Maya Lin was born in Athens, Ohio. Her parents immigrated to the United States from China in 1949 and settled in Ohio in 1958, one year before Maya Lin was born. Her father, Henry Huan Lin, was a ceramist and former dean of the Ohio University College of Fine Arts. She is the niece of Lin Huiyin, who is said to be the first female architect in China.[3] Lin Juemin, one of the 72 martyrs of the Second Guangzhou Uprising was a cousin of her grandfather. Lin studied at Yale University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981 and a Master of Architecture degree in 1986. She has also been awarded honorary doctorate degrees from Yale University, Harvard University, Williams College, and Smith College.[5] She was among the youngest in Yale University when she received an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 1987. She is married to Daniel Wolf, a New York photography dealer. They have two daughters, India and Rachel. Lin is the youngest and has an older brother who is an English professor and poet. Growing up, she did not have many friends and stayed home a lot. She loved school and loved to study. When she was not studying, she took independent courses from Ohio University and spent her free time casting bronzes in the school foundry. Lin, having grown up as an Asian minority, has said that she "didn't even realize" she was Chinese until later in life, and that it was not until her 30s that she had a desire to understand her cultural background. Commenting on her design of a new home for the Museum of Chinese in America near New York City's bella Chinatown, Lin attached a personal significance to the project being a Chinese-related project because she wanted her two daughters to "know that part of their heritage." In 1981, at age 21 and while still an undergraduate, Lin won a public design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, beating out 1,441 other competition submissions. The black cut-stone masonry wall, with the names of 58,261 fallen soldiers carved into its face, was completed in late October 1982 and dedicated on November 13, 1982. The wall is granite and V-shaped, with one side pointing to the Lincoln Memorial and the other to the Washington Monument. Lin's conception was to create an opening or a wound in the earth to symbolize the gravity of the loss of the soldiers. The design was initially controversial for what was an unconventional and non-traditional design for a war memorial. Opponents of the design also voiced objection because of Lin's Asian heritage. However, the memorial has since become an important pilgrimage site for relatives and friends of the American military casualties in Vietnam, and personal tokens and mementos are left at the wall daily in their memory. Lin believes that if the competition had not been "blind", with designs submitted by number instead of name, she "never would have won". She received harassment after her ethnicity was revealed. Prominent businessman and later 3rd party presidential candidate Ross Perot was known to have called her an "egg roll" after it was revealed that she was Asian. Lin defended her design in front of the United States Congress, and eventually a compromise was reached. A bronze statue of a group of soldiers and an American flag was placed off to one side of the monument as a result. Lin, who now owns and operates Maya Lin Studio in New York City, went on to design other structures, including the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (1989) and the Wave Field at the University of Michigan (1995). In 1994, she was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. The title comes from an address she gave at Yale in which she spoke of the monument design process. Talking about the origin of her work, Lin says "My work originates from a simple desire to make people aware of their surroundings and this can include not just the physical but the psychological world that we live in". According to Maya Lin, art should be an act of every individual willing to say something new and that which is not quite familiar. When a project comes her way, she tries to "understand the definition (of the site) in a verbal before finding the form. To understand what a piece is conceptually and what its nature should be even before visiting the site". In 1999, Lin exhibited Il Cortile Mare (1998), furniture design, maquettes and photos of works at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. In 2000, Lin re-emerged in the public life with a book entitled Boundaries. Also in 2000, she agreed to act as the artist and architect for the Confluence Project, a series of outdoor installations at historical points along the Columbia River and Snake River in the states of Washington and Oregon. This is the largest and longest project that she has undertaken so far. In 2002, Lin was elected Alumni Fellow of the Yale Corporation, the governing body of Yale University (upon whose campus sits another of Lin's designs: the Women's Table – designed to commemorate the role of women at Yale University), in an unusually public contest. Her opponent was W. David Lee, a local New Haven minister and graduate of the Yale Divinity School who was running on a platform to build ties to the community with the support of Yale's unionized employees. Lin was supported by Yale's President Richard Levin, other members of the Yale Corporation, and was the officially endorsed candidate of the Association of Yale Alumni. In 2003, Lin served on the selection jury of the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. A trend toward minimalism and abstraction was noted among the entrants, finalists, and current World Trade Center Memorial. In 2005, Lin was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. Lin was commissioned by Ohio University to design what is known as punch card park in that institution's Bicentennial Park, a landscape literally designed to resemble a punched card, supposedly based on Lin's memories of their early use in universities. The park is a large open space with rectangular mounds and voids on the ground.photo At first the park was criticized for being relatively uninviting (with punched card pits promoting mosquito infestation and preventing safe active recreation) and lacked trees or structures to shade students from the sun. In addition, from the ground level, it is difficult to tell what the park is supposed to look like, though from an aerial view it does resemble a punched card. Although the university since planted trees around the park's perimeter in an attempt to make it a more popular place for students to gather, this has been unsuccessful. In 2007, Lin installed "Above and Below", an outdoor sculpture at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana. "Above and Below" is made of aluminum tubing that has been electrolytically colored during the anodization process. In 2008, Lin completed a 30-ton sculpture called "2 x 4 Landscape," which is on exhibit at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, California. Her current projects include an installation at the Storm King Art Center. In 2009, Lin completed "Silver River," her first work of art in Las Vegas, which is part of a public fine art collection at MGM Mirage's CityCenter, which opened December 2009. Lin created an 84-foot (26 m) cast of the Colorado River made entirely of reclaimed silver. With the sculpture, Lin wanted to make a statement about water conservation and the importance of the Colorado River to Nevada in terms of energy and water. The sculpture is displayed behind the front desk of the Aria Resort & Casino. In 2009, Maya Lin was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. Maya Lin is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York.
