SRPS Role Model: Dr. Fannie Emanuel

I love sharing stories of women pursuing their dreams, as you probably already know. It's kinda my thing. It's particularly important, though, to celebrate older women who take up a new and challenging goal in mid-life or later. We have too few role models for this age group, so when I come across stories of amazing older women I am extra excited to share them with you.

After working nearly 20 years as treasurer for her husband's business, Fannie Emanuel (July 31, 1871 – March 31, 1934) went looking for more ways to help her community in Chicago. She began taking college courses in social sciences, and possibly thinking about studying medicine. In 1908 she decided to put into action the concepts she was learning in her classes, and established the Emanuel House, a settlement house with the mission "to inspire higher ideals of manhood and womanhood, to purify the social condition, and to encourage thrift and neighborhood pride, and good citizenship."

Settlement houses were private organizations focused on improving the communities they served by offering a wide range of services. Emanuel House addressed the disparity in educational opportunities for the children in the poor, predominately black neighborhood by offering kindergarten classes and a boys' and girls' club. Mothers could take classes in cooking, sewing, or domestic science, as well as attend regular mother's meetings. Emanuel House also hosted a free dental clinic and an employment bureau.

The part of Fanny Emanuel's story I find inspiring is she never stopped reaching for more. In 1911, at the age of 40, she made the decision to pursue a medical degree. When she enrolled in classes at the Chicago Hospital College of Medicine her two adult sons were also earning their own college degrees. Here was a woman who worked helping her husband's business while raising a family and staying active her community who, instead of resting in the comfort she'd earned, set out to do more.

While operating her private practice in Chicago, and between family trips to her summer cabin in northern Michigan, Dr. Emanuel continued her social work with important community organizations. She gave her time, energy, and business expertise to groups addressing the needs of the black community, such as the WYCA, Ida B. Wells Women's Club, and Delta Theta sorority, as well as serving on the Board of Directors for the Phyllis Wheatley Club (named after Phyllis Wheatley, a slave poet who lived from 1753 to 1784), an institution serving African American women, often providing lodging for younger women as well as retirement homes for older or disabled or sick women.

Dr. Fannie Emanuel was a woman who never stopped working to improve the lives of her neighbors, and when given an opportunity to follow her dreams she took it, and for that she's most certainly a Self-Rescuing Princess Society role model.

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Irena Iłłakowicz - Polish resistance martyr

Irena Iłłakowicz (July 26, 1906 – October 4, 1943) was a Polish intelligence agent during World War II.

Her parents were living in Berlin when she was born. Poland was still occupied by the Russians, and many Poles (like Marie Curie and her sister) had emigrated to other countries in Europe, looking for better opportunities. During World War I, they left Germany for Finland. After the war was over, Poland had succeeded in gaining its independence, and the family returned to their homeland.

After graduating from high school in Poland, Irena moved to Paris to study humanities. It was there that she met her first husband, Azis Zangehan, the son of an Iranian prince. The couple moved to Persia, where Irena stayed for two years. Sadly, Irena wasn't able to travel to Poland to visit her family and became very homesick. Eventually, her husband helped her secretly travel to Tehran, where she was able to meet with Polish diplomats who, in turn, helped her leave the country and return to Poland.

After spending time in Warsaw, she eventually returned to Paris, where she met her second husband Jerzy Olgierd Iłłakowicz. They married in 1934, and their daughter Ligia was born in 1936. The young family enjoyed a bit of peace while paying attention to the reports coming out of Germany and preparing for the worst.

The worst came in September 1939 when, within 3 weeks, both the Germans and Soviets invaded Poland. In October, both Irena and Jerzy joined the resistance movement. To protect them from arrests by the Gestapo, she assumed a new name -- Barbara Zawisza -- and she and her husband lived in different locations.

Irena was assigned to a branch responsible for conducting military, economic and information reconnaissance. She was the perfect candidate for this type of work as she spoke seven languages: Polish, French, English, Persian, Finnish, German and Russian. She went to Berlin, where she was a part of a small organization spying on the Germans.

