My mother was a woman of energy and drive. Influenced by her parents, she had a heart for helping others. Marrying my father in 1940, she started college a few years later only to be told she had to leave to “make room for the boys coming home from WWII”.
By the time I came along, the fourth and last child, she was an active volunteer tutoring in Detroit inner-city schools. Then came volunteering with Red Cross bloodmobile drives until she had her own team managing drives throughout the city. She encouraged me to “dream big.”
We’ve all had people of influence in our lives. Here at the close of Women’s History Month, I am inspired by yet more readings of amazing women I knew little about.
Scientific contributions like Marie Curie’s role in the discovery of vaccines or Rachel Carson’s discovery of the dangerous impact of DDT on bird life are well known. So are Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Gloria Steinman in pursuit of civil rights.
Lesser known are a host of champions either working independently or side by side with famous male colleagues. Women like Alice Hamilton.
Born in 1869 in Indiana, Hamilton pursued medicine, graduated from UoM, and focused on the scientific method of studying cause and effect in relation to health.
By 1915, when American industry began producing weapons and chemicals for WWI, she had already spent five years studying the dirtiest and dangerous corners of industry. She suspected a link between working conditions and why poor people were affected disproportionately by disease.
Following countless investigations, Hamilton became a pioneer in the field of occupational medicine. Her revealing studies of dangerous industries drove the creation of industry safety standards.
She was the first woman faculty member at Harvard University, a post she accepted only as part-time to allow continued working at Hull House, a settlement house in Chicago in the early 1900s offering services to immigrants and those in need.
At Hull House she witnessed the impact of the worst working conditions on the poor and joined Jane Addams who led a network of woman reformers advocating for changes in labor laws, old age insurance, and public health initiatives.
One of those reformers was Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under FDR, serving his entire term. Besides being the first woman cabinet member, major reforms: Social Security, minimum wage, worker’s compensation, and unemployment insurance all fell under her guidance.
In 1935, when FDR announced his intention to create Social Security, it came under attack. Suggested changes were to completely fund it through select employers, effectively excluding the majority of black workers. Perkins partnered with Eleanor Roosevelt to press for universal coverage. FDR’s resultant fireside chat statement: “Our responsibility is to all people of this country.”
There are so many women to mention. Mother Jones and her crusade against child labor resulted in child labor laws. Dolores Huerta, co-founder with Cesar Chavez of the United Farm Workers, organized worker strikes and launched boycotts as a new and effective means of public advocacy and support.
Septima Clark, born in 1898 was a pragmatic black teacher whose gentle style and spine of steel led her to focus basic lessons on practical civic knowledge. There wasn’t any of the “See Spot run” books some of us may recall. Clark developed workbooks that were respectful of children and adult students with chapters on political parties, taxes, social security, and voting rights.
In 1953, she joined Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, the only place in the South where blacks and whites met together to talk about early childhood education. Rosa Parks was a student. Attacked as “Communist” and a series of false charges, efforts to shut down Highlander eventually succeeded on the basis that it allowed integration.
Clark, meanwhile, calmly organized additional workshops and citizenship schools. She partnered with Martin Luther King to have the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) take over the classes. Clark became director of education and teaching for SCLC. By 1963, 400 local citizenship schools crossed twelve southern states.
Like so many of these leaders, no matter the antagonism directed her way, she refused to respond in kind. Inspirational indeed.