“Remarkable Women of Clinton County,” Anastasia L. Pratt, Charleston, South Carolina: The History Press, 2015.

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What is remarkable about the women of Clinton County, and indeed women throughout the history of recorded history, is that they remain largely unremarked upon.

Oh, we know a few famous ones from across time and even in Clinton County – actress Jean Arthur, local philanthropist Alice T. Miner whose family’s name is associated with many entities in the county. But the lives of ordinary women, largely unremarkable lives in many ways, are what has built the framework for the present and what continues to prepare society for the future.

Identifying this dearth of the stories that make up history, historian Anastasia Pratt undertook research into the lives of the women of Clinton County. Significantly, it was only in death that many women were revealed: Newspaper obituaries were a prime source of material for this book.

The book is chock-a-block with lists of names of women involved in organizations past and present, and snippets of lives glimpsed, such that I longed for a more studied approach to a handful of women who might exemplify the lives of others. Still, we see life – and hard work – in all its forms:

Nettie Senecal’s 1900s were filled with making soap that was then used to clean the clothes that she had made from the wool from the sheep she had tended and shorn, clothes that would then inevitably be muddied by her farm life of cows, sheep, potatoes and the making of soap.

Dorothy Bourne Booth’s life in the 1960s through 1990s was a roll call of civic organizations organized, chaired and served on for the benefit of youth, women, mental health services, economic development and housing, among other concerns, concerns that summarize the lives and struggles of many other county residents.

Rum runners make up the history of Clinton County women as well as the first female customs agent, employed to divest the rum runners from the bottles hidden in their bosoms.

And madams make up the history, as well as teachers and nurses and factory workers.

Not all firsts are laudable: Clinton County produced the first woman to be executed in the state, accused of killing her child.

Inevitably, some women became remarkable in lives lived after they left Clinton County. Lucy Hobbs Taylor, born in Ellenburg in 1833, moved to Michigan, working as a seamstress, then teacher, until she convinced a dentist to train her and then became the first woman to graduate as a doctor of dental surgery from an accredited dental college.

And sometimes decisions made in Clinton County brought women in to be firsts: Temple Beth Israel in Plattsburgh hired a female rabbi in 1990, Rabbi Carla Freedman, still at that time a controversial decision in the faith.

The women of Clinton County lived traditional lives, and nontraditional lives – raising children, serving in the military, owning businesses, tending the sick and dying, making art, manufacturing lollipop sticks, delivering the mail. And let’s not forget the Plattsburgh State Cardinals women’s hockey team, three-time NCAA champions.

Poignantly, Pratt reports there were many women whose lives were remarked upon in archival records but whose names were never given. There is a power in naming, and this book gives back to history the names of the ordinary women of the county, living their rich and varied lives, building the world.