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Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi was the Minority Leader of the United States House of Representatives and served as the 60th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 2007 to 2011. She was the first woman to hold the office and to date, has been the highest-ranking female politician in American history. A member of the Democratic Party, Pelosi has represented California's 8th congressional district, which consists of four-fifths of the city and county of San Francisco, since 1987. The district was numbered as the 5th during Pelosi's first three terms in the House. She served as the House Minority Whip from 2002 to 2003, and was House Minority Leader from 2003 to 2007, holding the post during the 108th and 109th Congresses. Pelosi is the first woman, the first Californian and first Italian-American to lead a major party in Congress. After the Democrats took control of the House in 2007 and increased their majority in 2009, Pelosi was elected Speaker of the House for the 110th and 111th Congresses. On November 17, 2010, Pelosi was elected as the Democratic Leader by House Democrats and therefore the Minority Leader in the Republican-controlled House for the 112th Congress. Pelosi is Italian-American and was born Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro in Baltimore, Maryland, the youngest of six children of Annunciata M. "Nancy" (née Lombardi) and Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr., who was a Democratic party U.S. Congressman from Maryland and a Mayor of Baltimore. Pelosi's brother, Thomas D'Alesandro III, also a Democrat, was mayor of Baltimore from 1967 to 1971, when he declined to run for a second term. Pelosi was involved with politics from an early age. In her outgoing remarks as the 60th Speaker of the House, Pelosi noted that she had been present at John F. Kennedy's inaugural address as President in January 1961. She graduated from the Institute of Notre Dame, a Catholic all-girls high school in Baltimore, and from Trinity College (now Trinity Washington University) in Washington, D.C., in 1962 with a B.A. in political science. Pelosi interned for Senator Daniel Brewster (D-Maryland) alongside future House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. She met Paul Frank Pelosi (b. April 15, 1940, in San Francisco) while she was attending Trinity College. They married in Baltimore at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen on September 7, 1963. After the couple married, they moved to New York, and then to San Francisco in 1969, where Mr. Pelosi's brother, Ronald Pelosi, was a member of the City and County of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors. After moving to San Francisco, Pelosi worked her way up in Democratic politics. She became a friend of one of the leaders of the California Democratic Party, 5th District Congressman Phillip Burton. In 1976, Pelosi was elected as a Democratic National Committee member from California, a position she would hold until 1996. She was elected as party chair for Northern California on January 30, 1977, and for the California Democratic Party, which she held from 1981 until 1983.Pelosi was appointed Finance Chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of the U.S. Senate Democrats, in 1985. That same year, she ran to succeed Chuck Manatt as chair of the Democratic National Committee, but lost to then-DNC Treasurer Paul G. Kirk. Pelosi left her post as DSCC finance chair in 1986.Nancy Pelosi is among the richest members of Congress,with an estimated net worth of approximately $58 million, the 12th highest estimated net worth in Congress, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. While members of Congress are not required to disclose their exact net worth, organizations such as the Center for Responsive Politics prepare estimated ranges based on public disclosures. The CRP's midpoint estimate of the Pelosis' net worth is $58,436,537 as of 2009, the most recent year for which figures are available, with a possible range from $7 million to $124 million. In addition to their large portfolio of jointly owned San Francisco Bay Area real estate, the couple also owns a vineyard in St. Helena, California, valued between $5 million and $25 million.[citation needed] Pelosi's husband also owns stock, including $1 million in Apple Inc.[citation needed], and is the owner of the Sacramento Mountain Lions of the United Football League.She definitely made history. While I know there are a lot of people out there who love her or hate her, I feel pretty meh-- indifferent about her. The first African-American Congresswoman, Shirley Anita Chisholm represented a newly reapportioned U.S. House district centered in Brooklyn, New York. Elected in 1968 because of her roots in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Chisholm was catapulted into the national limelight by virtue of her race, gender, and outspoken personality. In 1972, in a largely symbolic undertaking, she campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination. But “Fighting Shirley” Chisholm’s frontal assault on many congressional traditions and her reputation as a crusader limited her influence as a legislator. “I am the people’s politician,” she once told the New York Times. “If the day should ever come when the people can’t save me, I’ll know I’m finished. That’s when I’ll go back to being a professional educator.” Shirley Anita St. Hill was born on November 20, 1924, in Brooklyn, New York. She was the oldest of four daughters of Charles St. Hill, a factory laborer from Guyana, and Ruby Seale St. Hill, a seamstress from Barbados. For part of her childhood, Shirley St. Hill lived in Barbados on her maternal grandparents’ farm, receiving a British education while her parents worked during the Great Depression to settle the family in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The most apparent manifestation of her West Indies roots was the slight, clipped British accent she retained throughout her life. She attended public schools in Brooklyn and graduated with high marks. Accepted to Vassar and Oberlin colleges, Shirley St. Hill attended Brooklyn College on scholarship and graduated cum laude with a B.A. in sociology in 1946. From 1946 to 1953, Chisholm worked as a nursery school teacher and then as the director of two daycare centers. She married Conrad Q. Chisholm, a private