This is an I-Heart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

And this is a topic that has been on my list since I worked on paper patterns because this person is deeply connected to the Demarest,

who we talked about at length during that, as kind of the primary forerunner of paper patterns being widely available in multiple sizes in the U.S.

So Jane Cunningham Crowley, who wrote under the pen name Jenny June, was a journalist who advocated for equality for women.

She wrote, as we'll talk about later, for the Demerist magazine.

She is most well known, though, for founding one of the earliest clubs for women in the U.S.

and kind of starting the women's clubs movement.

Jane Cunningham was born on December 19, 1829, in Market Harbor, Leicestershire, England.

Her parents, Joseph Howes, and Jane Scott Cunningham,

had three children already before Jane was born. She was smart, described as buoyant and magnetic.

Her teachers loved her, and she and her father were very close from the beginning.

According to an account written by her brother, the two of them remained close

for the rest of their father's life. When Jane was about 12 in 1841, the family moved from

England to the U.S., eventually settling in New York State. And this move seems to have been

precipitated by religious persecution.

Joseph Cunningham was a Unitarian minister when England was not particularly friendly to that denomination of Christianity. There are some accounts that say that the family home was stoned

at one point, which led Joseph and Jane to decide to move for the sake of the family's safety.

Once they had gotten to the U.S., they lived briefly in Poughkeepsie before making their way to Wappinger's Falls a little to the south.

That's still about 75 miles north of New York City.

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