Sarah Breedlove Walker

Sarah Breedlove Walker was born on December 23, 1867 in Louisiana, the daughter of Owen and Minerva  Breedlove,  recently freed slaves.  Sarah, who was their fifth child, was the first in her family to be born free.  She became an orphan at the age of seven and went to live with her sister in Mississippi.  Presumably she picked cotton and did household work to earn her keep. 

At age 14, to escape both her oppressive working environment and frequent mistreatment by her brother in law, she married Moses McWilliams.  In 1885 she gave birth to a beautiful daughter, A’Lelia. Two years later Moses was murdered by a white lynch mob and Sara and her daughter moved to St.Louis.  She found work as a washerwoman earning $1.50 a day, which was enough to send A’Lelia to public school.  Sara herself attended night school when she could. While in St. Louis Sarah met her second husband, Charles J. Walker, who was in advertising and later assisted her in promoting her business.

In 1905 she had dream that revealed to her a formula of pomade to straighten Negro hair. The idea was first conceived in Cherry Creek, a prosperous mining town in Denver CO.  Sarah traveled from Pueblo, to Trinidad, to Colorado Springs and back to Denver selling her product. She mixed the ingredients herself in washtubs and sold it door to door.  She was very successful and “The Walker Method” and “Madam C.J Walker”were born.  She built a factory, recruited sales agents who dressed in starched white shirts and long black skirts taking the Walker products to homes all over the U.S. and the Caribbean. 

Sarah organized her 3,000 employees into social and philanthropic clubs, held national conventions that were attended by delegates from these clubs.  She rewarded her employees for high sales and those who did the most charity work.

By 1910 Sarah was a millionaire and one of the best known black women in America.  She made large donations to Black and Christian charities and endowed scholarships for women at Tuskegee Institute, She founded philanthropies that included educational scholarships and donations to homes for the elderly, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the National Conference on Lynching, among other organizations focused on improving the lives of African-Americans. She also donated the largest amount of money by an African-American toward the construction of an Indianapolis YMCA in 1913.

 

Sara Josephine Baker..."Doctor Jo"

When I hear the name Josephine Baker I think of the beautiful and exotic actress, singer and dancer. You probably do too.  But there is another Josephine Baker that few people know about.  Sara Josephine Baker was born November 15, 1873 in Poughkeepsie New York into a wealthy Quaker family She had fond memories of a happy childhood and a good and supportive relationship with both of her parents.  Her Father Daniel Mosher Baker was a lawyer.  Her mother Jenny Harwood Brown was one of the first women to graduate from Vassar College. Sara was raised with the expectation that she would also attend college but her plans changed when her father and brother died suddenly. Newly responsible for the family’s finances, she gave up her scholarship and applied to medical school instead. In 1894, Baker enrolled at the Woman’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, originally founded by pioneering physician Elizabeth Blackwell and her sister Emily Blackwell. While associating with the first generation of women to attend medical school, Baker was introduced to some powerful female role models, including faculty member Mary Putnam Jacobi. After graduating in 1898, second in her class of eighteen, Baker negotiated a year’s intern-ship at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston, where she worked at an outpatient clinic serving some of the city’s poorest residents. She developed a keen interest in the connection between poverty and ill health, which led her to a commitment to social medicine that would shape the rest of her career.

 Later she opened a private practice. After earning only $185 in her first year, she became an inspector for the N.Y. City Health Department. Although she maintained her private practice she became involved in public health work with a special concern for lowering infant mortality rate. 

In New York City, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the infant mortality rate was very high. Often there were 1,500 deaths per week during the heat of summer.  In 1908 she tackled this problem with a team of thirty nurses.  They went door to door, advising mothers on breastfeeding, cleanliness and good ventilation.  The mortality rate dropped considerably, which resulted in the establishment of a Bureau of Child Hygiene with Dr. Jo, as her patients had begun calling her, as director.

Dr. Jo was a pioneer in preventive medicine and public health education.  She lectured throughout the United States on child hygiene and published five popular books on the subject in addition to more than 250 magazine articles.  Josephine Baker became the first woman to be a professional representative to the League of Nations representing the U.S. in the Health Committee. In her lifetime and largely because of her efforts, Dr. Baker saw the infant mortality rate in New York City from 111 to 66 per 1,000 births.

   

Emily Blackwell

Emily Blackwell was born on October 8, 1826 in Bristol, England.  Her family immigrated to America when she was five settling with friends in Cincinnati.  Emily was inspired by her older sister Elizabeth, one of the first women to receive a medical degree in the U.S. and she decided to follow in her footsteps and pursue a degree in medicine.  To earn money for her education she took a teaching position but confided in her diary: “Oh, for life instead of stagnation. I long with such an intense longing for freedom, action, for life, and truth.”