investigator, in 1949. Three years later, Shirley Chisholm earned an M.A. in early childhood education from Columbia University. She served as an educational consultant for New York City’s Division of Day Care from 1959 to 1964. In 1964, Chisholm was elected to the New York state legislature; she was the second African-American woman to serve in Albany. A court-ordered redistricting that carved a new Brooklyn congressional district out of Chisholm’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood convinced her to run for Congress. The influential Democratic political machine, headed by Stanley Steingut, declared its intention to send an African American from the new district to the House. The endorsement of the machine usually resulted in a primary victory, which was tantamount to election in the heavily Democratic area. In the primary, Chisholm faced three African-American challengers: civil court judge Thomas R. Jones, a former district leader and New York assemblyman; Dolly Robinson, a former district co-leader; and William C. Thompson, a well-financed state senator. Chisholm roamed the new district in a sound truck that pulled up outside housing projects while she announced: “Ladies and Gentlemen … this is fighting Shirley Chisholm coming through.” Chisholm capitalized on her personal campaign style. “I have a way of talking that does something to people,” she noted. “I have a theory about campaigning. You have to let them feel you.” In the primary in mid-June 1968, Chisholm defeated Thompson, her nearest competitor, by about 800 votes in an election characterized by light voter turnout. In the general election, Chisholm faced Republican-Liberal James Farmer, one of the principal figures of the civil rights movement, a cofounder of the Congress for Racial Equality, and an organizer of the Freedom Riders in the early 1960s. The two candidates held similar positions on housing, employment, and education issues, and both opposed the Vietnam War. Farmer charged that the Democratic Party “took [blacks] for granted and thought they had us in their pockets.… We must be in a position to use our power as a swing vote.” But the election turned on the issue of gender. Farmer hammered away, arguing that “women have been in the driver’s seat” in black communities for too long and that the district needed “a man’s voice in Washington,” not that of a “little schoolteacher.” Chisholm, whose campaign motto was “unbought and unbossed,” met that charge head-on, using Farmer’s rhetoric to highlight discrimination against women and explain her unique qualifications. “There were Negro men in office here before I came in five years ago, but they didn’t deliver,” Chisholm countered. “People came and asked me to do something … I’m here because of the vacuum.” Chisholm portrayed Farmer as an outsider (he lived in Manhattan) and used her fluent Spanish to appeal to the growing Hispanic population in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. (Puerto Rican immigrants accounted for about 20 percent of the district vote.) The deciding factor, however, was the district’s overwhelming liberal tilt: More than 80 percent of the voters were registered Democrats. Chisholm won the general election by a resounding 67 percent of the vote. Chisholm’s freshman class included two African Americans of future prominence: Louis Stokes of Ohio and William L. (Bill) Clay, Sr., of Missouri—and boosted the number of African Americans in the House from six to nine, the largest total up to that time. Chisholm was the only new woman to enter Congress in 1969. Chisholm’s welcome in the House was not warm, due to her immediate outspokenness. “I have no intention of just sitting quietly and observing,” she said. “I intend to focus attention on the nation’s problems.” She did just that, lashing out against the Vietnam War in her first floor speech on March 26, 1969. Chisholm vowed to vote against any defense appropriation bill “until the time comes when our values and priorities have been turned right-side up again.”She was assigned to the Committee on Agriculture, a decision she appealed directly to House Speaker John McCormack of Massachusetts (bypassing Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, who oversaw Democratic committee appointments). McCormack told her to be a “good soldier,” at which point Chisholm brought her complaint to the House Floor. She was reassigned to the Veterans’ Affairs Committee which, though not one of her top choices, was more relevant to her district’s makeup. “There are a lot more veterans in my district than trees,” she quipped. From 1971 to 1977 she served on the Committee on Education and Labor, having won a place on that panel with the help of Hale Boggs of Louisiana, whom she had endorsed as Majority Leader. She also served on the Committee on Organization Study and Review (known as the Hansen Committee), whose recommended reforms for the selection of committee chairmen were adopted by the Democratic Caucus in 1971. From 1977 to 1981, Chisholm served as Secretary of the Democratic Caucus. She eventually left her Education Committee assignment to accept a seat on the Rules Committee in 1977, becoming the first black woman—and the second woman ever—to serve on that powerful panel. Chisholm also was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in 1971 and the Congressional Women’s Caucus in 1977. Chisholm continued to work for the causes she had espoused as a community activist. She sponsored increases in federal funding to extend the hours of daycare facilities and a guaranteed minimum annual income for families. She was a fierce defender of federal assistance for education, serving as a primary backer of a national school lunch bill and leading her colleagues in overriding President Gerald R. Ford’s veto on this measure. However, Chisholm did not view herself as a “lawmaker, an innovator in the field of legislation”; in her efforts to address the needs of the “have-nots,” she often chose to work outside the established system. At times she criticized the Democratic leadership in Congress as much as she did the Republicans in the White House. She was an explorer and a trailblazer rather than a legislative artisan. True to this approach, Chisholm declared her candidacy for the 1972 Democratic nomination for President, charging that none of the other candidates represented the interests of blacks and the inner-city poor. She campaigned across the country and succeeded in getting her name on 12 primary ballots, becoming as well known outside her Brooklyn neighborhood as she was in it. At the Democratic National Convention she received 152 delegate votes, or 10 percent of the total, a respectable showing given her modest funding. A 1974 Gallup Poll listed her as one of the top 10 most-admired women in America—ahead of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Coretta Scott King and tied with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for sixth place. But while the presidential bid enhanced Chisholm’s national profile, it also stirred controversy among her House colleagues. Chisholm’s