CAMARILLO : School Program Focuses on Women’s Contributions to History

She died nearly a century ago, but poet Emma Lazarus was alive in Camarillo on Monday.

Lazarus, whose poem beginning “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free . . .” was immortalized with an inscription on the Statue of Liberty, returned to Camarillo by proxy to tell schoolchildren about women in history.

Debra Creadick, a Camarillo resident and student of literature, donned a black velvet cape and long black skirt to imitate Lazarus’ look for her visit to El Rancho Structured School in Camarillo. Creadick said she found Lazarus’ poetry depicting the trials of immigrants in the 19th Century compelling. “I was very moved by her,” she said. The poem, she added, “is the essence of this country.”

Creadick, a member of the American Assn. of University Women, is one of 20 women who are presenting a program this week on the contributions of women in history to students in Camarillo and Thousand Oaks.

The program, titled “Making Women’s History Come Alive,” is in its sixth year and is intended to “bring women from history into the classroom,” Creadick said.

Born in 1849 into a family of six children, Lazarus was privately tutored in French, Italian and German, Creadick told the first- and second-graders in Ona Chin’s class. Later in life, Lazarus translated poems from French to English just to amuse herself, Creadick said.

Lazarus wrote poems and stories about the boatloads of doctors, lawyers and scientists who came to the United States looking for freedom with nothing but the clothes they wore. The French, who sent the statue to the U.S. in pieces, called it “Liberty Enlightening the World,” she said of the statue that overlooks New York Harbor. “We call it the Statue of Liberty.”

Lazarus submitted the poem to an auction held to raise money to build the statue’s base. Her verse brought the highest price. She wrote the poem three years before she died of cancer at 38 and did not live to see it inscribed on the statue.