AAUW Women’s History Month – March 2023

1 It’s women’s history month! Today we recognize Katharine Wright Haskell, the younger sister of famed airplane inventors Wilbur and Orville Wright. Unlike her brothers, Katharine finished college, graduating with a degree from Oberlin in 1898. After graduation, she secured a teaching position at Steele High School in Dayton, where she taught Latin.

Katharine ran the Wright family’s household and managed the Wright Cycle Company while Orville and Wilbur worked to perfect their flying machine. After the brothers’ first successful flight in 1903, she left her teaching position to assist them.

Katharine managed the business from behind the scenes. She responded to reporter inquiries, answered questions from the public about the science of their invention and handled Orville and Wilbur’s social calendar. Katherine became a celebrity in her own right.

Always a tight-knit family, Katharine was by Orville’s side while he recuperated from a crash in 1908 and helped nurse him back to health. She traveled with her brothers all over the world to showcase their airplane and regularly accompanied her brothers in the air—her flights helped bolster public confidence in the new invention.

After Wilbur died in 1912, she became an officer at the Wright Airplane Company. She continued to travel the world, actively fighting for women’s suffrage, and dedicated time and financial support to Oberlin College. Katharine died in 1929.

#ohiohistory #WomensHistoryMonth #SmithsonianWHM

2 Jacqueline Cochran (May 11, 1906 – August 9, 1980) was an American pilot and business executive. She pioneered women’s aviation as one of the most prominent racing pilots of her generation. She set numerous records and was the first woman to break the sound barrier on 18 May 1953. Cochran (along with Nancy Love) was the wartime head of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) (1943–1944), which employed about 1000 civilian American women in a non-combat role to ferry planes from factories to port cities. Cochran was later a sponsor of the Mercury 13 women astronaut program.

Known by her friends as “Jackie”, and maintaining the Cochran name, she was one of three women to compete in the MacRobertson Air Race in 1934.^[1] In 1937, she was the only woman to compete in the Bendix race and worked with Amelia Earhart to open the race to women. That year, she also set a new women’s world speed record.^[10] By 1938, she was considered the best female pilot in the United States. She had won the Bendix and set a new transcontinental speed record as well as altitude records.^[9] Cochran was the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic. She won five Harmon Trophies. Sometimes called the “Speed Queen”, at the time of her death, no other pilot held more speed, distance, or altitude records in aviation history than Cochran.^[11]^[12]

3 A recent timeline for women in the US Military:

1967–Lyndon Johnson signed Public Law 90-130, allowing women to be promoted to general and flag ranks, and removing the restriction for 2% women on active duty.

1976—Women are finally admitted to military academies.

1993—Women are eligible for combat aviation jobs.

1993—Rescinds “Risk Rule;” women can engage in risky activities

2013—Women are eligible to serve in frontline combatant and complete combat operations

4 Dr. MARY Ellen Walker, a surgeon in the Civil War is the only woman to have ever received the nation’s highest award. She was an American abolitionist, prohibitionist, prisoner of war and surgeon. She is the only woman to ever receive the Medal of Honor. In 1855, she earned her medical degree at Syracuse Medical College in New York, married and went into private practice, but then the Civil War broke out in 1861. She wanted to join the Army as a surgeon but wasn’t allowed because she was a woman. She didn’t want to be a nurse, either, so she chose to volunteer for the Union Army. Walker worked for free at the temporary hospital set up at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. She also organized the Women’s Relief Organization to help the families of the wounded who came to visit them at local hospitals.

In 1862, Walker moved on to Virginia, this time treating the wounded at field hospitals throughout the state. In 1863, her medical credentials were finally accepted, so she moved to Tennessee, where she was appointed as a War Department surgeon. Her position was paid, and it was the equivalent of a lieutenant or captain. Walker was captured in April 1864 by the South and held as a prisoner of war for about four months. She and other Union doctors were eventually exchanged in a prisoner-of-war swapfor Confederate medical officers. Aside from her wartime efforts, Walker was also an outspoken advocate for women’s rights.

President Andrew Johnson awarded her the medal in 1865. It was rescinded because she was not in the military (women couldn’t be) but was restored by President Jimmy Carter 1977.