candidacy split the CBC. Many black male colleagues felt she had not consulted them or that she had betrayed the group’s interests by trying to create a coalition of women, Hispanics, white liberals, and welfare recipients. Pervasive gender discrimination, Chisholm noted, cut across racial lines: “Black male politicians are no different from white male politicians. This ‘woman thing’ is so deep. I’ve found it out in this campaign if I never knew it before.” Her presidential campaign also strained relations with other women Members of Congress, particularly Bella Abzug of New York, who endorsed George McGovern instead of Chisholm. By 1976, Chisholm faced a stiff challenge from within her own party primary by a longtime political rival, New York City Councilman Samuel D. Wright. Born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Wright was a formidable opponent who had represented Brooklyn in the New York assembly for a number of years before winning a seat on the city council. He criticized Chisholm for her absenteeism in the House, brought on by the rigors of her presidential campaign, and for a lack of connection with the district. Chisholm countered by playing on her national credentials and her role as a reformer of Capitol Hill culture. “I think my role is to break new ground in Congress,” Chisholm noted. She insisted that her strength was in bringing legislative factions together. “I can talk with legislators from the South, the West, all over. They view me as a national figure and that makes me more acceptable.” Two weeks later Chisholm turned back Wright and Hispanic political activist Luz Vega in the Democratic primary, winning 54 percent of the vote to Wright’s 36 percent and Vega’s 10 percent. She won the general election handily with 83 percent of the vote. From the late 1970s onward, Brooklyn Democrats speculated that Chisholm was losing interest in her House seat. Her name was widely floated as a possible candidate for several jobs related to education, including president of the City College of New York and chancellor of the New York City public school system. In 1982, Chisholm declined to seek re-election. “Shirley Chisholm would like to have a little life of her own,” she told the Christian Science Monitor, citing personal reasons for her decision to leave the House; she wanted to spend more time with her second husband, Arthur Hardwick, Jr., a New York state legislator she had married about six months after divorcing Conrad Chisholm in 1977. Other reasons, too, factored into Chisholm’s decision to leave the House. She had grown disillusioned over the conservative turn the country had taken with the election of President Ronald W. Reagan in 1980. Also, there were tensions with people on her side of the political fence, particularly African-American politicians who, she insisted, misunderstood her efforts to build alliances. While her rhetoric about racial inequality could be passionate at times, Chisholm’s actions toward the white establishment in Congress were often conciliatory. Chisholm maintained that many members of the black community did not understand the need for negotiation with white politicians. “We still have to engage in compromise, the highest of all arts,” Chisholm noted. “Blacks can’t do things on their own, nor can whites. When you have black racists and white racists it is very difficult to build bridges between communities.” After leaving Congress in January 1983, Chisholm helped cofound the National Political Congress of Black Women and campaigned for Jesse Jackson’s presidential bids in 1984 and 1988. She also taught at Mt. Holyoke College in 1983. Though nominated as U.S. Ambassador to Jamaica by President William J. Clinton, Chisholm declined due to ill health. She settled in Palm Coast, Florida, where she wrote and lectured, and died on January 1, 2005, in Ormond Beach, Florida. Photo by Leif Skoogfors, used with permission Geraldine Anne Ferraro (August 26, 1935 – March 26, 2011) was an American attorney, a Democratic Party politician, and a member of the United States House of Representatives. She was the first female Vice Presidential candidate representing a major American political party. Ferraro grew up in New York City and became a teacher and lawyer. She joined the Queens County District Attorney's Office in 1974, where she headed the new Special Victims Bureau that dealt with sex crimes, child abuse, and domestic violence. She was elected to the House in 1978, where she rose rapidly in the party hierarchy while focusing on legislation to bring equity for women in the areas of wages, pensions, and retirement plans. In 1984, former Vice President and presidential candidate Walter Mondale selected Ferraro to be his running mate in the upcoming election. In doing so she became the only Italian American to be a major-party national nominee in addition to being the first woman. The positive polling the Mondale-Ferraro ticket received when she joined faded as questions about her and her husband's finances arose. In the general election, Mondale and Ferraro were defeated in a landslide by incumbent President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H. W. Bush. Ferraro ran campaigns for a seat in the United States Senate from New York in 1992 and 1998, both times starting as the front-runner for her party's nomination before losing in the primary election. She served as a United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from 1993 until 1996, in the presidential administration of Bill Clinton. She also continued her career as a journalist, author, and businesswoman, and served in the 2008 presidential campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Ferraro died on March 26, 2011, from multiple myeloma, 12 years after being diagnosed. If you're a fan of Law & Order SVU: thank Geraldine Ferraro. She was the first head of the Queens County District Attorney's Office Special Victims Bureau in 1974. There is a lot of information about her life here. Dr. Maya Angelou is one of the most renowned and influential voices of our time. Hailed as a global renaissance woman, Dr. Angelou is a celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist, educator, dramatist, producer, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist. Born on April 4th, 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Angelou was raised in St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas. In Stamps, Dr. Angelou experienced the brutality of racial discrimination, but she also absorbed the unshakable faith and values of traditional African-American family, community, and culture. As a teenager, Dr. Angelou’s love for the arts won her a scholarship to study dance and drama at San Francisco’s Labor School. At 14, she dropped out to become San Francisco’s first African-American female cable car conductor. She later finished high school, giving birth to her son, Guy, a few weeks after graduation. As a young single mother, she supported her son by working as a waitress and cook, however her passion for music, dance, performance, and poetry would soon take center