Sadly, over several months in 1941 and '42, her network was destroyed by the Germans, with on-going arrests of activist. Irena herself was arrested by the Gestapo on October 7, 1942. They took her to Pawiak, a prison that was being used to interrogate resistance members, and to process Jews and others for removal to concentration camps. Irena was tortured, but refused to give up any info. Her resistance colleagues, hoping to spare her more torture, sent her a vial of cyanide, but she refused to use it.

Her husband managed to bribe a guard to put her in a group of prisoners being transporter the Majdanek concentration camp. While there, a group of Polish resistance fighters were able to rescue her dressed as Gestapo officers with a forged warrant for her to be brought to Warsaw for further interrogation.

Instead of retiring from spywork, she returned to the resistance, this time working to gather intelligence on Soviet plans to send parachuters into Poland. On the night of October 4, 1943, she received a summon for a meeting that seemed too important to miss. She decided she had to go despite her suspicions. Tragically, it was a set up and she was brutally murdered.

Because she was undercover when she was killed, she was buried with her false name, and her husband and mother had to disguise themselves as cemetery workers in order to attend her funeral. It wasn't until after the war that her mother was able to have a plaque with her real name placed on her grave.

In 1944 Irena was posthumously promoted to second Lieutenant for her bravery during the war.

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Lyudmila Pavlichenko - Badass with a gun

It's all well and good to punch Nazis, but Lyudmila Pavlichenko (July 12, 1916 – October 10, 1974) did more than that. She shot Nazis. And not just a few. As a soldier for the Soviet Army in World War II she sniped 309 of them.

As gruesome as it might be to consider for many of us, at the time killing Nazis seemed to be the only way to stop their march across Europe, killing anyone they didn't deem worthy of living in their 'Großdeutsches Reich.' When the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941, in addition to reneging on their pact to not to invade (a pact they clearly hadn't actually planned to keep), they went in with the full intention of taking over the western part of the Soviet Union so they could fill it with Germans and use anyone left as forced labor to support their war effort.

Naturally, the Soviets didn't like this idea and immediately began to enlist in large numbers, men and women, to fight against this invasion. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was no exception. She wanted to use her skills as a sharpshooter to defend her country. She was a college student at the time studying history, but she was also handy with a rifle. As a teen she'd joined a shooting club when a boy friend of hers boasted about his achievements. She set out to prove to him that girls could shoot as well, and by the time she was in college, she'd earned a reputation as a proficient markswoman.

When she showed up at the recruitment office, she was initially offered a job as a nurse, but they agreed to let her prove herself with a gun. They handed her a rifle and showed her a couple of enemy fighters across the field of battle. She convinced them by handily dispatching both, earning her place as a sniper. In fact, there were over 2,000 female snipers in the Soviet Army. But Pavlichenko was the best. Her successes in the field earned her the respect of her superiors and the admiration of civilians near and far. In fact, after just over a year of battle (in which she'd killed 309 Nazis or their collaborators) she was removed from the front when she was injured because her notoriety had made her a target for the enemy.

She took a position as instructor for other snipers, teaching them what she'd learned in the field, and eventually rose to the rank of General. She used her newfound status to bring international attention to the situation along the Soviet front line -- the "second" front -- where resources were scarce and funds were desperately needed for basic equipment like x-ray machines. She was invited to the US by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to travel throughout the US telling Americans about her experience.

I'm more than a little annoyed by, but totally unsurprised at, the ridiculously misogynistic questions and comments she received during her tour. "One reporter even criticized the length of the skirt of my uniform, saying that in America women wear shorter skirts and besides my uniform made me look fat." But I am absolutely energized by her amazing response to the treatment she received from American men. "Gentlemen, I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist invaders by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?" Boom!

After the war, she returned to her study of history, and spent the rest of her life working as a historian with the Soviet Navy.

You can read more about her relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt in the Smithsonian Magazine story "Eleanor Roosevelt and the Soviet Sniper"

There was a Russian film made about her life, released in 2015, Battle for Sevastopol [trailer]

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Katharine Blodgett Gebbie - astrophysicist and civil servant

Katharine Blodgett Gebbie (July 4, 1932 – August 17, 2016) was the founding Director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and of its two immediate predecessors, the Physics Laboratory and the Center for Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics, both for which she was the only Director. During her 22 years of management of these institutions, four of its scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

As a child, she was inspired by her famous aunt (and namesake), Katharine Burr Blodgett, who was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, and went on to invent low-reflectance "invisible" glass. Almost following in her aunt's footsteps, Katharine also enrolled in Bryn Mawr, but had to transfer to MIT after he father's death.