Emily was rejected by eleven medical schools, including her sister’s alma mater in Geneva, New York.  In 1852 she was finally accepted at Chicago’s Rush Medical College, but the state medical society censured Rush for admitting a woman and she was asked to leave at the end of her first year. She joined her sister at her charity dispensary in New York City and gained as much practical experience as she could.  Finally she was accepted at the medical college of Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Upon graduation with honors, she went to Scotland for further study with Sir James Simpson, a pioneer in the use of chloroform during childbirth.  When she returned to America she rejoined her sister, who had recently established the New York Infirmary for Women and Children as a teaching clinic for women doctors and a place where women could consult physicians of their own gender.  In 1858 Emily was left in control of the infirmary when Elizabeth went abroad for a year for further study.

In 1860 the infirmary moved to larger quarters. The sisters established an on-site nursing school and medical college.  For thirty years Emily served as dean of the medical school and professor of obstetrics and gynecology.  In 1898 the sisters felt that their school was no longer needed as Cornell had begun to accept women students.  During its thirty one years of operation the Woman’s Medical College had graduated 364 women doctors.

The New York Infirmary for Woman and Children is still in operation today.  One of Emily’s former pupils reminisced: “She inspired us all with the vital feeling that we are still on trial and that, for women who meant to be physicians, no educational standards could be too high.  I think not many of us realized that we were going out into the world as test cases, but Dr. Blackwell did.” 

Anna Mary Robertson

Anna Mary Robertson

“I would draw the picture (on butcher paper) and then color it with grape juice or berries…”

Anna was born on September 7, 1860 to a large farm family near Greenwich, New York.  She had no formal schooling other than a few months at a local one room country school.

She left home at twelve to earn her living as a domestic.  After fifteen years as a paid housekeeper she married Thomas Salmon Moses who was a farm worker. They settled in Virginia where she bore ten children, five of whom died as infants.

Her interest in art was expressed throughout her life, including embroidery of pictures with yarn, until arthritis made this pursuit too painful. The family returned to New York State in 1905 and she turned to painting at the age of 78.  Her first work was done in exterior house paint, on “an old piece of canvas which had been used for mending a threshing machine cover.”

Anna put several of her paintings for sale with some of her other craftwork at a local drug store.  I vacationing New York City art collector bought them all and went to her farm house to purchase fifteen others.  He placed three of them in the Museum of Modern Art.  The following year she had a one woman show at a well known gallery and at the age of eighty became an overnight success.  Anna charmed wherever she sent.  She was a tiny, lively woman with mischievous grey eyes, a quick wit but she could be sharp-tongued or stern when necessary.

Madeline Zabriskie Doty

Madeline was born in Bayonne New Jersey, on August 24, 1877. After graduating from Smith College she went on to study law at Harvard, although women were strictly barred.  She attended four lectures dressed as a man, in a tailored suit and trousers, with a hat hiding her hair, before she was discovered by the professor. She argued her case strenuously before the faculty but was not allowed to continue. She completed her law degree at New York University in 1902.  Although she handily passed the bar she did not like trying cases so she turned instead to social reform work.  She worked in the juvenile court system until 1912 when she was appointed to the New York State Commission of Prison Reform beginning her long career in public service.

In 2913 Madeline decided that the best way to determine what reforms were needed in the prison system was to become a prisoner! With the cooperation of the warden and chief matron, she was incarcerated for four days as “Maggie Martin” in the women’s penitentiary at Auburn on a trumped up forgery charge.  Upon her release she wrote a scathing expose for the New York Sunday Post that described the deplorable conditions and her poor treatment as a prisoner.

In 1918 Madeline became engaged to Roger Baldwin, the future founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. As a conscientious objector, he served a year in prison for refusing the draft.  They were finally married in August of 1919. They lived in Greenwich Village until 1924 when Madeline was selected as the international secretary of the Women’s League for Peace and Freedom in Geneva Switzerland. She spent most of her life abroad from this point on with occasional visits to New York or Florida.

In her mid fifties she returned to school and earned her Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Geneva.

Lillien Jane Martin

It can be a challenge to discuss the influence of a woman in psychology because, although there have been several women throughout the history of psychology, their contributions have often been ignored or overridden by men. Lillien Martin is one woman who was determined to work in psychology doing what she wanted. Lillien, as a pioneer woman in psychology, faced obstacles including age, as well as gender discrimination. Her determination eventually rewarded her with an honorary Ph.D. from a school that originally refused her a degree because of her sex. Lillien's accomplishments and enthusiastic eagerness to share knowledge have changed the way applied psychology is viewed in areas of gerontology and mental hygiene for children.

