Category Archives: The Trailblazer

Each issue we pay tribute to a remarkable woman who blazed the trail in her given field, opening doors for other inspirational women to follow.

Emily Dickinson – Poetry of a Homebody

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Words by Laura Zolman Kirk
Imagery provided by Amherst College Special Collections

Many of us were introduced to Emily Dickinson during high school English class, finding her work elusive and over our heads. Yet, behind the oddly-placed dashes and lines that make our minds zing, there is a woman who―aside from sharing her complex thoughts in verse—doesn’t differ much from many of us trying to blaze a trail of our own.

Visit the Dickinson homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts on a late winter afternoon and you can watch the sun set from Emily’s bedroom window, just as she would have seen it working from home and just as she described it, likely from that very spot:

“Soft as the massacre of Suns/ By Evening’s sabres slain” (Fr1146).

Well, maybe not all of us would describe a New England sunset quite like Emily Dickinson did, but there is something alluring about experiencing her home-based muses as a modern-day visitor.

It makes her more real. Her poetics are often so difficult to grasp, intentionally construed so only those who work at her words enjoy them. However, looking out to see the same sights as she once did somehow makes her words more tangible.

At her core, Emily Dickinson was simply a woman who worked from home. She was distracted by dirty dishes, scribbled down lines while baking bread, and sent her poems directly to her readers through letters.

To read more about Emily Dickinson, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Marian Anderson: Ambassadress for All

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Words by Lanie Anderson
Imagery provided by University of Pennsylvania Special Collections

We. The word can have powerful implications depending on its context, and so it did on April 9, 1939, when contralto Marian Anderson sang her own rendition of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

When Anderson arrived at the third line of the familiar song, she belted “to thee we sing” rather than the original lyric, “of thee I sing.” The audience—a sea of tens of thousands that stretched from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument—might have considered the lyrics a misstep in her performance, but Anderson’s alteration was purposeful.

To read more about Marian Anderson, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Ada: Enchantress of Numbers

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Words by Dayna Brownfield
Artwork by Ann Shen

Walking down the rows of laptops, tablets and iPods at my local big-box electronics store, I am amazed at the tiny devices’ power and ingenuity. I grew up with computer-integrated classrooms and heard stories from my grandfather who, in the 60s and 70s, held meetings with his boss about “these new computer contraptions that can calculate large equations for the company.”

What you may not realize is that the creation of the computer began long before the twentieth century. In 1834, Ada Lovelace, a 19-year-old Englishwoman, took some of the first steps towards developing the fundamentals of modern computer programming.

To read more about Ada Lovelace, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Imogen Cunningham

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Words by Pamela Sutton & Laura Zolman
Photography by Imogen Cunningham

“So many people dislike themselves so thoroughly that they never see any reproduction of themselves that suits. None of us is born with the right face. It’s a tough job being a portrait photographer.” – Imogen Cunningham

The turn of the 20th century in America was not quite ready to embrace working mothers, let alone an avante-garde photographer. Yet over the span of a 70-year career, Imogen Cunningham, with her artistic talent and willful independence, overcame the obstacles of a steeply patriarchal society, a male-dominated photography industry, and the critics of her day. Known for her botanical, nude and portrait photography, she became one of the finest and most sought after photographers in American history.

To read more of this article, subscribe to CAKE&WHISKEY magazine or purchase the single issue here.

Trailblazer: Edith Flagg

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Words by Kaelan Hollon
Imagery courtesy of Josh Flagg

I succumbed to the purchase, like the millions who came before me, the second I saw Edith Flagg’s sweet, small dress. In a pink that flamingos merely aspire to, it flirted hazily with memories of bygone stewardesses of the Pan Am era. A clean Peter Pan collar and clipped A-line shape sealed the deal; the Pepto-hued Crimplene© promised universal flattery, ease of care, a jaunty excursion into iron-free vintage clothing.  Edith Flagg had done it again.

The well-cut polyester shift dress remains an impeccable symbol of the feisty genius of Mrs. Flagg, a Romanian-born WWII survivor and Dutch Resistance fighter whose business savvy and work ethic paid by amassing a quiet fortune, thanks to her role as the first importer of polyester in the US.  When Flagg arrived in the US in 1948, the slight woman brought with her a husband and young son and but a scant few dollars in her pocket. After working her way through the design industry as a seamstress, the Flaggs quickly pooled a $2,000 investment and Edith began designing dresses locally in Los Angeles. Not long after she saw the investment potential of a material used mostly for British parachutes in WWII, she had transformed her small family-run storefront in downtown Los Angeles into an international design house with offices in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Cleveland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Charlotte and London, and a factory in Hong Kong.

Early media coverage heralded Flagg’s keen eye for polyester fabric as a quasi-feminist fashion opportunity for women of the 1960s.  An affordable, iron-less, dirt-disguising, easy-care fabric meant ladylike shifts could be had by all, and sales. One of the first major media stories of Flagg’s fashion line, “Clotheshorse in the Jet Age,” in the Los Angeles Times, lauded Crimplene© as a “miracle fabric,” a veritable housewife’s assistant, whose easy upkeep and care provided more fashionable travel bags. The Times’ models flaunted across the page riding horses, leaping across ship decks and hanging adroitly from moving cars, a testament to their Crimplene’s mod new standards.

While her business acumen as an importer and designer won her fortune, it is Flagg’s rich history and feisty personality that won her legion fans. Born into a well-to-do family in Romania and educated in fashion design at a school in Vienna, Flagg left her schooling when the Nazis invaded Austria, to work on a Dutch farm. Presumed to be safe from the war, the German invasion of Holland surprised many and forced Flagg into hiding, where she joined the Dutch Underground. The nineteen-year-old spoke such fluent German (as well as six other languages) she capably survived the Holocaust by assuming the identity of a deceased woman and hiding in plain sight.

“My experiences in Holland did not change me as a human being. I was born the way I am today.… It was what it was, though, and I could not let it get me down,” Flagg explains to C&W of her experiences. “I just had to pick myself back up again.”

That tirelessness served her well. Once the war ended, Flagg made her way to New York City and later Los Angeles in 1948, working as a seamstress for 35 cents an hour, and carefully honing her business chops.

Flagg finagled her way into ever-higher salaries by working her way through every aspect of the garment industry. She moved from the seamstress position to costume designer, amid sundry other retail and design jobs, then headed to LA for work in the garment district where she hit her stride.  As only the most talented sharks know how, she kept her head on a swivel while moving up the industry ladder, all while squirreling away savings to start business on her own. By 1956, she was ready.

Flagg saw innovation before others did and pounced, thanks in part to her working knowledge of the nooks and crannies involved in business from the ground up.  Her knowledge of seven languages was a boon during European trade shows, and those connections combined with a keen eye served her well in honing the latest design technology into Middle American fantasy. She was better than smart; she was ingenious. Double-knit woolens, early pantsuits, the first polyester to hit the American streets; Edith Flagg perceived what American women needed before they needed it, and, in turn, the dead presidents just rolled in.

At 93, Flagg remains insouciantly feisty and incomparably confident. She explains her business savvy with impeccable self-assurance.  “You have to be in the right place at the right time,” Flagg told Cake & Whiskey. “Never think you are anything less than the best at your trade. [If] you believe in yourself, so will others.”