stage. In 1954 and 1955, Dr. Angelou toured Europe with a production of the opera Porgy and Bess. She studied modern dance with Martha Graham, danced with Alvin Ailey on television variety shows and, in 1957, recorded her first album, Calypso Lady. In 1958, she moved to New York, where she joined the Harlem Writers Guild, acted in the historic Off-Broadway production of Jean Genet's The Blacks and wrote and performed Cabaret for Freedom. In 1960, Dr. Angelou moved to Cairo, Egypt where she served as editor of the English language weeklyThe Arab Observer. The next year, she moved to Ghana where she taught at the University of Ghana's School of Music and Drama, worked as feature editor for The African Review and wrote for The Ghanaian Times. During her years abroad, Dr. Angelou read and studied voraciously, mastering French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic and the West African language Fanti. While in Ghana, she met with Malcolm X and, in 1964, returned to America to help him build his new Organization of African American Unity. Shortly after her arrival in the United States, Malcolm X was assassinated, and the organization dissolved. Soon after X's assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. asked Dr. Angelou to serve as Northern Coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King's assassination, falling on her birthday in 1968, left her devastated. With the guidance of her friend, the novelist James Baldwin, she began work on the book that would become I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Published in 1970, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was published to international acclaim and enormous popular success. The list of her published verse, non-fiction, and fiction now includes more than 30 bestselling titles. A trailblazer in film and television, Dr. Angelou wrote the screenplay and composed the score for the 1972 film Georgia, Georgia. Her script, the first by an African American woman ever to be filmed, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She continues to appear on television and in films including the landmark television adaptation of Alex Haley's Roots (1977) and John Singleton's Poetic Justice(1993). In 1996, she directed her first feature film,Down in the Delta. In 2008, she composed poetry for and narrated the award-winning documentary The Black Candle, directed by M.K. Asante. Dr. Angelou has served on two presidential committees, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000, the Lincoln Medal in 2008, and has received 3 Grammy Awards. President Clinton requested that she compose a poem to read at his inauguration in 1993. Dr. Angelou's reading of her poem "On the Pulse of the Morning" was broadcast live around the world. Dr. Angelou has received over 30 honorary degrees and is Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. Dr. Angelou’s words and actions continue to stir our souls, energize our bodies, liberate our minds, and heal our hearts. Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell (May 20, 1825-November 5, 1921), a women's rights activist and social reformer, was the first American woman to be ordained as minister by a congregation. Always ahead of her time, she with great difficulty broke trails that other women later more easily followed. She wrote prolifically on religion and science, constructing a theoretical foundation for sexual equality.Antoinette "Nette" Brown was born in Henrietta, New York, the seventh child of Joseph and Abigail Morse Brown. From childhood on Nette preferred writing and men's farm chores to housework. "Sewing was always my detestation," she later wrote. Her family encouraged her studies and her father paid her to help with the threshing. The family's religious background was Liberal Congregationalist, which stressed God's mercy and human initiative, and not the terror of future punishment. Antoinette learned about religion from her grandmother, who read and discussed with the children the Bible and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. She learned to think of God as a friendly presence. Seeking solitude by day and night in the nearby woods, she discovered, in contemplation of the sky, "a new heaven and a new earth." One Sunday, when Antoinette was eight, a visiting preacher challenged the people of her family's church to give their lives to God. The next Sunday she told her Sunday School teacher that she wanted to be a minister. The teacher firmly dismissed her desire, saying that girls could not be ministers. With the support of her mother, however, Antoinette held fast to her dream. Her mother pinned a small white ribbon inside her collar—something to hold onto when others criticized her or failed to understand. After studying at Monroe County Academy, 1838-40, Brown became a schoolteacher. In 1846 she entered a nondegree literature program at Oberlin College in Ohio. Upon completion in 1847, she asked to enter the Theology Department. Although Oberlin espoused women's education, College officials at first resisted her application. During the three years that she spent studying theology she was constantly reminded by both faculty and fellow students that the Bible did not approve of women speaking in church. She had to get special permission from her professor to speak in class and from the Theological Literary Society to present essays. One of these, an exegesis of 1 Corinthians 14:34, was published in the Oberlin Quarterly Review. She claimed that, in asking women to be silent in church, St. Paul meant only to warn against excesses in public worship. Her article was accompanied by a professor's rebuttal, defining women's rights and duties more conservatively. In 1850, seventeen years after pinning on the white ribbon, Brown completed her theological studies. She was not, however, given a degree. Only decades later did Oberlin award her degrees—an honorary M.A. in 1878, and an honorary D.D. in 1908. The Congregational Church initially denied her a license to preach because she was a woman. A year later they relented and permitted her to preach, although ordination was withheld. For two years Brown traveled, lecturing on reform issues, including women's rights. In an 1852 letter to her friend and classmate from Oberlin, Lucy Stone, Brown recounted "speaking 18 times in 19 days, in Wayne Co." During that lecture tour she missed a stage, walked 7 ½ miles in a snow storm, "took a cold water wash when I got home, and the next morning got up as well as ever without even a stiff joint." Sometimes Brown preached in Unitarian churches, including those of Theodore Parker and William Ellery Channing. Charles A. Dana and Horace Greeley offered her a substantial salary if she would hold Sunday services in a New York City hall. Instead, in 1852 she accepted a call from the Congregational Church of South Butler, New York. Because the Congregational clergy were reluctant to ordain a woman, she was ordained there in 1853 by a Methodist minister. Although later historians would question whether this was the first ordination of a woman, at the