Sheila Scott: Record-Setting Pilot

Sheila Scott (27 April 1922 – 20 October 1988) was an amazing pilot who broke over 100 aviation records during her career, and was the first person to fly over the North Pole in a small aircraft as part of her "world and a half" flight in 1971 where she flew 34,000-miles (55,000 kms). A harrowing flight that was completed despite mechanical failures that would have made other pilots turn back.

But her adventurous life began even before she climbed into the cockpit. During World War II she served as a nurse in a naval hospital, while also working as an actor.

But when she took up flying, she dedicated herself to it completely. She learned to fly in 1958, and by the 1960s she was setting world records. She was the founder and first governor of the British branch of the Ninety-Nines, the association of women pilots created by Amelia Earhart and 98 other women in 1929.

In 1966, she completed her first solo flight around the world, starting on 18 May in London, and returning on 20 June, after covering approximately 31,000 miles. Then, three years later, she did it again.

In 1967, she was awarded a Harmon International Aviation Trophy for setting a new light plane speed record.

She was inducted into the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame in 2014. 

If you like the work I do here on SRPS, please support me!

Read More

Adele Goldstine - pioneering programmer

I've been doing some reading lately about the women who programmed the ENIAC computer, and was thrilled to learn that these six amazing women were trained by another amazing woman: Adele Goldstine!

Adele Goldstine (December 21, 1920 – November, 1964) earned her masters in mathematics from the University of Michigan, and then went to teach at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, at the University of Pennsylvania. That's important, because that's where the US Army set up their Ballistics Research Laboratory. Adele worked as a mathematics instructor for the women computers tasked with doing the calculations by hand.

That's also where they built the ENIAC computer, the very first programmable, electronic, digital computer, designed to solve large-scale problems -- like ballistic trajectories. Adele trained several of the original six women programmers, who were set loose on the machine to figure out how to program it. Being the first of its kind, no one really knew what it was capable of or how to go about programming it. So these women just figured it out.

Adele wrote the ENIAC Operators Manual (Bookshop/Amazon) based on what they discovered as they taught themselves, enabling more programmers to use the machine throughout the war. At first, each time the ENIAC was used, it had to be programmed from scratch, but eventually Adele figured out how to get it to "save" several key functions, saving the time of having to set it up again fresh.

You can learn more about her life and work in this excellent piece by the Society of Women Engineers.

[Image: Adele and Herman Goldstine. Source: Society of Women Engineers]

My inspiration to keep telling the stories of remarkable women comes from your support! If you were inspired by what you've read here, please consider making a donation, and share this post with your friends.

---

You may also be interested in:

Amazing Grace Hopper: life advice from a remarkable woman
This amazing woman was a trail-blazer, and nearly 25 years after her death, Rear Admiral Grace Hopper is still a role model whose life and achievements continue to serve as a positive influence for pretty much everyone. Her wisdom can help us find strength when we need it most, and encouragement to keep working even when it is difficult.

Margaret Hamilton - pioneering software engineer
Computer science pioneer Margaret Hamilton built the field of computer software engineering as she went along. The brilliance of her work wasn't so much that she build a system to help the astronauts reach the moon, but that she built it to basically save them from their own mistakes.

Uncovering Stories: Raye Montague - Navy Engineer
She was promoted into a civilian position with the equivalent rank as a captain, working as the Program Manager of Ships, in charge of the entire process of building a ship -- a dream job that combined her engineering talents with her business degree. She was the first woman to earn that position and she took it very seriously.

Read More

Marian Wright Edelman and trying your best

I've been thinking about what inspires social justice activists to continue fighting when it feels like there's always more work to do. One of the women whose work continues to inspire me is Marian Wright Edelman.

"You’re not obligated to win. You’re obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day." Marian Wright Edelman

The more I learn about her life and her work, the most I admire her. This quote is one I refer to often when I'm feeling discouraged. She has dedicated her life to protecting children, and especially children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and has helped improve the lives of millions. But there is still so much work to be done, and if anyone would know about how to stay focused and to keep doing their best every day in the face of daunting odds, it's Marian Wright Edelman.