5 Maggie Lena Walker was the first African American woman in the U.S. to found a bank. Walker was born in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of a former slave. Walker spent her life working for civil rights and other humanitarian causes, including co-founding the NAACP’s Richmond branch.

Walker graduated in 1883 and worked as a teacher until she married Armstead Walker, Jr., a brick contractor, in 1886. After leaving her teaching job, Walker became active in the Independent Order of St. Luke (IOSL), an organization dedicated to the social and financial advancement of African Americans. In 1899, Walker became the organization’s grand secretary and held that position throughout her life. During her tenure, she founded a newspaper and opened a highly successful bank and department store. Walker opened the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank in 1903 and remained its president until 1929. She not only managed to keep her bank alive during the Great Depression but merged with two other banks to form the Consolidated Bank and Trust Company. The bank prospered as the oldest continually African American-operated bank in the United States until 2009.

Through her leadership of the IOSL and the St. Luke Bank president, Walker became one of the most influential women in the banking industry. When many black women faced employment challenges and low wages, she proved that black women could play an essential role in the business world.

Maggie Walker died in 1934 at the age of 70. Her home on East Leigh Street in Richmond was purchased in 1979 by the National Park Service and became a National Historic Site.

6 One cold bright morning last November, a small crowd from across the country and around the world gathered on a quiet downtown neighborhood corner to celebrate the life one of our greatest community leaders.

Most Vancouver and Clark County residents have never heard of this person, but they will hear of her now, because her name is on a large sign welcoming them to a sparkling new city project built in her honor: Ida Bell Jones Park.

Most municipal projects of this kind — parks, statues, benches, plaques — are meant to memorialize public figures who were well known for what they accomplished in their lifetime. Ida Jones certainly fits this description, but in two important ways she breaks the standard mold: she was female, and she was Black.

Ida Jones was never well known beyond Vancouver’s Black community, which she helped launch in the turbulent 1940s and stood up for throughout her long life, but among these people she is legendary.

Ida Bell Anderson was born August 2, 1908, on an Arkansas farm. Her grandparents had endured slavery in South Carolina, but when the first National Colored Farmers Club and Cooperative Union was starting up in Arkansas after the Emancipation Proclamation and before Jim Crow, they were able to marry and stay together, building a solid family operation of a kind now seeing its latest resurgence among American Black farmers.

Oliver Jones and Ida Bell Anderson were married in 1924. They followed his railroad work around Oklahoma, crossing into Kansas around the time Henry J. Kaiser issued his call for shipyard workers in Vancouver and Portland. By then they had four children: Lola, Helen, Betty Jean and John Paul.

“My husband came out here in 1942,” Ida told me when we first met, not long after her 100th birthday celebration at Vancouver’s Inn at the Quay. “Then I came out to visit.”

At first she balked at leaving familiar territory, but when the children’s school year ended she brought the family out West to stay.

At her birthday party she welcomed the joyous acclaim, but later she talked as if she’d done nothing special. She worked as a shipyard welder; Oliver landed a steady railroad job.

On Aug. 15, 1945, their workday had just begun when the loudspeakers said it was V-J Day. The shipyard was already shutting down — V-E Day had set the stage back in May — and the jobs were going away, especially for Black workers. Returning soldiers took priority, and the entrenched citizenry of Vancouver generally expected their all-white town to go back to the way it was.

Great swaths of wartime housing projects, too, were going away. Three more children were born, all boys, while the family moved from one disappearing neighborhood to the next while looking to buy a home.

“We wondered what we were gonna do,” Ida said. “A lot of people went to Portland. Some of my friends went back home, but we kinda liked it here – it was quiet. My husband had a job. We decided we’d stay in Vancouver.”

Sticking to that decision was not easy. “We had a hard time trying to find a place,” she said. “We didn’t realize the prejudice until we were turned away from a lot of houses because of our color — but I was brave enough to say I’m not moving to Portland. I’m a citizen of Vancouver now. I worked hard here, we all did, and I’m not leaving. I was a very determined person. We went down to the courthouse — that’s everybody’s home. I wouldn’t let ’em push me out.”

