At the beginning of March, Women’s History Month 2021, I was thinking about little-known women who have made important contributions to our society. I asked my critique group and several non-writer friends if they knew of any such women. They came up with many names, some of whom I had not heard about. Here I have whittled the list to a few who have impacted the world in various fields and historical periods.
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| Caroline Herschel - U.S. Public Domain |
Caroline Herschel was born in Hanover, Germany on March 16, 1750. When Caroline was ten, she contracted typhus. This caused vision loss in her left eye and affected her growth. She reached a height of only four feet, three inches. Assuming she would never marry, her mother decided she should train to be a household servant. Her father, however, thought she should be educated. During her mother’s absences, he tutored Caroline individually and included her in her brothers’ lessons.
Her older brother William became a successful music
teacher in Bath, England. In 1772, he brought Caroline to live with him and do
the housekeeping. He tutored her in mathematics and trained her as a singer.
The siblings gave public musical performances until 1782, when William accepted
an appointment to the office of court astronomer to King George III. This
position came about after William was credited with discovering the planet
Uranus the year before.
While still keeping house
for William, Caroline helped with his research by grinding and polishing
mirrors for his telescope and executing the calculations related to his
observations. Her interest in astronomy grew and she began making her own
observations. On February 26, 1783, Caroline made her first discoveries, a
nebula that was not previously recorded and a second companion of the Andromeda
Galaxy. In 1786, she became the first
woman credited with discovering a comet. The following year, the king gave her
an annual salary in her role as her brother’s assistant making her the world’s
first professional female astronomer. Over the next ten years
she discovered seven more comets.
After her brother’s death in 1822, she returned to
Hanover, where she continued her astronomical work, verified and confirmed
William’s findings, and produced a catalogue of 2500 nebulae. Her work had
gained her the respect and admiration of the general public as well as the
scientific community. In 1828, at the
age of 77, the Royal Astronomical Society awarded her a Gold Medal for revising
and reorganizing their work. No other woman would again be awarded a Gold Medal
until 1996.
Caroline died in Hanover on January 8, 1848. The C.
Herschel crater on the moon is named after her, continuing her legacy into the
twenty-first century.
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| Susan La Flesche Picotte |
Susan La Flesche was born on June 17, 1865 to Chief Iron Eyes (Joseph
La Flesche) and his wife, One Woman (Mary), on the Omaha Reservation in
northeastern Nebraska. Her father was a strong advocate for education. Susan
attended school on the reservation until she was fourteen. After a brief period
of home-schooling, she was sent to the Elizabeth Institute for Young Ladies in
New Jersey. In addition to her native tongue, she was fluent in English, French,
and Otoe. She returned home at age seventeen and taught at the Quaker Mission
School on the reservation for two years. A co-worker encouraged her to complete
her education and earn a medical degree.
When she was twenty-one,
Susan entered the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Philadelphia,
one of the foremost institutions for higher education of non-white students in
the country. The physician there urged her to attend the Woman’s Medical
College of Pennsylvania, which she did, graduating as valedictorian on March
14, 1889. Susan was the first Native American to earn a medical degree. As a
child, she had seen an Omaha woman die because the local white doctor refused
to treat her. Later, Susan stated that this heart-breaking experience had
inspired her to become a physician so that she could care for her people. She
returned to the Omaha Reservation and assumed her position as physician at the Agency
Indian School, where she taught students about health and hygiene in addition
to providing medical care. Although she was not obligated to treat people
outside the school, she made house calls and cared for the sick in the
surrounding area. She became a widely trusted community leader.
In June 1894, she married Henry Picotte, a
Sioux man from the Yankton agency. They had two sons. Susan continued to
practice medicine after the birth of her children. In her practice, she treated
both Omaha and white patients in the town of Bancroft and surrounding
communities. Sometimes she even took her children along on house calls. She worked to teach her community about
preventive medicine and other public health issues such as food sanitation and
efforts to prevent the spread of tuberculosis. Alcoholism was a serious problem
on the Omaha reservation, including Susan’s husband. Susan advocated temperance
and struggled against disreputable whites who used alcohol to take advantage of
Omahas while making land deals. She also worked on behalf of community members
in their struggles with the bureaucracy regarding land interests.
