Crafty Times

My list of Great Woman.

By Sue Farace, on February 2nd, 2010

I was able to compile this list using these two websites and sugessions everyone made:

http://www.greatwomen.org/ and http://en.thinkexist.com/quotes/

Famous Woman that created change:

Susan B. Anthony taught school in New Rochelle and Canajoharie, NY, and discovered that male teachers were paid several times her salary. She devoted her first reform efforts to anti-slavery and to temperance, the campaign to curb alcohol. But when she rose to speak in a temperance convention, she was told, “The sisters were not invited here to speak!” Anthony promptly enlisted in the cause of women’s rights.

In a lifelong partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anthony’s organizational skill and selfless dedication built the women’s rights movement. The ballot, she became increasingly to believe, was the necessary foundation for all other advances. When she and Stanton published a newspaper, they called it The Revolution. Its motto was “Men their rights and nothing more; women their rights and nothing less.” In order to press a test case of her belief that women, as citizens, could not be denied the ballot, Anthony voted. She was tried, convicted and fined for voting illegally.

For over thirty years she traveled the country almost ceaselessly working for women’s rights. In 1906, her health failing, Anthony addressed her last women’s suffrage convention. Although she sensed that the cause would not be won in her lifetime, she looked out across the assembled women and told them,

“Failure is impossible.”

Rachael Carson 1907-1964

A shy young woman who loved books and nature equally well, Rachel Carson trained as a zoologist. She joined the Fish and Wildlife Service in Washington to work on their publications. In 1951 she came to national prominence when her book, The Sea Around Us, topped the best seller list for 86 weeks. Her graceful prose opened up scientific knowledge about the oceans to the layperson. An earlier work, Under the Sea Wind, was reissued. When she studied marine life in Maine for her next book, The Edge of the Sea, she stayed for hours wading in icy tidal pools until she was so numb with cold she had to be carried out.

She was not by nature a crusader, but when aerial spraying of DDT killed the birds in a friend’s bird sanctuary, she began to investigate the effects of pesticides on the chain of life. “The environment” and “ecology” have since become household words for Americans, but it all began with her Silent Spring in 1962. Driven by the knowledge that the book was desperately needed, she pored over and combined the work of many individual researchers. She wrote of the heedless pesticide poisoning of our rivers and soils, warning that we might soon face a spring when no bird songs could be heard.

Rachel Carson had to weather a storm of controversy and abuse, and she did not live to see the eventual banning of DDT. But the environmentalist movement carries on the work she began, preserving our natural heritage for the future.

“One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, ‘What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’”

Joan Ganz Cooney, as creator of Sesame Street, has benefited millions of young children.

After graduating from the University of Arizona, Cooney worked as a newspaper reporter. In 1954, she moved to New York City to write for television. In 1964, she received an award for her analysis of the antipoverty program in New York. That same year, after studying the use of television for preschool education and successfully soliciting over $8 million in funding, Cooney founded the Children’s Television Workshop and created Sesame Street.

Debuting in 1969, Sesame Street won numerous awards and is still seen by millions of children around the world. In some places, Sesame Street provides preschool children with their only structured opportunity to develop learning skills. Not only has the program enhanced preschool children’s understanding of the fundamentals of reading, but it has helped them appreciate the world and the variety of people in it.

Cooney’s research on poverty, education, and on children’s inquisitive nature, along with her creativity, lead to this television program of unequaled success. Perhaps no other woman in the late 20th century has influenced the education of children as much as Joan Ganz Cooney.

“There is a young and impressionable mind out there that is hungry for information. It has latched on to an electronic tube as its main source of nourishment”

Dorthea Dix; An unhappy childhood helped Dorothea Dix to identify with society’s outcasts. Like many young women of her day, she became a school teacher. Surrounded by the ferment of reform in pre-Civil War Boston but untouched by it, she was drifting towards a life of spinsterly aimlessness until one cold day in March 1841. She had volunteered to teach a Sunday school class at the jail in East Cambridge. Among the convicts, shivering in an unheated room, she found some women who were mentally ill. Why was there no stove to warm them, she demanded? Lunatics, she was told, could not feel the cold, and they would only burn themselves or set the building afire. Dorothea Dix determined to act; she had found her cause.

She spent over a year touring every jail, almshouse, and house of correction in Massachusetts. She then presented a report, or “memorial” to the Legislature asking for funds for an institution specially designed to treat the mentally ill. She did the same in state after state, traveling thousands of miles alone and publicizing the terrible conditions she found. Always observing the rules of feminine propriety, she rarely spoke publicly, but she was a persuasive lobbyist behind the scenes.

When the Civil War broke out she was appointed superintendent of nurses for the Union Army. Unfortunately, this was a role for which she was ill-suited, and controversy swirled around her. After the war she toured hospitals in the South and in Europe, slowing up but never abandoning her role as crusader for humane treatment of the insane.

“In a world where there is so much to be done, I felt strongly impressed that there must be something for me to do”

Marian Wright Edelman, civil rights activist and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, has dedicated her life to those who cannot always lift themselves up.

Edelman obtained a law degree at Yale and worked in Mississippi, becoming the first African-American woman to be admitted to that state’s bar. As a leader with the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund, Edelman helped coordinate the Poor People’s Campaign after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. She founded the Children’s Defense Fund in the 1970s, to apply pressure on the federal government to help poor children, and to coordinate nationwide activities to help children. Considered the nation’s most powerful children’s lobby, CDF secured the 1990 Act for Better Child Care, bringing more than $3 billion into daycare facilities and other programs. Many consider this law the first federal government acknowledgment that children matter. With 14.3 million American children living in poverty, Edelman continues her advocacy, focusing on expanding Head Start, health care and support for homeless children. In l993 Edelman published her book, The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours.

