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Rowena Granice Steele (1824-1901)—actress, author, newspaper publisher, suffragist, lecturer on social issues—began her career on stage at Barnum’s American Museum in New York and performed with companies around the U.S. and in Gold Rush California and the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). In 1859 she became the West Coast’s first female novelist and over the next 35 years produced more than sixty short stories and four novels. From 1862 to 1890 Rowena and her husband published the San Joaquin Valley Argus in Merced, California, for which she wrote hundreds of columns about local affairs and charitable concerns and detailing her extensive travels around the state.
Despite many heartbreaking sorrows and personal ordeals, and often in the face of intense criticism and resistance to what were then considered radical, controversial ideas, Rowena steadfastly persisted. In her productive life can be found an example of indomitable altruism and activism to inspire and encourage generations to come.
An impressively researched but occasionally overwhelming chronicle of a pioneering woman’s unconventional life.
Sharp’s biography charts the remarkable life of a 19th-century woman who defied convention to become an actress, writer, and women’s advocate.
Born in 1824 in rural Goshen, New York, Rowena Granice Steele experienced an idyllic early childhood before her family relocated to New York City. There, she received an unusually thorough education in the city’s progressive public schools. The author brings this vanished world to life, offering detailed descriptions of the rigorous but compassionate instruction in practical skills—including needlework and penmanship—designed to lead girls to self-sufficiency. When her first husband abandoned her with their two young sons, Rowena made the desperate decision to go on stage—work considered scandalous for respectable women—to support her children. Throughout her life, Rowena was always “determined to excel in every aspect of life toward which she set her path, domestic and professional”; her stage career brought both acclaim and scandal, including a defamatory newspaper attack on her character. Later, Rowena reinvented herself as a fiction writer and editor of the Weekly Merced Herald (and later of the San Joaquin Valley Argus). For nearly three decades, she chronicled life in California’s Central Valley, championed education for women, and advocated for married women working outside the home. The biography’s exhaustive details are both its greatest strength and weakness. While the wealth of primary sources—including newspaper clippings, letters, and Rowena’s own writings—creates an immersive portrait of 19th-century American life, the narrative occasionally drowns in minutiae. Lengthy reproductions of school curricula and theatrical programs, and breakdowns of tangential family genealogy, sometimes overshadow the compelling human story at the book’s center. The most engaging sections feature Rowena’s own voice relaying her vivid reminiscences. Readers seeking a comprehensive historical record will be satisfied; those hoping for psychological insight into what drove this extraordinary woman may find themselves wanting more.
An impressively researched but occasionally overwhelming chronicle of a pioneering woman’s unconventional life.
The Extraordinary Life Of A California Pioneer
There was nowhere in our country in the mid 19th Century where women had rights equal to those of men. And of all those places, there was none worse than California, a virtual boar’s den of ugly male behavior brought about by the flood of men, having left the civilizing influence of wives and family in the east to seek riches mining for gold.
Civil behavior, sobriety, kindness, and common decency were lost in the melee, especially in places like San Francisco. A young woman alone in such a corrupting environment was like gazelle surrounded by hungry lions. Many became victims of cruel misogyny, dependent on survival by accepting the brutal abuse of licentious men at a time when they were considered more like property than human beings. Married women, even those virtually abandoned by their husbands, were still under their control without economic rights or freedom.
That is exactly where Rowena Granice found herself on March 14, 1856, and where her story, as told by Priscilla Stone Sharp in volume I of her four-part book “Rowena – The Life and Collected Works of Rowena Granice Steele,” becomes most extraordinary..
An educated woman, mother of two young boys, deserted in New York City in 1853 by a husband lured away to the gold rush, and left to support herself and sons as an actress for P.T. Barnum’s American Museum and Theater on Broadway in New York, she refused to accept her fate, boarded a clipper ship in 1856 and sailed to San Francisco to find what had become of him.
Her experience working with P.T. Barnum would be enough for a colorful story, but what happened after she arrived in the Golden State could make her the heroine of an epic novel, or film, in which one of Jane Austen’s characters was thrust into a frontier setting and plot created by Jack London. Except that it is all true.
Priscilla Stone Sharp, the author, spent more than a decade of prodigious research collecting, editing and curating a huge volume of scattered, rare and obscure documents and newspaper clippings documenting Rowena’s life and how she bravely fought not only for her rights as a woman, but for all women trapped in the frontier-warped Victorian values of that time.
Sharp’s detailed descriptions and many examples of Rowena’s writing document, often in Rowena’s own words, not only how she survived, but how became a leader in the California suffrage movement, a prominent pioneer journalist and newspaper woman in gold rush boom towns, a respected actress and public speaker, and our state’s first woman novelist.
Volume I is primarily dedicated to her biography. It took three more volumes to include just a representative sample of her articles, columns, novellas and novels. By bringing them all together author Sharp has brought to life and documented one of California’s most remarkable pioneer women.
Bill Lynch, 2nd great-grandson
Publisher/editor (ret.), Sonoma Index-Tribune
Author, Mekong Belle: Love’s Impossible Choice (2023)
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