Women’s History

The Future of Women: Michelle Obama and Marissa Mayer

I want to close Women’s History Month with thoughts of the future. An email from a reader last week said it perfectly: “Based on what these women have accomplished, I see great blankpotential for women of today and the future.”

I agree. Tuesday night two of my daughters and I attended a program at New York’s 92nd Street Y featuring Marissa Mayer, the young woman who is Employee #20 at Google and is now vice president of location and local services. Suddenly I felt very hopeful. After years of worrying that America wasn’t really making as much progress as we had hoped when the women’s movement built speed in the 1970s and ‘80s, I began to re-think my concern.

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Jane Swisshelm, Journalist, Abolitionist, Women’s Rights Advocate

  • Ardent abolitionist and advocate for women’s rightsblank
  • First woman to cover a story from the Senate press gallery

Jane Cannon Swisshelm was born in Pittsburgh in 1815. Her father was a Presbyterian minister who died when Jane was only eight. Without him to provide for them, the family faced financial hardship so Jane had to quit school and work with her mother at lacemaking. When she was fourteen she was able to get a job as a teacher. (At a later date, I will investigate the changes in teaching requirements in American schools.)

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Jennie Grossinger (1892-1972), Garment Worker to Resort Owner

  • Established a world-class, financially successful resort

Jennie Grossinger was born in Austria in 1892 to parents who wanted to save enough blankmoney to bring the family to America for a better life.  When Jennie was five, her father emigrated, and three years later he had saved enough money to bring Jennie, her younger sister, and her mother to New York; they lived on the lower east side.  Her father, a former real estate overseer, was now a coat presser; life was not easy.

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Carrie A. Nation (1846-1911), Crusader for Prohibition and for the Rights of Women

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  • Her approach was more radical than most, but in some ways she was a forerunner of a future group of women, Mothers Against Drunk Driving
  • She resorted to violence to make her point but also assured her critics that she wouldn’t have had to choose this route if women had the right to vote

Carrie Amelia Moore Nation was born in 1846 in Kentucky to a slave-owning family that was very religious. In 1854 the family moved to Cass County in western Missouri, which turned out to be close to the fighting going on in Kansas over slavery. At various times then and during the Civil War, Carrie Nation was among the women who aided injured soldiers in the area.

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Belva Lockwood (1830-1917), American Attorney and Crusader for Equal Rights

blank• She was admitted to what eventually became George Washington University Law School, but after completing the coursework, she was denied a diploma because she was a woman; after waiting a year she petitioned the U.S. President and soon received her diploma
• Had to petition Congress for the right for a woman to practice law before the U.S. Supreme Court; she was the first woman to do so
• Ran for president in 1884 and 1888

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