Throughout her adult life,
Susan had worked for the building of a hospital. In 1913, the first privately
funded hospital on a reservation was completed on the Omaha tribal land. It was
later named in Susan’s honor, and in 1993 the Dr. Susan LaFlesche Picotte
Memorial Hospital, Walthill, Nebraska, was declared a U.S. National Historic
Landmark. Susan died of bone cancer on September 18, 1915 at the age of fifty.
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| Shirley Chisholm Library of Congress |
Shirley
Anita St. Hill was born on November
30, 1924 in Brooklyn, New York. Her father was an immigrant from Guyana, and
her mother was an immigrant from Barbados. She graduated from Brooklyn
Girls’ High and Brooklyn College, then worked as a nursery school teacher.
In 1949, she married Conrad Chisholm, a private investigator. She earned
a master’s degree from Columbia University in early childhood education in
1951. By 1960, she was a consultant to the New York City Division of Day Care.
Having encountered discrimination based on her race and her gender, she became
active locally in the League of Women Voters, the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, and the Urban League to counter inequality.
She also joined the Democratic Party.
Shirley ran for the New York Assembly in 1964 and became the second
African American in the New York State Legislature, where she served through 1968.
Her accomplishments included the granting of unemployment benefits to domestic
workers and a program that gave underprivileged students the opportunity to
attend college while taking remedial education classes. Both programs continue
today. In 1968, she won a seat in the House of Representatives, becoming the
first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. She represented
New York's 12th congressional district for seven terms from 1969 to 1983,
introducing more than 50 pieces of legislation. Throughout her career, she
fought for racial and gender equality, tried to improve conditions for the
poor, and advocated for ending the Vietnam War.
Her autobiography, Unbossed and Unbought, was published in 1970.
It chronicled her first-hand account of her journey from her childhood in
Brooklyn to her position as the first Black Congresswoman. In it she wrote, “Our
representative democracy is not working because the Congress that is supposed
to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief
reason for this is that it is ruled by a small group of old men.”
In 1972, Shirley became the first Black candidate to seek a major
party's nomination for President of the United States, and the first woman to
run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Due to discrimination,
she was blocked from participating in televised primary debates and, after
taking legal action, was allowed to make just one speech. However, she garnered
support of students, women, and minorities, entering twelve primaries and
winning 10% of the total delegates to the Democratic Convention. While she did
not become the presidential candidate, she continued to serve in the House of
Representatives.
Conrad and Shirley divorced in
1977. She kept the last name of Chisholm in her professional endeavors even
after she married Arthur Hardwick Jr., a New York state legislator, She retired
from Congress in 1983, taught at Mount Holyoke College and co-founded the
National Political Congress of Black Women. Shirley Chisholm died on January 1,
2005 in Florida. President Barack Obama awarded her a posthumous
Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
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| Maryam Mirzakhani National Science Foundation |
Maryam Mirzakhani was born on May 12, 1977 in Tehran, Iran. She attended an
all-girls high school and in 1994 she became the first Iranian woman to win a
gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. She repeated the
achievement the following year. This recognition of her genius enabled her to
pursue a career in pure mathematics, an opportunity rarely accorded to Iranian
women. While attending the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, she was
involved in a serious accident when a bus she was riding in fell off a cliff.
She was one of the few survivors.
In 1999, she earned her Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from
Sharif University. That year, she published Elementary Number Theory, Challenging Problems in Farsi with friend
and fellow student, Roya Beheshti. While at the university, the American
Mathematical Society recognized Maryam’s work, and she traveled to the United
States for graduate study at Harvard University. In her doctoral thesis, she
connected and solved two long-standing mathematical problems. She was awarded
her PhD in 2004.