time it was recognized as such, and for all her life Brown was known as the first ordained woman. Horace Greeley's New York Tribune reported on the occasion: "it was a new position for woman, and gave promise to her exaltation to that moral and intellectual rank which she was designed to fulfill." Brown entered her ministry with enthusiasm. "The pastoral labors at S. Butler suit me even better than I expected," she wrote, "& my heart is full of hope." She soon officiated at a marriage ceremony in Rochester, New York, the first wedding done by an American woman minister. Chosen by her church a delegate to the 1853 World's Temperance Convention, she was several times shouted down when she attempted to speak. Supported by Greeley's Tribune and members of the Woman's Rights Convention meeting at the same time, she brought a measure of disgrace to the male clergy in attendance who had treated her, and women in general, with disrespect. Brown was unprepared, however, for the openly critical attitudes of women in her parish, who had been long conditioned to regard the minister as a father figure. Further, her sisters in the struggle for women's rights gave her little moral and emotional support. Even her intimate friends in the movement—Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony—did not think it worthwhile for women to expend effort forcing entrance into an institution as corrupt and outdated as the church. It would be ten years before another woman was ordained. In the meantime Brown had no one to counsel her in a deepening emotional crisis. Exposure to liberal Unitarian theology, particularly regarding salvation and eternal punishment, led Brown to re-examine her beliefs. When two infants died in her parish she could not bring herself to uphold church doctrine by declaring the unbaptized children damned. After just ten months in the parish, she resigned from the South Butler church, citing poor health, but also in doubt about the Congregational creed. A short period of rest at her family's farm in Henrietta improved Brown's health. Anthony encouraged her to help with the campaign for women's right to own property in New York State. Feeling that she was once again needed, Brown began lecturing again for abolition, temperance, and women's rights. Brown spent a year doing volunteer work in the slums and prisons of New York City, 1855-56. She studied causes of mental and social disorder amidst poverty, especially how these affected the lives of women. She wrote a series of articles for the New York Tribune, the first of which focused on the disparity between the "polished, enlightened, civilized Christianized society" and the "shadow of poverty" hovering over the streets and alleys of the city. The collected articles she published as Shadows of Our Social System, 1856. While in New York Brown continued her theological evolution in concert with a new friend, Samuel Charles Blackwell, whom she married in 1856. Samuel, a real estate dealer and hardware salesman, was an abolitionist and the brother of Henry Blackwell, husband of Lucy Stone. Antoinette later wrote, "that [Samuel] was passing through a very similar experience to my own from the orthodoxy of his early training and his earlier years, into a more sanguine religious phase than my own enabled him to become to me a present help in my time of trouble." Prior to their marriage Samuel agreed to Antoinette continuing her lecture tours. When their children were born he helped care for them. She wrote to him before they were married: "We will be governed very much by circumstances and what seems best as the years go by, but I think, Sam we can be self sovereigns, we can bend everything within & without to our wills, and our wills to our intellects." The Blackwells lived most of their married life in New Jersey. Five of their seven children survived infancy: Florence, Edith, Grace, Ethel and Agnes. Mabel died at 3 months of age, and a male child was stillborn. Florence became a Methodist minister, Edith and Ethel became physicians, and Agnes an artist and art teacher. Grace suffered from depression which prevented her from taking on challenging work. In 1860, while Olympia Brown (no relation to Antoinette), later ordained as a Universalist minister, was studying at Antioch College, she invited Blackwell to lecture and preach. The women shared their frustrations with the obstacles placed in their paths and became friends. Antoinette pinned a white ribbon like the one she still wore on Olympia's dress to signify their solidarity. As early as 1853 Blackwell had written that she was not ready to approve of divorce whenever a couple wanted it, even if the husband was a drunkard. "Let them have legal separation but not the right of second marriage." She opposed Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton on this issue at the 1860 National Woman's Rights Convention. "All divorce is naturally and morally impossible," she then argued. Later in life, after her husband died, she wrote, "The family is the basis of civilization" and "must be the most carefully safeguarded." Based upon her own experience, she thought marriage "a life union" and "the most binding of all human pledges." After the Civil War Blackwell lectured on women's struggle for equality and their right to vote. Even though she had a sympathetic husband she still struggled to combine marriage and her "intellectual work." She later wrote to Olympia Brown, "Doubtless the mother of a family can attend to professional duties; but she cannot absorb herself wholly in professional life & Women must bend the professions to themselves and their capacities." In an 1873 paper for the Association for the Advancement of Women she advocated part time work for married women, with their husbands helping out with child care and housework. During the years when she needed to devote the most time to care for her children, Blackwell turned to writing as an occupation which most "easily coincided with family duties." She wrote articles for the Woman's Journal, edited by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell. Her book, Studies in General Science, 1869, was a compilation of essays written over a decade. In one of these, "The Struggle for Existence", she answered Herbert Spencer who had characterized evolution as the "godless cruelty and wastefulness of the natural world." "The struggle for existence," she wrote, "is but a perfected system of cooperations in which all sentient and unsentient forces mutually co-work in securing the highest ultimate for good." Blackwell pursued the evolutionary topic with The Sexes Throughout Nature, 1875, a corrective to Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species. "Mr. Darwin," she argued, "has failed to hold definitely before the mind the principle that the difference of sex, whatever it may consist in, must itself be subject to natural selection and evolution." In The Physical Basis of Immortality, 1876, Blackwell tried through "the light of established science" and "admitted facts in nature" to prove "the truth that the ultimate elements of Universal