Where does her strength come from?
While she was growing up, her father, a minister, would say "God runs a full employment economy." Her parents lived by the philosophy that whenever they saw a need, it was their responsibility to try to fill it, and guided their children to do the same. They were taught to be "servant-leaders," using their service as a way to improve the world around them. She was only 14 when her father died. His last words to her were "Don't let anything get in the way of your education." Such a heavy mantle to lay on a child, but she carried with grace and an incredible inner strength that came from knowing she was given the great gifts of intelligence and determination. She had already been told that she was powerful and capable, and that the best way for her to serve would be to make the most of her opportunities in service of the greater good.

She didn't let him down. She graduated as valedictorian from Spelman College in 1960, and studied law at Yale Law School, graduating with her JD in 1963. It was in her senior year at Spelman College that she joined the Civil Rights Movement, and was arrested as part of one of the largest student sit-ins at the Atlanta City Hall.

Becoming a servant-leader.
After she graduated from Yale Law School, she immediately headed directly to the center of the Civil Rights Movement activities: Mississippi. She worked as a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense And Educational Fund out of their Mississippi office, and became the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar. It was the Freedom Summer of 1964, and she was right there in the middle of it all, representing activists, working on racial justice issues, and witnessing first-hand the horrors Jim Crow and the tragedy of grinding poverty.

It was the experience of seeing children dying from preventable diseases, starvation, and generalized poverty that changed the course of her life. While still in Mississippi, she was instrumental in establishing the Head Start program there. Created under President Johnson's War on Poverty, the goal was to give communities the help they needed to meet the needs of disadvantaged preschool children, giving them a "head start" to prepare them for elementary school.

Using her voice.
Still fired up by her experience in Mississippi, she moved to Washington, DC, where she founded the Washington Research Project, a public interest law firm focused on civil rights and racial justice. But her real focus was serving the needs of children. She founded the Children's Defense Fund as a voice for those who cannot speak for themselves, particularly poor children, children of color and those with disabilities.

For 45 years she served as president of the CDF, using her position to tirelessly advocate for children across the country, taking on critical issues as diverse as child poverty, child health, youth justice, teen pregnancy, and gun violence. The CDF has been at the forefront of nearly every piece of legislation affecting children in the United States.

In November 2018, Marian transitioned from president to the role of president emerita, stepping back from the day to day duties. I guess that's as close to retirement a "servant leader" will get. As she said in a recent TED interview, "I feel like the luckiest person of the world to have been born at the intersection of great needs and great injustices and great opportunities to change them. I just feel very grateful that I could serve and make a difference."

My inspiration to keep telling the stories of remarkable women comes from your support! If you were inspired by what you've read here, please consider making a donation, and share this post with your friends.

---

You may also be interested in:

Read This: Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Freedom
"I'd had enough of just feeling angry... I was tired of hoping for justice. When my moment came, I was ready." Her moment came on March 2, 1955, when she was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on the bus. A full nine months before Rosa Parks did the same. In many ways, I find the story of this brave teenager to be even more inspirational than Rosa Park's.

Lorraine Hansberry - Eternally Young, Gifted and Black
"A woman who is willing to be herself and pursue her own potential runs not so much the risk of loneliness, as the challenge of exposure to more interesting men - and people in general." Lorraine Hansberry knew what she was talking about. She never shied away from pursuing her own goals.

Uncovering Stories: Raye Montague - Navy Engineer
She was promoted into a civilian position with the equivalent rank as a captain, working as the Program Manager of Ships, in charge of the entire process of building a ship -- a dream job that combined her engineering talents with her business degree. She was the first woman to earn that position and she took it very seriously.

Read More

Katharine Burr Blodgett

Katharine Burr Blodgett (January 10, 1898 – October 12, 1979) was the first woman to to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge, in 1926. She spent her career working for General Electric, where she invented low-reflectance "invisible" glass.

What I'm struck most by when reading about her life and work is that she just did her thing and didn't let anything get in her way. I'm sure it wasn't entirely that simple, of course.

She knew what she wanted to do with her life, and did it.

Her childhood was spent in France, where her mother moved the family a few years after Katharine's father was killed. She did well in school. The family's finances made it easy for her to enroll in private schools, but she had a scholarship for Bryn Mawr, where she earned her undergraduate degree.

