Greek-American Pioneer Women of Illinois: Greek meets women's history

Greek American Pioneer Women of Illinois: Greek History Meets…

March 28, 2021
by irene Archos

As March nears its end, it signals the end of both Greek History month and Women’s History
month. What a better way to see it off with a review of a non-fiction book that combines both
themes. Greek American Pioneer Women of Illinois is a short text that highlights the
achievements of five Greek American women: Georgia Bitzis Pooley, Presbytera Stella
Christoulakis Petrakis, Theano Papazoglou Margaris, Venette Askounes Ashford and Senator
Adeline J. Geo-Karis.

This text would not have come about if not for the energies of the organization that brought
these women to light: the Greek Women’s University Club. Two decades ago, this organization
was able to secure a grant to bring to the public eye the lives of these pioneering women in a
photo exhibit that ran for several weeks in the State Building of Illinois. The curators of the
photo exhibit Penny Sarlas and Elaine Cotsirilos Thomopoulos were able to provide pain-staking
research to uncover these pioneering women. What the book achieves is to expand the icon of
“pioneer” to include not just bearded men in covered wagons steering west, but images of
immigrant women who arrived from rural villages in Greece and carved a new identity for
themselves; women who would go on to become educated, community organizers, and influential achievers in their own right.

As Dr Thomopoulos writes in the Introduction, “These five, who settled in Illinois, exemplify the
early immigrant pioneer women who struggled to make a better way of life in the New World
and who blazed a trail for those who followed . . . The five women featured in this book
redefined the role of women in the Greek community. They ventured outside of the traditional
boundaries of nikokeeres, or housewives. Not just supporters or helpers of the men, they
played major roles on their own, in some cases despite family and community opposition.”
The book, which features captivating historical archival photos, was so very enlightening. While
I won’t give too much away, here is a brief bio of the five pioneering women featured:

Georgia Bitzis Pooley (1849-1945)

From the Chicago Hearld-American April 1941. Its caption reads “First Greek woman to enter the US as an immigrant, Mrs. Georgia Pooley, 82, of 2046 Berteau Avenue enlists as volunteer worker in the Greek War Relief Association’s campaign to raise $10,000,000 for war sufferers in her native land.” Although the photo says she is 82, her correct age would have been 92 when this photo was taken.

Georgia Pooley with her husband Peter, shortly after her arrival from Corfu, Greece in 1885

Georgia Bitzis Pooley was the first known Greek woman to immigrate to Chicago shortly after
1885. She organized the Greek community especially after witnessing the appalling conditions
young immigrant men had to endure in the city. She was responsible for establishing the first
house of worship and initiating the first Pan-Orthodox voluntary society in Chicago. A founding
member of the Philoptochos Society at Hull House, she also organized the first Greek school in
Chicago (even though she was never given credit for it due to stereotypical views of women) as
well as the Hellenic League for the Molding of Young Men in 1910. During WW2, she raised
close to $100,000 of funds to help the war effort in Greece as a volunteer for the Greek War
Relief Association. She did all this while raising seven children, the last one she birthed at 50!

Presbytera Stella Christoulakis Petrakis (1888-1979)

In St Louis, MO, in 1920, Presbytera Petrakis organized the Greek Ladies’ Benevolent Society (Elpis). It is still in existence at St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church.

The young women of the Nea Genea display a flag they sewed denoting parish members in service during WW2.

Attorney Dimitri Parry, Secretary of the Greek War Relief Association, congratulates Presbytera Petrakis for her assistance with war effort

Presbytera Petrakis volunteered for the Red Cross for over 60 years and organized units not only in Chicago but round the country.

Red Cross groups from in front of the AHEPA Sanitorium in Alberquerque, New Mexico.

The ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinopole spoke of Presbytera Stella’s career as
“a unique act of selfish love.” Married to her husband Rev Mark E Petrakis a week before he
was to enter the priesthood in Chania, Crete, she accompanied him to the US when in 1916 the
young Greek Orthodox community of Carbon County, Utah, a mining district, requested the
appointment of Father Mark to their parish. (Their son was to become the famous Greek-
American writer Harry Mark Petrakis.) In 1923 Presbytera organized the St Helen’s Benevolent
Soceity at SS. Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church in Chicago. As president, she
accomplished so many charitable and philanthropic works they are too long to mention. Some
notable examples include: selling war bonds to help soldiers during the war, founding Elpis, a
woman’s cultural society as well as Amalthia, a Cretan Ladies’ Fraternity, distributing free
textbooks, lunches and tuition for poor children, volunteering for the Red Cross for over 60
years. She actually received the Immigrants’ Service League’s Distinguished Achievement Award
for her service. Presbytera loved drama and staged many plays including The Dance of
Zalloggou (based on the famous episode of the women of Zalloggou who danced to their death
over the side of a cliff rather than face enslavement by the Turks). In New Mexico, she helped
the efforts to fund the AHEPA Sanitorium. Too many achievements to list: you must read the
book.

Theano Papazoglou Margaris (1906-1991)

Press badges for the Greek Press in Chicago and Krikos in London

Not only a journalist, Theano was a talented actress and director of many Greek-themed plays and performances. Here she is headlining in The Outer Door at the Chicago Woman’s Club in the 1930s

A feminist, a single mother, labor organizer, Theano is shown here in an excursion to San Francisco where she lived for a time and became interested in the plight of Greek waiters. She wrote a short story describing the efforts of waiters to unionize in her book, A Tear for Barba Jimmy.

Theano was a renowned author and journalist. Twice made a refugee, once as an orphan of 8,
and again when orphaned when her grandparents died and she had to come to Athens as part
of the exchange of populations from Asia Minor. She came to NY at 17 and got to work at the
Nabisco factory. Her first published piece appeared in The Voice of the Worker when she was
18. Most of her early writing had a left-leaning bent as she was a staunch supporter of the
worker’s movement. Fierceless and self-determined, she divorced her first husband during the
nadir of the Great Depression and raised a daughter by herself. Throughout her writing career,
she documented the stories of immigrant Greeks in America and became a journalist for more
than one Greek newspaper of the time, including Embros , Vemos, and The National Herald
(The Ethnikos Kyrx) where she penned her own column. She garnered a reputation both in Greece and in America as a bilingual writer.

The highlights of her career included a series of in-depth articles about
Constantinopole. She won the Greek National Award in Literature for her book Chronicle of
Halsted Street in 1963, the first Diaspora Greek to be so honored. The book included her most
powerful and moving stories, the struggles and heartbreak, the aspirations and
disappointments of the Greeks of America with a writing style uniquely hers and identified as
“Theano.” Even though she became an agnostic and did not take part in the Church,
Archbishop Iakovos and Patriarch Athenagoras gave her the honor of “Archondissa” of the
Ecumenical Throne.

Venette Askounes Ashford

Vanette Askounes appears with Adlai Stevenson at one of the many annual fund raisers of the Greek Committee to Aid the Immigrants’ Protective League in Chicago.

An example of the sponsorships Venette Askoures was responsible for: a family of 8 shortly after their arrival to the US in the 1950s. From 1924 until after WW2, immigration from Greece nearly ceased. After WW2 in the 1950s under the Displaced Persons Act, Greek immigrants from war-torn Greece started coming again. Askounes and her husband were personally responsible for sponsoring hundreds of Greek immigrants to the US

Venette Askounes social worker for the Immigrants’ Protective League leaves Athens with approximately 50 orphans on June 11, 1952. The orphans ranged in age from babies to teens. In Greece a child was deemed an orphan even if one parent was living.

