Scout Moves

Julia Child was quite a cook, wasn't she? She was likely the first "celebrity chef" that got people interested in cooking beyond making macaroni and cheese and tuna casserole for the family dinner table. She hosted popular cooking shows and wrote cookbooks that still serve as culinary bibles, but she was so much more. Julia was born into a privileged class—the "leisure class," she called it—in Pasadena, California in 1912 in an age when women weren't expected to do anything but reproduce, be an accessory to their husbands, and roll bandages for a cause. She floated through school and went to Smith College in Massachusetts, the family alma mater. She excelled at sports there and had a high time at speak easies. When asked what she wanted to be, she was always quick to point out that she wasn't expected to want to be anything. Women were either brood mares or secretaries, she recalls, but she wanted to be neither. She moved to New York City to work as a wr...

Klara Pölzl was born in Austria in 1860. She was kind and gentle and set out to live the life of the typical girl of her time and place, intending to become a devoted wife and mother. Her cousin, Alois Hitler, brought her to his home to serve as maid for his children while is wife was ill with tuberculosis. While the wife was dying, Klara became pregnant with Alois's child, and as soon as the man was widowed, they petitioned the Church in Rome to be married. Because they were cousins, the Church needed to issue a special dispensation. Incest is an unpleasant business. Klara and Alois had six children, but only two survived their childhood—a daughter named Paula and a son named Adolf. Yeah, that Adolf. Alois had other children from his previous marriage, but Klara stayed focused on her own. She was so focused, she spoiled them rotten. Her step-son Alois, Jr. asked for money for school, but Klara convinced her husband to save his money for Adolf's education. She wanted him to at...

Frank and Jesse James were notorious outlaws who ravaged Missouri and Kansas in the name of the Confederate Army and various guerrilla leaders. Missouri was a divided state with the territories near the southern border being pro-slavery, and the James family were slave owners. After the Civil War was over, the guerrilla fighters turned to robbing banks, stage coaches, and trains, allegedly focusing on enterprises owned by former Union interests. Some legends show Jesse James to be a bandit, and others equate him with Robin Hood for standing up for small farmers against infringing corporations. Regardless of the truth behind Frank and Jesse James, their mother was certainly no Maid Marian. Zerelda Elizabeth Cole was born in Kentucky in 1825. After marrying Robert James, she moved to Missouri where her husband was a slave-owning hemp farmer and a Baptist minister. Robert died while preaching to gold miners in California, and Zerelda soon married a neighbor to help her get back on her fee...

Amelia Earhart was a vanguard, a woman who wore trousers, believed in equality of the sexes, and flew an airplane all at a time when women were expected to sit quietly and keep their legs hidden under a big skirt. Disappearing somewhere in the Pacific wasn't the only thing she was famous for—Amelia was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, and she held a number of other records. She was an author, an advocate for women's rights, and a champion for aspiring female pilots. It's quite possible none of those things would have been true about her had it not been for the influences of her mother. Amy Otis was a young woman of genteel society, the daughter of a well-known judge who sometimes took her on trips out west instead of going to school. They climbed Pike's Peak on one of those trips, and Amy claimed to be the first woman to make the entire climb. That's disputed, but the fact that she climbed it in 1890 when women weren't encouraged to be so adventu...

Everyone has a mother, so I'm digging into a new series about the mothers of the famous and the infamous. Let's start with the mother of Genghis Kahn, born Temujin. In the early 1100s, Hoelun was a girl from a tribe in Mongolia. During a raid led by Yesugei of a neighboring hostile tribe, the girl was captured and taken away from the tribe of her new husband. Back at camp, Hoelun was given to Yesugei as a wife. Their first child was Temujin, later to be called Genghis Kahn. Hoelun was a trooper whose sole motivation in life seemed to be self preservation. She went along with the opposing tribe, and she went along with the forced marriage, as if any marriage she would find herself in would have been anything but forced. She gave birth to five children, and she assimilated. If she had failed at any one of those tasks, she most likely would not have survived. When her oldest child was nine or twelve, depending on your source, her husband was poisoned by enemies, and his tribe, pre...