Ad campaign continues focus on Revolutionary women
Adapted from reporting by Denise Keiller
A Philadelphia savings and loan association debuted in the spring of 1976 its third ad featuring a Revolutionary woman.
Commissioned by Olney Federal Savings and Loan Association in celebration of the nation’s Bicentennial, the ad highlighted Mercy Otis Warren. She was a Revolutionary propagandist who ridiculed the British with satirical poems and plays.
“While Molly Pitcher was firing cannons at the British, Mercy Warren was firing words,” the ad said.
Ad agency Narcisso-Volz worked with a $100,000 budget to research and write the ads, which ran in community newspapers starting on July 4, 1975.
In total, the campaign featured six women: Deborah Sampson, who enlisted in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment under the name Robert Shurtleff; Margaret Dreier Robins, who battled for women’s rights in the labor movement of the 1900s; Warren; Margaret Cochran Corbin, who was wounded in the Battle of Fort Washington; Jane McCrea, whose slaying by Native American allies of the British inspired colonists at the Battle of Saratoga; and Lydia Barrington Darragh, a nurse who conveyed British battle information to George Washington.
U.S. poised to deport immigrants who persecuted gays under Nazis
Adapted from reporting by PGN staff
At the urging of the Gay Activists Alliance, a U.S. representative from Brooklyn agreed to add persecution based on sexual orientation to a bill she authored proposing the deportation of immigrants found to have persecuted others during the Nazi period.
U.S. Rep. Elizabeth R. Holtzman, a Democrat, authored the bill that called for deportation of immigrants who had persecuted people because of race, religion, national origin or sexual orientation.
Holtzman responded to a January 1976 letter from Gay Activists Alliance President David Thorstad by saying she would add persecution based on sexual orientation as a basis for action by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
“It is now becoming increasingly understood that homosexuals were among the most persecuted of all groups under the Nazis,” Thorstad wrote in the letter. “As early as 1933, thousands were rounded up and herded into concentration camps. Indeed, the ‘final solution’ to the Jews was first carried out against homosexuals.” n