Venette ASkounes Ashford was a social worker, teacher, and community leader. Because of the
extensive social and education work she did among the Greek immigrants of Chicago, she was
known as the “Jane Addams of the Greeks.” When many of her peers were either illiterate or
barely graduates of high schools, Venette attended Wheaton College eventually graduating
from De Paul University. She worked in Hull House as a protégé of Jane Adams. In fact, the two
had a close professional and personal relationship. In 1932, Venette began her 30-year tenure
with the Immigrants’ Protective League in Chicago, the organization founded by Jane Adams
and directed by Eleanor Roosevelt. During the time with strict immigration quotas for
immigrants from Southern Europe, Venette was instrumental in bringing over 5000 Greeks to
the US, even personally sponsoring them. A sympathetic immigration official in Chicago once
remarked that he had never met a person who had sponsored so many people. Indeed, she not
only brought immigrants over, she helped acclimate them to the workings of a new society by
contracting jobs and homes for them. She even brought over 50 orphans to the US as a social
worker for the IPL. She was likely the first Greek professional social worker in Illinois and
perhaps the nation.

State Senator Adeline J. Geo-Karis (1918–

Senator Geo-Karis has served in the Illinois State Legislature since 1972, first as a state representative and then as state senator. She has been assistant majority leader of the senate since 1992.

Governor James Thompson swears in Senator Geo-Karis as mayor of Zion in 1987. She served until 1991

Senator Geo-Karis served in the US Navy where she started as an apprentice seaman and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander with top secret clearance. She was one of the first female lawyers in the Navy’s Judge Advocate Corps.

Adeline Geo-Karis arrived in the US in 1922 on the 4 th of July. Initially she did not like the
constricted urban environment of NYC she beheld from the deck of the ship that sailed into Ellis
Island when compared with the green open countryside of her native Greece.

With time she grew to adapt, esp after her family moved to Chicago. She showed her
proclivity for politics early on as an elected student representative in high school. She
eventually graduated from Theodor Herzl Junior College and then De Paul University Law
School. She graduated the only woman in her law class of 120. In fact, Geo-Karis was the
second Greek woman to become a lawyer in the state of Illinois. (The first was Koula Butler).
If trailblazing as a female lawyer was not enough, in 1942 she enlisted in the Navy. She was one
of the first female lawyers in the Navy’s Judge Advocate Corps. She eventually settled in Zion
where she ran a successful law practice and became the town’s mayor in 1987. In 1949 she was
elected justice of the peace and then assistant state attorney.

In 1972 she was elected to the
Illinois House of Representatives going on to the Illinois Senate in 1978 where she continued to
serve until her retirement. She was one of the founding members of the Greek Women’s
University Club. She has held many civic positions of note, including president of her chapter of
the Daughters of Penelope of AHEPA where she organized a successful drive to enable military
personnel to have the Greek Orthodox religion recorded on their dog tags.

In an interview she gave to the GWUC, she states, “If I have been successful in life I owe it to
the great values instilled in me by my parents, to God’s many blessings, and to the
opportunities that this great country of America made available to me.”

A Note About the Editors of the Book: The GREEK WOMEN’S UNIVERSITY CLUB

Did you know this organization has been around since 1931? It was established by a group of
seven women of Greek descent to promote education and encourage the arts, literature and
sciences? It sponsors an annual music competition for men and women of Hellenic descent at
the Chicago Cultural Center and it has distributed over $100,000 in scholarship money. During
its long history, it has supported many philanthropic causes including: providing equipment to
the science labs of the University of Athens after WW2 sponsoring needy children in Greece,
contributing to the Cooley’s Anemia Research, Modern Greek Studies Program at the University
of Illinois in Chicago, the Greek -American Nursing Home Committee, among others.

Surprisingly, this book, Greek-American Pioneer Women of Illinois, has been in print since 2000,

but it is only recently that it has surfaced. It
is about time academia, society, and the Greek-American community as a whole started taking
scholarship of women’s history, especially Hellenic women’s history, seriously. Who knows
how many other pioneer influential Greek women of the Diaspora are buried under the dust in
some manuscript library waiting to be resurrected into the heroines they are? So many times,
history, written from a male lens, overlooks the achievements of women. Much like the rising
interest in women artists in the traditionally male art world, a similar revisioning is happening in
history.

To get your copy, go to Amazon or directly to the publishers, www.arcadiapublishing.com.
While you are there, why not donate to female-run organizations such as the Greek Women’s
University Club or even Greek American Girl through Amazon’s Smile Club.