That unflinching model of positive toughness became her legacy. People found courage in knowing what their ancestors had been through. Now they found courage in knowing Ida Jones. She was never a public figure, but people respected her. She was uneducated, except by experience. She worked 18 years as a hospital nurse’s aide — “not school exactly,” she said knowingly, “just an aide” — and then, long since widowed, she did her day work, mostly cleaning houses, until she was 90.

We thought the book would make a difference in the way people were treated. We thought other stories would be told, and our project would be ongoing — but 10 years passed, and none of this happened.

Then last November, I [Jane Elder Wulff, author of “First Families”] got a call from the Vancouver City Parks department (now Parks, Recreation and Cultural Services) inviting me to the upcoming dedication of a city park, the second in a new model project to inform the public of previously unrecognized life stories. The department had chosen to name this one for Ida Bell Jones but had found no information about her life except in the “First Families” book.

Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle would speak for the city. Superior Court Judge Camara Jones Banfield would share memories of her grandmother. I was there to read my tribute to Ida Bell Jones, written when she died in 2018 at age 108.

Half the crowd was related to her, some from other lands, many from other states. The ribbon-cutting released us into a joyful family reunion full of friends and well-wishers. For a shining hour we saw the American dream. Thanks to the courage we found in one another that morning, and with public infrastructure lending a hand, we might see it happen yet.

7 Margaret E. Knight, American Inventor Born Feb. 14, 1838, York, Maine—died Oct. 12, 1914, Framingham, Mass.

Prolific American inventor of machines and mechanisms for a variety of industrial and everyday purposes.

Knight demonstrated a knack for tools and invention from an early age, and she was said to have contrived a safety device for controlling shuttles in powered textile looms when she was 12 years old. In 1868, at which time she was living in Springfield, Massachusetts, she invented an attachment for paper-bag-folding machines that allowed the production of square-bottomed bags. She founded the Eastern Paper Bag Company in 1870.

After working to improve her invention in Boston, she patented it in 1870. She later received patents for a dress and skirt shield (1883), a clasp for robes (1884), and a cooking spit (1885). Later still she received six patents over a span of years for machines used in the manufacturing of shoes.

Other of Knight’s inventions included a numbering machine and a window frame and sash, both patented in 1894, and several devices relating to rotary engines, patented between 1902 and 1915. Although she was not the first woman to receive a patent, she was one of the most productive of female inventors, having some 27 patents to her credit. She failed to profit much from her work, however. She sold her various inventions to companies and lived on royalties and patent sales. When Knight died she was honored in a local obituary as a “woman Edison.” She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006.

Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia

8 INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY—today, March 8

International Women’s Day is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women’s equality.

International Women’s Day has occurred for well over a century, with the firs IWD gathering in 1911 supported by over a million people. Today, IWD belongs to all groups collectively everywhere. IWD is not country, group, or organization specific.

IWD’s theme for 2023 is #EmbraceEquity. The aim of Embrace Equity is to get the world talking about Why equal opportunities aren’t enough.

For the United Nations the theme is DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality highlighting gender gaps in STEM education and careers—and calling attention to the online harassment many women face.

For more info see https://www.internationalwomensday.com

9 Mary Anderson 1866-1953 – Inventor of Windshield Wipers

Mary was born on an Alabama plantation during Reconstruction, just after the Civil War. She moved to Birmingham, Alabama, and became a real estate developer. She lived in Fresno, California for 5 years to operate a cattle ranch and vineyard. She was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2011.

In 1903, Mary visited New York City in the winter, and she jumped aboard a trolley car. According to many of the articles I read, she became slightly annoyed at how often the driver had to stop and clear the windshield on that frosty day. A driver had to stop the vehicle to clean the windshield with his sleeve or a rag, stick his head out to see, or even get out and clean the windshield off.

Mary developed a spring-loaded lever with a rubber blade that the driver could operate from inside the trolley car. She patented the device in 1903 before cars were became really popular. Car makers didn’t see the money return on this invention. There weren’t enough cars yet and it was deemed too dangerous to operate a hand lever to clean the windshield while driving. She had a 17 year patent.

By 1922, after Mary’s patent expired, Cadillac was the first car manufacturer to adopt windshield wipers as standard equipment.

