Mystery, Bloody Lessons, the question comes up over whether a teacher got her position through undue favoritism on the part of a school board member. Once again, a plot point came right out of the pages of my dissertation and the newspapers of the time period. And once again, the controversies of the past, in this case over city policies governing the hiring and retaining of public school teachers, echoes controversies in the present. “No matter what their salary, women highly coveted the job of teaching in the nineteenth century, and by 1880 a position in the California or Oregon public schools was not always easy to obtain. In the 1850s and 1860s a teacher had to go through a yearly examination order to get and to retain her job, and examination that was Read more…
Bloody Lessons: Victorian San Francisco Teachers–Part One
From the start, my plan for the series of mysteries set in Victorian San Francisco has been that each book should feature a different occupation held by women of that period. In Maids of Misfortune, my protagonist, Annie Fuller, goes undercover as a domestic servant, in Uneasy Spirits, she investigates a fraudulent trance medium, and in my short story, The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage, the elderly seamstresses who live in Annie Fuller’s boarding house are on center stage. In Dandy Detects, it is another boarder, Barbara Hewett, who is the main protagonist. And it was while I was developing her background story, including her work as a teacher at the city’s Girls’ High, that I decided that my next full-length book after Uneasy Spirits would be about the teaching profession. In less than two weeks, that book, Bloody Lessons, will Read more…
Victorian San Francisco: Woodward’s Gardens
In the countdown to the publication of Bloody Lessons, I am going to explore some of the places in I have let my characters visit in my Victorian San Francisco stories. For some of those places, you can still visit and experience what they would have been like in the late 19th century, for example, the famous Cliff House Inn, while others are so long gone that it is hard to imagine how important they had been to residents of San Francisco in the past. Woodward’s Gardens is one such place. In 1879-1880, when my novels are set, Woodward’s Gardens was the preeminent place for San Franciscans to go to recreate–even more popular than Golden Gate Park, which was just still a good deal of sand dunes, newly landscaped carriage drives and a single Flower Conservatory. However, today, if you Read more…
Would a Rose by any other Name: The Thorny Question of Titles
I have belonged to a writing group for nearly 25 years, and I cannot count the number of hours we have discussed the titles for our books over those years. For those members who were fortunate enough to be traditionally published (remember those days of yore when it was assumed that a traditional contract was the height of good fortune), the titles they came up with were always tentative because we weren’t ever sure they would be permitted to use them. In fact, when I think of the laughter that erupted as we threw out–often absurd––suggestions, I wonder if this was because we all had the sense that the agents and editors (the “grown-ups” who would instruct us what a good title should be), would have the final word. As a result, I think we felt that we didn’t need Read more…
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