She went on to earn a master's in chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1918, and was quickly hired by General Electric, where her father had worked as a patent attorney in the years before he was shot. She worked with Irving Langmuir, who'd worked with her father, making her the first female scientists hired by GE.

With his encouragement, she pursued a Ph.D. in physics, becoming the first woman to earn that degree at Cambridge when she graduated in 1926.

Over the course of her long career with GE she developed a wide variety of projects, including several with military applications during both World War I and II. She is most well known for her invention of nonreflecting glass in 1938 -- a technique still used in the manufacture of optical equipment, cameras, telescopes, and eyeglasses to cut down on glare.

She lived her personal life in a similar vein. She never married, and instead lived in a kind of long-term platonic (or maybe not?) relationship with two different women over the course of her lifetime. She was active in her community, and visited with her family regularly.

Her niece, Katharine Blodgett Gebbie, was named after her, and grew up to follow in her aunt's footsteps, pursuing her own career in physics.

You can read more about her work at GE at the Chemical Heritage Foundation's historical profile of Irving Langmuir and Katharine Burr Blodgett

I can't do the work of SRPS without your your support!
If you like what you found here, please share this post with your friends.

Read More

Edith Quimby - pioneering medical physicist

In the early decades of the 20th century scientists around the world were busy looking for ways to use radioactive materials. Following its groundbreaking discovery by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, and then the isolation of radium as a pure metal by Marie Curie and André-Louis Debierne in 1910, radium seemed to hold the most promise. The two most common applications were in luminescent paint applied to clock hands so they glowed in the dark, and in medicine where it was used to treat cancer.

We know from learning the story of the Radium Girls, using radium as a component of paint would have deadly repercussions. By the mid-1920s, countless young woman had died after working painting on the dials of watches and clocks. They'd been instructed to lick their paintbrushes to create a finer point, and thus they ingested radium in unknown quantities before becoming sick.

The field of nuclear medicine was somewhat more promising. There are some horrific stories of radium being used in large quantities to treat cancers where doctors sewed capsules of radium directly to the tumor, as in the case of Henrietta Lacks and the treatment she received for cervical cancer. But it seemed that smaller doses had some positive effects. The question was how much was the right amount?

That answer came from medical physicist Edith Quimby. In 1919, after having earned a bachelor's in mathematics and physics, and completed a master's in physics, Edith set out to find a research position. She accepted a position as assistant physicist at the Memorial Hospital in New York City, working with Gioacchino Failla who had established the first laboratory devoted to researching the medical uses of radiation.

It was her task to determine the precise dosage needed for each patient that would have the fewest side effects. At the time, radiotherapy (where radium-containing needles are directly applied to tumors) was in its infancy. There was no consistency in regards to placement or dosage, and no way to determine if the tumor was receiving the correct exposure needed for proper treatment. It was her research that led to a set of guidelines for the most effective arrangement of needles in 1932. Known as the "Quimby rules" they were the standard used until computer-aided placement techniques became available in the 1980s.

She moved to Columbia University in 1942 where she taught radiology and medical physics while conducting research using the new kinds of radioactive materials being created by accelerators and nuclear reactors. She was named as a full professor there in 1954. It was here where she taught future Nobel Laureate Rosalyn Yalow.

Her research also included quantifying the amounts of different kinds of radiation needed to have the same effect, which laid the foundation for future studies to understand how cumulative exposures of each would affect a body. This calculation could not only help inform the doctors about a patient's long-term side effects, but would also help radiation technicians protect their own health by reducing risks of repeated exposure. She created a "film badge" system where X-ray film strips were covered with black paper and distributed to laboratory personnel to measure incidental exposure.

Also in 1954, she became the first woman and first physicist to be named president of the American Radium Society. In her acceptance speech, she outlined the need for an organization of medical physicists in the US. And thus, because of her call to action, the American Association of Physicists in Medicine was founded in 1958.

If you like the work I do here on SRPS, please support me!