10 Tony Morrison 1931-2019

Writer, editor, scholar and mentor Toni Morrison is on a forever stamp now. The tribute at Princeton University, where she taught, included speakers who had close relationships with her—President Barack Obama, Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey and the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden. Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, the first Black woman to have that prize.

11 Maria Beasley 1836-1913

Maria got 15 patents from the late 1870s to the late 1890s for inventions ranging from foot warmers to barrel making machine to a steam generator to a “means for preventing derailment of railroad cars.”

Her grandfather ran a distillery in Kentucky and he needed a better method for making barrels. She established the Beasley Standard Barrel Manufacturing Company in 1884.

In 1882 she got a patent for her design of a life raft that vastly improved on current life rafts.

12 Gertrude Bell (1868-1926)

Gertrude Bell

Gertrude Bell in Babylon, Iraq (Credit: Gertrude Bell Archive).

Gertrude Bell was a British archaeologist, linguist and the greatest female mountaineer of her age, exploring the Middle East, Asia and Europe.

She was the first woman to attain a first-class degree (in just two years) in modern history at Oxford, and the first to make major contributions in archaeology, architecture and oriental languages.

Fluent in Persian and Arabic, Bell was also the first to achieve seniority in the British military intelligence and diplomatic service.

Her in-depth knowledge and contacts played a key role in shaping British imperial policy-making. She strongly believed that relics and antiquities should be kept in their home nations.

To this day her books, including ‘Safar Nameh’, ‘Poems from the Divan of Hafiz’, ‘The Desert and the Sown’, ‘The Thousand and One Churches’ and ‘Amurath to Amurath’, are still studied.

Her greatest legacy was in the establishment of the modern state of Iraq in the 1920s. The National Museum of Iraq, which houses the world’s largest collection of Mesopotamian antiquities, was born from her efforts.

13 Nellie Bly (1864-1922)

Nellie Bly (Credit: H. J. Myers).

Nellie Bly is best remembered as a pioneer of investigative journalism, including her undercover work in a women’s lunatic asylum. Her exposés brought about sweeping reforms in mental institutions, sweatshops, orphanages and prisons.

On 14 November 1889, Bly – born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane – decided to take on a new challenge for the newspaper ‘the New York World’.

Inspired by the Jules Verne novel, ‘Around the World in 80 Days’, the American journalist set out to beat the fictional globetrotting record.

When she initially pitched her idea, the newspaper agreed – but thought a man should go. Bly refused until they agreed.

Alone and literally with the clothes on her back and only a small bag, she set off aboard a steamer.

She returned just 72 days later, having travelled 24,899 miles from England to France, Singapore to Japan, and California back to the East Coast – in ships, trains, rickshaws, on horseback and on mules.

Bly set a new world record, becoming the first person ever to travel the world in less than 80 days.

14 March 14 is Equal Pay Day 2023

Each year, this symbolic day is used to raise awareness around and combat the impact of pay inequities. Equal Pay Day 2023 is on March 14 and marks the current state of the gender pay gap: 84% for full-time workers and 77% for all workers (including part-time and seasonal).

15 Romay Catherine Johnson Davis, 102, a member of the iconic World War II “Six Triple Eight” battalion, was honored in a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony with numerous reminders of what the 6888th did to advance equality.

The ceremony was held on the 74th anniversary of the official integration of U.S. armed forces. Throughout an emotional program in Montgomery, Ala., on July 26, [2022] the former Army private first class was praised again and again by members of the military and civilian leaders for protecting U.S. freedom overseas, paving the way for equality in the military and furthering civil rights back home.

Davis, whose unit helped sort a backlog of 17 million pieces of mail and who drove a truck and cars in the battalion’s motor pool, is one of 855 women who served in the pioneering 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, better known as the Six Triple Eight — the only all-African American Women’s Army Corps battalion to serve overseas in World War II. The veterans were awarded the Gold Medal through bipartisan legislation signed into law March 14 by President Joe Biden.