Her future husband proposed to her, but Katharine initially turned him down saying she was going to move to London to study the stars and earn her Ph.D. Instead of seeing those as a hindrance, he completely supported her and together they moved to England.

After earning her degree in 1964, she returned to the US where she practiced "laboratory astrophysics" -- where scientists study the basic physical processes of astrophysics and perform simulations of these processes to understand how they work throughout the universe.

In 1981, she moved from the laboratory to the management side of operations, eventually accepting an appointment as Chief of the Quantum Physics Division at the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology). She continued to rise in the ranks of management, eventually directing several hundred employees. Her job, as she saw it, was to select the best and brightest scientists and then make sure they have everything they need to succeed. And succeed they did. She is likely the only manager to have directed four Nobel winners in her career.

She made it her goal to creating more opportunities for women and other marginalized groups in physics, and was a co-organizer of a Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics bringing together more than 100 young female physics majors for encouragement and inspiration. She was awarded the Women in Science and Engineering Lifetime Achievement Award, among many other honors.

You can watch a short interview with her: Katharine Blodgett Gebbie: In Her Own Words

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Harriet Brooks - Canada's first woman of nuclear science

Harriet Brooks (July 2, 1876 – April 17, 1933) enrolled at McGill University in Montreal in the mid-1890s, just a few years after they'd started admitting women. She knew from the start she wanted to study mathematics, and graduated in 1898 with a bachelor's degree in both in mathematics and natural philosophy -- the precursor to the field of physics.

Impressed with her scientific ability, Ernest Rutherford, the "father" of nuclear physics, and future Nobel winner (with much of his work being built on her research) accepted her as his first graduate student. With him, she studied electricity and magnetism, and graduated with a Master's in Electromagnetism in 1901, making her the first woman in Canada to earn a Master's degree.

After graduation, she left Montreal for the US, where she first served as a fellow at Bryn Mawr and then at Cambridge. She returned to Rutherford's lab, though, where she made a crucial scientific discovery. Working with the element thorium, she discovered that its radioactive decay emissions weren't the expected alpha, beta, or gamma rays, but instead were another element in the form of a gas "transmuted" from the parent element.

This new element was radon, which has a lower molecular weight than the thorium from which it was emitted. In fact, it was this discovery that laid the foundation for the development of the entire field of nuclear science, and created the basis for the work Rutherford did to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908.

In 1904 she moved again, this time to New York City where she took a position as a physics tutor at Barnard College, the women's college associated with Columbia. It was while there that she fell in love with a male physicist from Columbia, and the two planned to marry. When the Dean of Barnard found out, it was made clear that she was expect to resign on the date of her wedding. Instead, Harriet Brooks wrote a stern letter stating her opposition to such a ridiculous practice. "I think it is a duty I owe to my profession and to my sex to show that a woman has a right to the practice of her profession and cannot be condemned to abandon it merely because she marries. I cannot conceive how women’s colleges, inviting and encouraging women to enter professions can be justly founded or maintained denying such a principle."

Sadly, the policy wasn't changed, and she had to make a tough decision. She broke off the engagement, and eventually left Barnard entirely.

In 1906, she studied at the Curie Institute, where she discovered the recoil of radioactive atoms, using the radium Dr. Marie Curie had discovered. Her research showed that when a radioactive atom undergoes decay, a large alpha particle is released, and the atom is propelled in the opposite direction, proving Newton's Third Law applied to atomic particles as well.

Unexpectedly, considering her previous fight against women being forced to choose between marriage and academic research, in 1907 she married and retired from science completely. After nearly a decade of ground-breaking research where she was frequently compared to Marie Curie, she seemed content to leave future research to others. Perhaps she saw first hand the exhausting schedule of Marie Curie, busy juggling a family and a scientific career, when she was in Paris, and decided she was satisfied with her contributions in one area and was eager to explore the other.

You can read more about her work in her McGill profile, "Remembering Harriet Brooks: Canada’s first female nuclear physicist"

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