---

For more information:

Her New York Times obituary: "Edith Quimby Dies; Radiation Expert"

Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons: "Edith Quimby: First Woman Medical Physicist"

Photo source: Whitman College Archives

Read More

Science Fair Rock Stars: Mikayla Sharrieff, India Skinner, and Bria Snell

High school juniors Mikayla Sharrieff, India Skinner, and Bria Snell have been in the news quite a bit in the last week, but the articles have only barely touched on what I consider to be the really exciting part of their story: these smart girls came up with an inexpensive and easy way to filter lead out of drinking water! And not only lead, but other impurities and bacteria like e. coli.

Their creative system builds on NASA Spinoff technology using specially created filtering floss made from nanofibers. A spinning fan circulates the contaminated water through the floss, which traps the unwanted particles. The clean water is then transferred to the storage container.

Their project "From H2NO to H2O" earned them a spot in the finals of the 2018 NASA Transformers Optimus Prime Spinoff Promotion and Research Challenge (OPSPARC) contest, which was created to encourage students to come up with creative uses for existing NASA technology in projects that would benefit the general public. Mikayla, India, Bria decided to turn their attention to the problem of lead-contamination in school water fountains.

Tragically, contaminated drinking water is an everyday issue for far too many students around the country, and one that hits home for these three burgeoning scientists: their school, Benjamin Banneker High School in Washington, DC, has several drinking fountains that have been taken out of commission because of concerns regarding lead contamination.

They took their idea to their mentors at the Inclusive Innovation Incubator, a technology incubator whose mission is to support entrepreneurs and businesses from underrepresented communities that provide products and services benefiting under-served communities, who gave them the encouragement and guidance they needed while building their prototype for the NASA OPSPARC contest. Their mentors' confidence is well-placed. This team of resourceful young women are the only all-black, all-female team to make it to the finals.

The winning team will be announced later this month. Winners will be invited to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center for a two-day workshop, and a $4000 stipend to cover their expenses for the trip. But these girls are already winners! They've caught the attention of celebrities and politicians alike. The Washington, DC, mayor Muriel E. Bowser has pledged a $4000 award to help the girls continue work on their filtration system.

Not only are these young women looking at careers in STEM, they're already looking for ways to inspire others. As Mikayla, who is looking at becoming a biomedical engineer, put it, "It’s important to be role models for a younger generation who want to be in the STEM field but don’t think they can." India, who wants to be a pediatric surgeon, wants to make sure others see their full potential, to "see our faces, and see we’re just regular girls, and we want to be scientists."

If you appreciate the work I do here on SRPS, please support me!

Read More

Eugenie Clark and the power of passion

I wonder how many scientific discoveries have been made by people who were just curious about a subject and wanted to know more about it? How does it work? Why is it like that? What else is there like this?

Honestly, I have a special place in my heart for stories about people who first realized their passion as a child and spent their life pursuing it. And especially for those who had to overcome some kind of naysayers, ignoring anyone who said they couldn't or who questioned the value of their work. Imagine the determination needed to just keep going anyway, just "doing your thing" simply because it's just so fascinating. And to then have it pay off in such a huge way with some unexpected discovery that changes everything.

When Eugenie Clark (May 4, 1922 – February 25, 2015) was a kid she visited the New York Aquarium and was immediately entranced. So much so that she returned nearly every weekend to stare at the fish and try to learn as much about them as she could. She wrote school papers about what she learned and followed the doings of other marine scientists of the era. Her hero was the explorer/naturalist William Beebe, famous for his deep dives in a kind of personal submarine off the coast of Bermuda.

Despite her evident passion for the subject and her determination to learn as much as possible, when she told her parents she intended to become a marine biologist, they tried to discourage her. "I told my family, I said, 'I'd like to go down and be like William Beebe,' and they said, 'Well, maybe you can take up typing and get to be the secretary of William Beebe or somebody like him.'"

She did it anyway.

She studied zoology at Hunter College and spent her summers working at the University of Michigan Biological Station. She went on to graduate studies from New York University, and prestigious research opportunities at places like Woods Hole Marine Laboratory and the American Museum of Natural History. She traveled to Micronesia for an Office of Naval Research project to study fish populations. And she earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study fish in the Red Sea, which she wrote about in her wildly successful book Lady with a Spear, which brought her to the attention of the wealthy Vanderbilts who built Cape Haze Marine Laboratory along the coast of Florida for her.