16 Louise Evelina du Pont Crowninshield (August 3, 1877 – July 11, 1958) was an American heiress, historic preservationist, and philanthropist. She was the great-granddaughter of Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, founder of E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. Her estate at Eleutherian Mills near Wilmington, Delaware became the Hagley Museum and Library in 1957.^[1]^[2]

Life and career

Louise du Pont was born on the Winterthur Estate to parents Henry Algernon du Pont and Mary Pauline Foster. She and her younger brother, Henry Francis du Pont, were their parents’ only children who survived past infancy and therefore became the heirs to the du Pont fortune. A socialite who mingled in elite society in New York and Washington, DC, Louise du Pont married Boston Brahmin and professional yachtsman Francis Boardman Crowninshield in June 28, 1900.

Passionate about historic preservation, Louise du Pont Crowninshield restored the du Pont family house at Eleutherian Mills, collected antiques and decorative arts, and planted gardens. She belonged to numerous historical societies and horticultural organizations. During the Truman administration, she served on the committee to redecorate the White House. She helped to restore and furnish the Dutch House and George Washington’s birthplace at Wakefield House with period objects. She was a co-founder of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1949 and served as vice chair of the board in 1953. In the early 1950s, she was president of the National Council for Historic Sites and Buildings during its merger with the National Trust.^[2]

In recognition of her services to historic preservation, the National Trust instituted an annual award, the Louise Evelina du Pont Crowninshield Award. This award is the National Trust’s highest national honor and is awarded only to those who have proven “superlative achievement over time in the preservation and interpretation of our cultural, architectural or maritime heritage.”^[3]

17 Jeanne Baret (1740-1807)

Jeanne Baret was the first woman to ever complete a voyage of circumnavigation of the world.

An expert botanist, Baret disguised herself as a boy called Jean to join the naturalist Philibert Commerson aboard the world expedition of the Étoile. At the time, the French navy did not allow women on ships.

Portrait of Jeanne Barret, 1806 (Credit: Cristoforo Dall’Acqua).

For three years between 1766 and 1769, Baret travelled on the vessel with 300 men until she was eventually discovered.
When she returned to France, the navy paid tribute to “this extraordinary woman” and her botany work by giving her a pension of 200 livres a year.

One plant believed to have been discovered by her was the bougainvillea, a purple vine named after the leader of the expedition ship, Louis Antoine de Bougainville.

18 In 1955, Emma “Grandma” Gatewood told her children that she was “going for a hike in the woods” – little did they know that this hike would be the entire 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail (A.T.), the longest hiking-only footpath in the world. Though hiking the entire A.T. is already an impressive feat, Gatewood’s trip was even more remarkable for a number of reasons; she was 67 years old at the time, a mother of 11, a grandmother of 23, and a survivor of more than 30 years of domestic abuse. When she summited Katahdin on September 25, 1955, she became the first woman ever to complete the entire A.T. alone in one season. A pioneer in long-distance hiking and a portrait of resilience, Gatewood broke barriers in the outdoors, sending the message that “if those men can do it, I can do it.”

19 Susan La Flesche: The Healer

Born in 1865, Susan La Flesche grew up on the Omaha reservation. During her childhood, she saw a white doctor refuse to treat an ailing American Indian woman. This spurred La Flesche to become a physician herself. In 1889, she was the first female Native American to earn a medical degree in the United States.

After finishing her internship, La Flesche started work on the vast (30-by-45 mile) Omaha reservation. She took care of about 1,300 patients who suffered from ailments that included tuberculosis, diphtheria and influenza. A worn-down La Flesche had left this position by 1894, though she continued to see patients in private practice and served as a medical missionary. She also married and had two children.

In 1909, as a trust period that had limited Omaha control over their property was about to end, the federal government decided that these landowners still lacked the ability to manage their property. La Flesche felt that “the majority of the Omaha are as competent as the same number of white people” and led a delegation to Washington, D.C., to make this case. This resulted in the Omaha being allowed to control their land.

However, La Flesche’s focus remained on improving the health of the Omaha; through the years she treated most of the population. She also helped raise the funds to open Walthill Hospital in 1913. After her death in 1915, the facility was renamed the Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte Memorial Hospital.

20 Gloria Brown was the first African American women to serve in the US Forest Service as a forest supervisor. Her career is followed in the book “Black Woman in Green: Gloria Brown and the Unmarked Trail to Forest Service Leadership.” The compelling story includes the aspects of racism and changes in society. It presents a study of black Americans’ professional careers in environmental issues and public land management.