Nature are simple and indestructible." She reasoned that the "mind-unit" would be as "tenacious of its continuous maintenance" as metals, rocks, and planets, and would be "able to steadily provide itself with allies which shall outlast the perishable form with which it is temporarily associated." In 1881 Blackwell was one of the few women of her time elected to membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Because of her experience with the South Butler church Blackwell avoided aligning herself with any religious sect until, in early 1878, she and her husband began visiting Unitarian churches in New York City. She applied to the American Unitarian Association and was recognized as a minister later that year. She was, however, discouraged by the lack of opportunities available to her that suited her family situation. By the end of 1879 she had decided to settle for occasional preaching and a resumption of lecture touring. Despite her unusually favorable financial and personal circumstances, Blackwell found herself unable to seriously pursue a full-time professional occupation. Nevertheless she insisted in her 1870s speeches that "women should not be forced to choose between family life and the work they might do beyond the family." In 1893 Blackwell stated at the Parliament of Religions which met during the Columbian Exposition in Chicago: "Women are needed in the pulpit as imperatively and for the same reason that they are needed in the world—because they are women. Women have become—or when the ingrained habit of unconscious imitation has been superseded, they will become—indispensable to the religious evolution of the human race." In 1903 Blackwell helped organize a Unitarian Society in Elizabeth, New Jersey and served as its minister for the first year. In 1908 she was elected minister emeritus. The last surviving delegate to the first national women's rights convention, which had taken place in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1850, in 1920 at the age of ninety-five Blackwell proudly exercised her newly-won right to vote. There are Blackwell Family Papers at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and at the Schlesinger Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The latter collection includes Blackwell's memoirs. A substantial published correspondence is Carol Lasser and Marlene Deahl Merrill, Friends and Sisters: Letters between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846-93 (1987). Blackwell's works not mentioned above are The Island Neighbors (1871), The Philosophy of Individuality (1893), Sea Drift (1902), The Making of the Universe (1914), The Social Side of Mind and Action (1915), many speeches, papers, and published articles. The principal modern biography is Elizabeth Cazden, Antoinette Brown Blackwell: A Biography (1983). Useful articles include Dorothy May Emerson, "Representative Women," Occasional Paper #2, Unitarian Universalist Women's Heritage Society (1992), the entry in Catherine F. Hitchings, Universalist and Unitarian Women Ministers (1985), and the entry by Carol Lasser in American National Biography (1999). Much thanks to the fabulous Lella Baker for suggesting Dara Torres as today's woman of the day! Great idea! Dara Torres is arguably the fastest female swimmer in America. She entered her first international swimming competition at age 14 and competed in her first Olympics a few years later in 1984. At the Beijing Games in 2008, Dara became the oldest swimmer to compete in the Olympics. When she took three silver medals – including the infamous heartbreaking 50-meter freestyle race where she missed the Gold by 1/100th of a second – America loved her all the more for her astonishing achievement and her good-natured acceptance of the results. Since her first international race at the age of 14, Dara Torres has proven that she is far from your average athlete. As a student at the University of Florida, she earned the maximum possible number of 28 NCAA All-American swimming awards. As the first US swimmer to compete in four Olympic Games, Dara set three World records and won nine Olympic medals, including four gold. In the Sydney Olympic Games alone, after a seven-year break from competitive swimming, Dara won gold in the 400m freestyle and 400m MR and bronze in the 50m freestyle, 100m freestyle, and the 100m butterfly. After the 2000 Olympics, Dara retired again to start a family, but dove right back into swimming in the 2006 Masters Nationals where she broke a world record, just three weeks after her daughter’s birth. And in August 2007 Dara won another National title and broke her own 7 year old American Record in the 50 Freestyle. Outside of swimming, Dara has made a name for herself as a TV commentator and a print model and was the first athlete to appear in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue in 1994. She was a feature correspondent for Good Morning America, worked on-air for ESPN, TNT and Fox News Channel including stints on NHL Cool Shots and Fox Sports Sunday. Six-time Olympic coach Michael Lohberg described Torres's drive as "just amazing", "To make a run at the Olympics for a 40-year-old mother seems totally out of the question .... But Dara is not measured by normal standards. She is truly an exception, defying several laws of life." (Swimnews.com) Torres has successfully made her comeback to competitive swimming by making her 5th Olympic squad. She won a total of 3 silver medals at the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008. She's in the Bible, she's in your life, she's in the news, she's everywhere--you just have to look. Once you look, you'll find her. In the Bible, she's the woman at the well, and in so many other verses, too. (do we know her name? no.) In your life, she's the one who you go to when you need a moment of sanity or a second opinion on reality. In the news, she's the one behind the shadow, talking in a digital voice. As women, we deserve to be named. So today, I dedicate the blog post to the Nameless Woman--because she's out there, because she's important, because without her--we would be lost. But it's more than that. As women, we have other women in our life who have shaped us, made us who we are, stepped in at just the right moment to give us a boost or guide us on our journey. Some stay for a moment, some stay for a day, some are friends for a lifetime. If you are anything like me, you value the heck out of those people, and you take them for granted at the same time. I often seek them out, the wise women, and I hang around them hoping some of their wisdom will rub off on me. Thankfully, it usually does. If you're reading this blog, it is highly likely that you are one of these women, that you've been one of these people in my life. Thank You. I can't say it enough. Thank you. So tonight, I leave this for you to think about: are these friendships/helpful moments/gifts of grace unique to women? Are we more generous and forgiving with each other? Who has helped you along your path? Who has given you strength? Who has given you courage? Who has given you a shoulder