She accepted a position as assistant professor at Princeton University
and as a research fellow at the Clay Mathematics Institute. Soon after, she
joined the faculty at Stanford University in California, where she was
recognized for her work in the fields of hyperbolic geometry, topology and
dynamics. In 2008, she became a full professor at Stanford.
Also in 2008, Maryam married Jan Vondrák, a Czech theoretical computer
scientist and applied mathematician. They had a daughter named Anahita.
Working alone and with colleagues, Maryam proved several theories related
to simple and complex geodesics, tying together fields including geometry,
topology and dynamical systems. In an interview, she characterized her process
this way: “It is like being lost in a jungle and trying to use all the
knowledge that you can gather to come up with some new tricks, and with some
luck you might find a way out.”
On August 13, 2014, Maryam was awarded the Fields Medal. Presented every
four years, the Fields Medal is the most prestigious award in mathematics, akin
to a Nobel Prize. Maryam was the first and, to date, the only woman to be
honored with this recognition since its inception in 1936.
After a four-year battle with breast cancer, Maryam died July 14, 2017.
She was 40 years old.
Among the many honors and tributes were accorded to her after her death
were having an asteroid and a micro-satellite named in her memory, a
documentary featuring her and her work, and recognition by the United Nations
as one of seven female scientists who have shaped the world. Beginning this
year, the Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prize will award $50,000 to
outstanding women in the field of mathematics who
completed their PhDs within the past two years.
Through the millennia, women have made major contributions that have gone
largely unrecognized. Hopefully, in the future, our society will do a better
job of acknowledging women’s achievements.
Despite an active criminal career he was often protected by locals in Oklahoma, where he was seen as the “Robin Hood of the Cookson Hills”. He had a reputation of helping to look after the grindingly poor by raiding shops to give away the food to starving people. He was also said to destroy mortgage records when he raided banks, although how the householder was supposed to know the bank no longer had proof of their mortgage debt is not clear.
He lived to his otto, “Rob only those who are worth robbing.”
He was imprisoned seven times, escaped four of those times, yet still spent a total of 35 years behind bars. His criminal career stretched between 1865 and 1911. He was a true highwayman, robbing everything from stagecoaches to trains, and he spent his money on women and whiskey – and as the old saying goes, wasted the rest. He was reputed to be the first to say “put your hands up, and nobody gets hurt.” Unlike other outlaws, he wasn’t known for spittin’ or cussin’ or gun-slinging. He was polite and soft-spoken. After his death, a major newspaper ran a four-column story on Miner, describing him as a “kindly, lovable old man, whose thoughts were humorous, whose manner was that of one who was a friend to all humankind . . . the most courtly, the most kindly spoken, the most venerable man . . . one whom they all regard with affection and something of esteem.” Miner had secured that soft spot in so many people’s hearts by stealing almost entirely from corporations, feeling that they robbed the common man. Many agreed, and he became a folk hero in both the US and Canada. On the occasions when Miner had to steal from an ordinary person to, say, facilitate his way out of town, he often made a point to return at least part of what he had taken. For instance, on one occasion, he stole $80 from a ranch hand and then later returned $10. In another instance, he robbed a driver of $5, his watch, and boots, yet was considerate enough to return the watch and boots after he finished with them. These types of thoughtful acts earned him the nickname “the Gentleman Bandit.”
Black Bart was one of the first Gentlemen Thieves I came across and I admit to a sneaking affection for him, and for the fact that he later disappeared and nobody knows what happened to him. After the Civil War, Charles Boles was a former First Sergeant in the Union Army, and was happily making a living as a gold miner when he was forced off his land by Wells Fargo. They had apparently offered to buy Boles’s property they cut off the water supply when he refused. This shut down his mine. Boles was infuriated and cryptically wrote a letter to his wife saying he was going to take revenge against the bank. While he never explained the specifics of his vengeance, we can assume this is when his alter ego, Black Bart, was born.