“If you don’t like the way the world is, you change it. You have an obligation to change it. You just do it one step at a time.”

“Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.”

“You’re not obligated to win. You’re obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day”

Helen Keller; When she was nineteen months old an illness left Helen deaf, blind, and mute. Though a wild, destructive child, she showed such signs of intelligence that her mother sent for a special teacher. The teacher, young Anne Sullivan, herself formerly blind, managed to break through to communicate with Helen. The child loved to learn, and her remarkable achievements in reading, writing and even speaking soon made her internationally famous.

Helen earned a bachelor’s degree at Radcliffe, where Anne Sullivan accompanied her to every class and spelled the lectures into her hand. She wrote poetry, toured on the Chatauqua lecture circuit, and published an autobiography, The Story of My Life. Helen became a member of the Socialist Party. She also supported controversial groups like the Industrial Workers of the World, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and Margaret Sanger’s birth control crusade.

In the 1920s, the newly established American Foundation for the Blind asked Helen Keller to help them raise funds. She was living testimony to the capabilities of a group once assumed to be retarded and helpless, and she spent most of the rest of her life as the most prominent advocate for the needs and rights of the handicapped. She lobbied for measures to aid the blind, including reading services and Social Security acceptance.

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

“We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long enough”

Annie Oakley was probably the nation’s finest marksman. Born in 1860, she was an outstanding Ohio woman who gave freely of her time, funds and energies to benefit other women.

Oakley’s shooting skills were developed early in her life and when she was age 21 she met her future husband, shooting champion, Frank Butler by defeating him in a match. They toured as a team for some years before he retired to manage her career. She joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in 1885 and performed as the star of that 19th century show for more than 16 years. She astonished Americans and royalty across England and Europe with her amazing skill.

She was injured in a train accident in 1901 that ended her career with the Wild West. After she recovered she went on to shoot in charity events to help orphans, widows, and underprivileged women. She campaigned for women’s rights to hold paid employment, earn equal pay, participate in sports, and defend herself in her own home and on city streets.

“Aim at a high mark and you will hit it. No, not the first time, not the second time and maybe not the third. But keep on aiming and keep on shooting for only practice will make you perfect. Finally you’ll hit the bull’s-eye of success.”

Nikki Giovanni is a world-renowned poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. Over the past thirty years, her outspokenness, in her writing and in lectures, has brought the eyes of the world upon her. One of the most widely-read American poets, she prides herself on being “a Black American, a daughter, a mother, a professor of English.” Giovanni remains as determined and committed as ever to the fight for civil rights and equality. Always insisting on presenting the truth as she sees it, she has maintained a prominent place as a strong voice of the Black community. Her focus is on the individual, specifically, on the power one has to make a difference in oneself, and thus, in the lives of others.

“I really don’t think life is about the I-could-have-beens. Life is only about the I-tried-to-do. I don’t mind the failure but I can’t imagine that I’d forgive myself if I didn’t try.”

Juliette Gordon-Low Her mother was witty and outspoken, and young “Daisy,” as Juliette was called, also tended to be charming but erratic. Her family was composed of wealthy social leaders in Savannah. In 1886 she married William Mackay Low, an intimate of the Prince of Wales and heir to a huge fortune. In high society in late Victorian England, Daisy was a great success. Her increasing deafness might have made a recluse of a less vibrant personality.

She was in her fifties before she began her work for which she is remembered. She met General Sir Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, and became an enthusiast of their female counterpart, the Girl Guides. When the Girl Scouts of the USA was formally organized in 1915, Daisy became the first president and she gave freely of her own money in the early years.

She found it useful to exaggerate her deafness when she pretended not to hear friends who tried to beg off commitments to work for the Scouts. Her lifelong eccentricity and love of “stunts” were enlisted in the cause. She would trim her hat with carrots and parsley and go to a fashionable luncheon. “Oh, is my trimming sad?” she would ask as the vegetables drooped. “I can’t afford to have this hat done over — I have to save all my money for my Girl Scouts. You know about the Scouts, don’t you?” Soon all America did, thanks to the woman they lovingly called the founder of Girl Scouting.

“I realize that each year it has changed and grown until I know that, a decade from now, what I might say of it would seem like an echo of what has been instead of what is."

Oprah Winfrey: At the heart of everything Oprah Winfrey does, there is a consistent message – that individuals should take personal responsibility for their lives, and to improve the world.

Winfrey is the first African-American woman to own her own production company; a talented actress nominated for an Academy Award in her first movie; television’s highest-paid entertainer; producer and actress in her own television specials; and the successful host of a syndicated television talk show that reaches 15 million people a day. She does all that she can to eradicate child abuse. As a victim herself, Winfrey knows the damage abuse does to young lives, and she was a major force in the drafting, lobbying and passage of the National Child Protection Act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1994. The Act establishes a national registry of child abusers to help employers and those working with children to screen out dangerous people. Winfrey is also a committed philanthropist, providing significant assistance to schools (Morehouse College, Tennessee State University, Chicago Academy of Arts) as well as to the Chicago Public Schools. She also funds battered women’s shelters and campaigns to catch child abusers.

“As you become more clear about who you really are, you’ll be better able to decide what is best for you – the first time around.”

“The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change his future by merely changing his attitude.”