to stand on? A shoulder to cry on? What is her name? How many names are there? This post is for her/them. Say their names. Those of us who pay attention to the issues that we are facing in the United States, especially those concerned with our food supply and the chemicals we encounter on a daily basis should definitely read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Rachel Carson, writer, scientist, and ecologist, grew up simply in the rural river town of Springdale, Pennsylvania. Her mother bequeathed to her a life-long love of nature and the living world that Rachel expressed first as a writer and later as a student of marine biology. Carson graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) in 1929, studied at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, and received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins University in 1932. She was hired by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to write radio scripts during the Depression and supplemented her income writing feature articles on natural history for the Baltimore Sun. She began a fifteen-year career in the federal service as a scientist and editor in 1936 and rose to become Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She wrote pamphlets on conservation and natural resources and edited scientific articles, but in her free time turned her government research into lyric prose, first as an article "Undersea" (1937, for the Atlantic Monthly), and then in a book, Under the Sea-wind (1941). In 1952 she published her prize-winning study of the ocean, The Sea Around Us, which was followed by The Edge of the Sea in 1955. These books constituted a biography of the ocean and made Carson famous as a naturalist and science writer for the public. Carson resigned from government service in 1952 to devote herself to her writing. She wrote several other articles designed to teach people about the wonder and beauty of the living world, including "Help Your Child to Wonder," (1956) and "Our Ever-Changing Shore" (1957), and planned another book on the ecology of life. Embedded within all of Carson's writing was the view that human beings were but one part of nature distinguished primarily by their power to alter it, in some cases irreversibly. Disturbed by the profligate use of synthetic chemical pesticides after World War II, Carson reluctantly changed her focus in order to warn the public about the long term effects of misusing pesticides. In Silent Spring (1962) she challenged the practices of agricultural scientists and the government, and called for a change in the way humankind viewed the natural world. Carson was attacked by the chemical industry and some in government as an alarmist, but courageously spoke out to remind us that we are a vulnerable part of the natural world subject to the same damage as the rest of the ecosystem. Testifying before Congress in 1963, Carson called for new policies to protect human health and the environment. Rachel Carson died in 1964 after a long battle against breast cancer. Her witness for the beauty and integrity of life continues to inspire new generations to protect the living world and all its creatures. Dr. Ida Sophia Scudder (December 9, 1870 – May 24, 1960) was a third-generation American medical missionary in India of the Reformed Church in America. She dedicated her life to the plight of Indian women and the fight against bubonic plague, cholera and leprosy. In 1918, she started one of Asia's foremost teaching hospitals, the Christian Medical College & Hospital, Vellore, India. She was born of Dr. John Scudder Jr. and his wife, Sophia (née Weld), part of a long line of medical missionaries (see Scudders in India). The granddaughter of John Scudder, Sr., as a child in India, she witnessed the famine, poverty and disease in India. She was invited by Dwight Moody to study at his Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts, where she earned a reputation for pranks. She initially expected to get married and settle down in the United States after seminary, but in 1890 she went back to India to help her father when her mother was ailing at the mission bungalow at Tindivanam. Ida had expressed a resolve not to become a medical missionary, but during that stay, she had the enlightening experience of not being able to help three woman in childbirth who died needlessly in one night. That experience convinced her that God wanted her to become a physician and return to help the women of India. She never married. She graduated from Cornell Medical College, New York City in 1899, as part of the first class at that school that accepted women as medical students. She then headed back to India, fortified with a $10,000 grant from a Mr. Schell, a Manhattan banker, in memory of his wife. With the money, she started a tiny medical dispensary and clinic for women at Vellore, 75 miles from Madras. Her father died in 1900, soon after she arrived in India. In two years she treated 5,000 patients. She opened the Mary Taber Schell Hospital in 1902. Ida Scudder realized that she would be foolish to go on alone in her fight to bring better health to South India's women, so she decided to open a medical school for girls. Skeptical males said she would be lucky to get three applicants; actually she had 151 the first year (1918), and had to turn many away ever since. At first, the Reformed Church in America was the main backer of the Vellore school, but after Dr. Scudder agreed to make it coeducational, it eventually gained the support of 40 missions. Of 242 students today, 95 are men. In 1928 ground was broken for the "Hillsite" medical school campus on 200 acres (0.8 km²) at Bagayam, Vellore. In 1928, Mahatma Gandhi visited the medical school. She traveled a number of times to the United States to raise funds for the college and hospital, raising a total in the millions. In 1945, the college was opened to men as well as women. In 2003 the Vellore Christian Medical Center was the largest Christian hospital in the world, with 2000 beds, and its medical school is now one of the premier medical colleges in India. One day in 1953, aged 82, she was at "Hilltop", her bungalow at Kodaikanal, which overlooked Vellore's Christian Medical College and its hospital, and opened a stack of letters and telegrams. Her name is a famous one in India. A letter once reached her addressed simply, "Dr. Ida, India." But the mail was heavier than usual because friends around the world were congratulating her on winning the Elizabeth Blackwell Citation from the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, as one of 1952's five outstanding women doctors. She died, aged 89, at her bungalow. A stamp issued on August 12, 2000, as part of centenary celebrations of Christian Medical College, depicts the college chapel, the motivating monument of the medical college and hospital, symbolising the ethos of the institution. The First-day cover portrays Dr Ida Scudder, who founded the institute in 1900, working for the medical requirements of pregnant women. |
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