Sunday, July 19, 2015

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 Rankin

Jeannette Pickering Rankin was born June 11th 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.