Lillien Jane Martin was born on July7, 1851, in Olean, New York. Her father deserted the family when she was very young and her mother took over a proper religious and secular education.  She attended Olean Academy at the age of four and at sixteen her mother took a position as matron in a college in Racine, Wisconsin, and Lillien began teaching at a nearby girl’s school to earn money for her college education.

After graduation from Vassar she taught chemistry and physics at Indianapolis High School. She remained there for nine years, until she was offered a position of vice principal and head of the Science Department at Girls’ High School of San Francisco.  After five years in San Francisco, at the age of forty-three, she suddenly decided to become a psychologist.

Lillien studied at the University of Gootingen in German receiving her Ph.D. in 1898 followed by a year of study in a Swiss psychiatric hospital specializing in hypnotism. In 1899 the president of Stanford University cabled her abroad and offered her an assistant professorship in psychology.  She was promoted to full professor in 1911 and in 1915 she became Stanford’s first woman department head. 

She was forced to retire at sixty-five but retirement did not agree with her.  She moved again to San Francisco where she opened a private practice where she encountered an imbalanced grandmother, which by chance thrust her into the field of gerontology. She opened the first old-age counseling center and devoted the rest of her life to researching the rehabilitation of old people who had become a public liability.

Lillien never slowed down.  She travelled to Russia alone at seventy-eight, accompanied a friend on a cross-country auto trip at eighty-one, spent six months trekking through South America at eighty-seven, and learned to drive at ninety. She earned numerous honorary degrees and awards recognizing her contributions to the field of psychology and gerontology.   She was most amused at being included in the book American Men of Science, with a star beside her name denoting distinction. 

Jeannette Pickering Rankin

Jeannette Pickering Rankin was born June 11^th 1880, on the Grant Creek Ranch in Montana Territory to John Rankin, rancher, developer and lumber merchant and Olive Pickering a former school teacher. She was the oldest of eleven children, seven of whom survived childhood.  She attended Missoula public schools graduating in 1902 from the University of Montana with a Bachelor of Science degree in biology.

During a trip to Boston to visit her brother at Harvard in 1904, after witnessing conditions in slums, Jeannette took up a new field of social work.  She was a resident in a San Francisco Settlement House for a while.  After completing a degree in social work at Columbia School of Social Work in New York, she worked in Spokane Washington in a children’s home.  In 1910 she joined the suffrage movement, determined to combine her quest for peace with suffrage.  She spent the next few years lobbying for suffrage in fifteen different states and was a major force in acquiring the vote for women in Montana in 1914. In 1916 she campaigned for Congress as a Republican, endorsing prohibition, suffrage, child protection laws and “preparedness that will make for peace”.  She won the election, becoming the first woman in the House of Representatives.  Just four days after her arrival in Washington in April 1917 she voted against the U.S. entry into World War I.  Fifty six congressmen voted with her, and although it was falsely reported that she cried as she cast her vote, in fact several of the men did cry.

Having lost a bid for election as a Montana senator, Jeannette finished out her term as a congresswoman and moved on to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.  In 1924 she established the Georgia Peace Society.  From 1929 to 1939 she was an organizer and lobbyist for the National Council for the Prevention of War.  In 1939 she again ran for Congress in Montana.  With the support of women, labor and citizens against war; she defeated her liberal Democratic opponent.

In 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor she cast the only opposing vote to America’s entry into World War II becoming the only member of Congress to oppose both World Wars.  After losing her bid for re-election in 1942 she traveled extensively abroad studying pacifism. She was fascinated by Ghandi’s work and made seven trips to India between 1946 and 1971. 

Lillian Moller Gilbreth

Lillian Moller was born May 24^th 1878 in Oakland, Ca.  She was tutored at home until she was nine, at which time she entered the Oakland Public Schools and then the University of California at Berkeley, graduating in 1900 with a B.Lit. degree.  She was the first woman to be chosen as the university’s commencement speaker.

In 1903, after earning a master’s degree in English from Berkeley, she departed for Europe. On a stopover in Boston she met Frank B. Gilbreth who was a cousin of her traveling companion. He was one of New England’s leading building contractors.  Lillian and Frank were married on October 1904 when she became a partner in his rapidly expanding business.

Lillian had twelve children.  With the assistance of her mother-in-law and hired help, she managed to earn a Ph.D. in psychology from Brown University in 1915.  One of her children, Frank, Jr., wrote the bestselling book about their childhood, Cheaper by the Dozen.  Lillian and Frank opened Gilbreth, Inc., in Montclair, New Jersey.  Their company pioneered the application of motion study in industry, consulting with major companies around the company.

Frank died in 1924 and Lillian continued their work alone and put all of here eleven surviving children through college.  From 1935 to 1948 she was professor of management at Purdue University where she established a time and motion study lab.  She became a consultant at the Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine at New York University Medical center where developed a model kitchen adapted to the needs of the physically challenged.

