Hoarding

I am not really a hoarder. I just think that some day I might need my third grade report card or my sports letters. And the electric football, baseball, basketball games are collectors' items just like my Lionel Electric Train. Certainly I need all those greeting cards I've received over the years. It will remind who to remember when I win the lottery. My Dodger coffee mugs from every year they won the championship? They have to be worth as much as the year books from those years which I also have.

My take on it is that I am not a hoarder because I don't collect things. I'm just a loyal dude that doesn't like to throw things out. How about you? Do you hoard? Do you or your spouse keep things long past their useful life? Do you classify yourself as a hoarder? According to the following article if you hoard it could be dangerous or harmful. Do you agree?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20100426/us_time/08599198444400

Today's Who Am I features another woman in history. Email answers to either billdahn@aol.con or williamjdahn@aol.com

I was born in Wisconsin in 1859 and died in New York in 1947, I was the second of three children born to Lucius and Maria. I attended elementary education in a one-room schoolhouse. In 1877, I graduated from high school. My father refused to provide the money for more education so I taught school for a year, earning enough income to enter a State Agricultural College. I supported myself working in the state library and the college kitchen. I graduated in 1880 – the only woman among 18 graduates. I aspired to become a lawyer so I began reading law in an attorney’s office. The next year, I began teaching high school with the intent of earning enough money to study law at the university. However, I found I enjoyed teaching so much that I gave up the idea of becoming a lawyer. Less than two years later, I was appointed principal and superintendent of schools.

When I was 13 years old, I asked why my mother was not getting dressed up to go to town to vote like my father. My sincere question was met with laughter and the reason that voting was too important a civic duty to leave to women. On February 12 1885, I married Leo, an editor of the local newspaper and resigned from teaching (as married women were not allowed to teach). I became his business partner, writing a “Woman’s World” column but not about food or fashion, rather about women’s political and labor issues, and reminding women that if they wanted the vote, they needed to organize. Leo harshly criticized a local Republican candidate in the paper and was sued for libel forcing him to sell the newspaper. He went to San Francisco to find work where he caught typhoid fever. I received a telegram about him and left immediately by train, but he died before I arrived. I was a 27 year-old widow left with no house or financial resources. I decided to stay in San Francisco, finding work as a freelance journalist. I was barely making ends meet when one evening a male associate grabbed me and began kissing me. I managed to break away, but the assault left me feeling frightened and outraged and determined to do something about the vulnerability of working women. I become a public lecturer. After hiring an agent in 1887, I returned to the Midwest and began my work for suffrage. I joined the state branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, becoming head of its suffrage section. As that local group began breaking apart, I began organizing women and creating suffrage clubs. In 1889, I was elected secretary of the state Woman Suffrage Association and the next year a delegate and minor speaker at the convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in Washington, D.C. On June 10, 1890 I remarried in Seattle, Washington. I replaced Susan B. Anthony as a president of a suffrage organization in 1900. I am known for the famous quote: “The world taught women nothing skillful and then said her work was valueless. It permitted her no opinions and said she did not know how to think. It forbade her to speak in public and said the sex had no orators. It denied her the schools, and said the sex had no genius. It robbed her of every vestige of responsibility, and then called her weak. It taught her that every pleasure must come as a favor from men and when, to gain it, she decked herself in paint and fine feathers, as she had been taught to do, it called her vain.” In 1918 I established a famous league that still is a force in U.S. politics. In 1933 I helped establish the Protest Committee of Non-Jewish Women Against the Persecution of Jews in Germany. We obtained thousands of signatures to a letter protesting the crimes against the Jews. I lobbied Congress to amend the U.S. immigration laws to help Jews and other refugees escape. That same year, honoring my work, I received the American Hebrew Medal – the first woman to do so. Who Am I?