It was at Cape Haze where she began to study sharks more seriously. She worked with a local fisherman to catch sharks for research. Through her research many of the dangerous myths about sharks have been dispelled, replaced by newfound respect for their intelligence and understanding of their behavior, which she wrote about in her second book, The Lady and the Sharks.

When she left Cape Haze in the mid-60s, it was to teach college zoology and marine biology classes for another four decades, only semi-retiring at the age of 77. She continued diving until the year before her death, and was still working on research projects right up to the end.

"Not many appreciate the ultimate power and potential usefulness of basic knowledge accumulated by obscure, unseen investigators who, in a lifetime of intensive study, may never see any practical use for their findings but who go on seeking answers to the unknown without thought of financial or practical gain."

I'll say she knew more than most the power and potential usefulness of following one's passion, seeking answers to the unknown. Over the course of her long career, she traveled the world, taught thousands of students, conducted over 70 dives using submersible equipment, led more than 200 field research expeditions, and helped create the very first IMAX film.

And she did it all because she was curious about fish and wanted to know more.

If you like the work I do here on SRPS, please support me!

Read More

Aggretsuko - adorable badass

Yesterday I was logging into Netflix to watch my current obsession (Offspring, a charming comedy-drama from Australia), and saw an interesting looking teaser for something called Aggretsuko, based on a character from the Sanrio franchise. I thought it looked cute but maybe annoyingly so, and I didn't have high hopes for the story, but I figured I should probably check this out anyway, just to have an informed opinion.

A couple of hours later I'd binged the entire thing in one sitting and ran off to rave about it to my friends.

It starts out showing us young Retsuko, a fresh-faced college grad starting her new job in a big office, full of possibility and hope for the future. Fast forward five years, and she's a burnt out corporate zombie who has to psych herself up to get out of bed each morning. I think many of us can relate.

Retsuko is the dutiful worker who performs her tasks without complaining and doesn't balk when others dump their work on her or when her sexist pig of a boss (who is literally a pig) goes on and on about how useless women are. She's the kind of person who's afraid of speaking up for herself, even when being followed around a store by an annoying sales clerk. In fact, she buys some socks she doesn't even like because she feels bad for leaving without purchasing anything.

As meek and timid as she appears, she has a secret. One that involves a microphone: she screams her rage out to death metal where no one else can hear her.

And that's where Retsuko's story really begins. Over the course of 10 episodes, we get to watch her come into her own power, with the help of her friends and the guidance of two older, badass professional women who take a liking to her and see a spark of something great behind the anxiety.

OK, so I don't know the characters in the Sanrio universe other than Hello Kitty, and isn't there a chocolate one? But now I'm starting to rethink my assumption that it was all silly fluff. There's something truly subversive going on in Aggretsuko (Aggressive Retsuko) around women's righteous anger as a force for change.

I'm sure there are some self-rescuing princess types out there who came out of the womb already kicking ass and taking names (yay you!), but most of us have had to overcome a huge amount of societal training. As Amy Pohler said, "It takes years as a woman to unlearn what you have been taught to be sorry for." So much of what we've been taught about our worth and how to interact with the world holds us back. Like Retsuko, we were taught not to speak up or talk back, but instead suffer in silence and rage in private.

Another thing Aggretsuko gets totally right is the role of other women in the process of unlearning. The real power comes from truthful conversations with other women, learning from each other's stories and reveling in the support that comes from that kind of shared experience. It's through her friendships with the two older company women, Gori and Washimi, and her coworker Fenneko, that Retsuko is able to imagine other ways of responding to the injustices of life, both professional and romantic.

Aggretsuko earns the Self-Rescuing Princess Society seal of approval for its story of a young woman coming into her own power, and its positive portrayal of female friendships. We get to watch Retsuko unlearning. It's not a straight line. She has setbacks and stumbling blocks. Who doesn't? But with the help of her friends, she is able to grow into a kickass young woman. I guarantee by the end of the season you'll be giving a super feminist fist pump in her honor.

If you like the work I do here on SRPS, please support me!

Read More