She continued to do research into her seventies and lectured and published books well into her eighties. She received more than twenty honorary degrees and numerous awards.  A fellowship in here memory was established by the Society of Women Engineers as a tribute to her lifelong encouragement of women to become engineers. 

Belle Case LaFollette

Belle Case LaFollette, Attorney and Woman’s Suffrage Activist, was born on April 21, 1859, in a log cabin in Summit, Wisconsin.  Upon graduation from the University of Wisconsin, she taught for two years and then married a former classmate, Robert LaFollette.  The ceremony was performed by a Unitarian minister and by mutual agreement, the word “obey” was omitted from the marriage vows. 

In 1883 Belle entered the University of Wisconsin Law School, becoming the first woman to receive a law degree from that university.  She was admitted to the bar but never actually practiced.  Her legal training was of great help to her husband’s career though. She was an active participant during Robert’s three terms in Congress, serving as his secretary and administrative assistant.

Robert was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1906. Three years later Belle created LaFollette’s Magazine, which later became The Progressive. In 1911 and 1912 she wrote a syndicated column for the North American Press Syndicate. She edited the “Women and Education Department” writing articles on health, child care, political news and the social life in Washington. 

In 1913 Belle spoke before her husband’s colleagues in the Senate Committee on Suffrage, in favor of suffrage. In 1914 Belle addressed the colored Young Men's Christian Association, raising an argument that segregation of colored people on street cars. public conveyances and government departments was wrong. She added there would be no constitution of peace until the question is "settled right". In 1915 she helped found the Woman’s Peace Party, which later became the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. After World War I, she was active in the Women’s Committee for World Disarmament, and helped found the National Council for the Prevention of War in 1921. She and other women influenced governments to convene the Naval Arms Limitation Conference in 1922.

  

Franc Lynette Johnson

Franc Lynette Johnson was born March 30^th, 1887 in Tunnel City, Wisconsin.  She was named after her father, Frank Lewis Johnson, an architect, who died when she was only three. After his death her mother taught school to support her three young children.  Her mother died when she was twelve, but she inherited a strong sense of self from her mother and continued her education along with her older sister Ella. 

In 1912, eight months after New Mexico attained statehood, Franc came west by rail to teach at the Navajo Indian boarding school in Fort Defiance, Arizona.  She earned $25 a month and lived and ate with the students in the dormitory. Two years later she married Arthur Newcomb, a clerk at the trading post, and became known as “the Indian trader’s wife. Eventually she was recognized within academic circles as a scholar and writer on the Navajo way of life.  Franc befriended Hosteen Klah, a medicine man, and he invited her to attend his healing ceremonies, and she became the first white person to record Navajo symbolism. Her documentation of Navajo art and culture, writing, lecturing, or reproducing ritual sandpaintings onto two-dimensional painted surface, made a significant impact of Southwestern studies.

During the flu epidemic of 1920, when one tenth of the Navajo population died, she used her knowledge of the Navajo religion and healing ceremonies becoming a respected medicine woman.  She was inducted into the tribe, the first white woman to have such an honor bestowed on her, and given the name Atsay Ashon.

Franc wrote numerous books about the Navajo.  She and her friend Mary Wheelwright established the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art in Santa Fe.  All of her watercolor re-creations of sand paintings – almost 1,000 in all – plus her pottery and basket collection were donated to the Museum.

Mary Sewell Gardner

Mary Sewell Gardner

Mary Sewall Gardner was born in Newton, Massachusetts on February 5^th, 1871.  Her mother died when she was only four and her father remarried a woman who was a physician. 

Most of Mary’s early education was in local private schools but she went to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington in her teen years.  In 1890 she returned home and spent many years nursing her invalid stepmother and doing work in the community.  When she was thirty she attended the Newport Rhode Island Hospital Training School knowing that she wanted to become a physician, probably inspired by her step mother. When she completed a four year program she became superintendent of nurses in the Providence District Nursing Association.  Her leadership led the organization to become a model for other district nursing associations.  She implemented organized, regular meetings, an efficient record keeping system and introduced uniforms.

In 1912 Mary and another nurse founded the National Organization of Public Health Nursing, serving as its president. She helped create a monthly periodical Public Health Nursing, which has been revised twice and translated into several languages and long considered a classic.  Mary contributed many editorials and scholarly articles.  

When World War I broke out she took a leave of absence and went to Italy where she served as chief nurse on the American Red Cross Tuberculosis Commission.  She also established training programs for Italian women who wished to become nurses.

She received an honorary Master’s Degree from Brown University in Rhode Island and received the Walter Burns Saunders Medal for distinguished service to the nursing profession.  She has been inducted into the American Nursing Association Hall of Fame.