Role models
A kind of obvious study, but then 9 women to know (most of whom, you probably don't). Also, 7 other things worth your time.
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When I became a dad, I read and wrote about a lot of parenting studies, especially things about raising daughters to be happy, healthy and successful.
Basically, I didn’t want to screw this up.
Along the way, I read a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology that found that "exposing women to highly successful female role models" helped them overcome gender-negative stereotypes related to their own performance.
I grant you, this is not the world’s most surprising finding, but it stuck with me. And with it in mind, here are nine fearless women role models—from the worlds of war, science, and business—that many people probably don't know about.
March is Women’s History Month, so I’ve wanted to find an opportunity to share these. It's pretty amazing to realize how daring some of these women's exploits were.
Nadezhda Popova (WW2)
Popova was a Soviet combat pilot in World War II, part of Russia's 588th Night Bomber Regiment, the first all-women combat unit in history. Fighting against the Nazis, she flew a staggering 852 combat missions.
Nicknamed the Night Witches, the 558th flew obsolete crop dusters made of wood and canvas, and always attacked the advancing German army in darkness. Popova, who died in 2013 and was profiled in the New York Times, is a sort of proxy for the several hundred women pilots in the unit.
Nancy Wake (WW2)
Wake ran away from home at age 16 in Australia and became a journalist, working in New York, London and eventually Paris before the outbreak of World War II. When Germany invaded France, she remained in the country, working as a courier for the Resistance.
At one point, she was apparently the most-wanted person in France, with a 5 million franc Gestapo bounty on her head. She escaped to Spain and England, joined the British secret service and parachuted back into occupied France.
Lyudmila Pavlichenko (WW2)
Pavlichenko was another member of the World War II Soviet military, a sniper who was credited with killing hundreds of German soldiers before being wounded herself.
The Soviets then sent her on a PR tour of the U.S. and Canada where she met with President Roosevelt and encouraged American to open a second front in Europe (a/k/a, to invade France):
"I am 25 years old and I have killed 309 fascist invaders by now," she said in one speech. "Don't you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?"
Sarah Breedlove
Born in 1867, Breedlove was a African-American woman, and the first child born into her family after the end of slavery in the United States. (Her parents and older siblings had all been slaves.) She worked in sales and in the 19th century beauty industry before launching her own company.
Known professionally as Madam C. J. Walker, she ultimately employed thousands of people, and became both the most successful female entrepreneur of her time, and the first African-American millionaire.
Geraldine Hoff Doyle (WW2)
Doyle is famous more for what she represents than what she actually did. At the age of 17, during World War II, she was working for just a few weeks in a factory, when a photographer snapped her photo for a feature on women supporting the war effort.
The result became the basis for one of the most iconic home front images of World War II: Rosie the Riveter. However, it was only 40 years later that Doyle saw the image that her picture inspired, recognizing her own face.
(Note: After this story was posted, a reader pointed out that Naomi Parker Fraley, another factory worker, was revealed during 2018 academic research to be the more likely source for the poster.)
Dr. Mary Edwards Walker (Civil War)
A Civil War-era surgeon (a big deal in itself for a woman during the 19th century), Walker volunteered for duty with the Union Army, got captured and imprisoned by the Confederates as a spy, and was ultimately released and awarded the Medal of Honor. She's still the only woman to have received it.
Walker was controversial in her time for two anachronistic reason: First, she wore men's clothes, and second, she had a bitter but legalistic dispute with other women's advocates about how the best way to achieve universal voting rights for women.
Valentina Tereshkova, cosmonaut
A former factory worker and amateur skydiver, Tereshkova was the first woman in space. What's perhaps most surprising is how early in the history of human spaceflight that she flew.
Her June 1963 mission made her the 12th human in space, and her three day, 48-orbit journey was longer than the combined length of all previous American space travel. Her mission also came a full 20 years before the first American woman to go into space, Sally Ride.
Cecilia Payne, astronomer and academic
Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor at Harvard University, and the first person to become a department head there.
Her rise stemmed from that fact that she was a groundbreaking astronomer who came up with the then-shocking theory that the sun and other stars were made of different elements than the planets (namely hydrogen and helium). Payne’s highly controversial doctoral thesis on this subject was later called "undoubtedly the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy."
Nellie Bly
Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, better known by her pen name, Nellie Bly, landed her first newspaper job in the 1880s after writing an incisive letter to the editor, objecting to a wildly sexist article that ran under the headline, "What Girls Are Good For.")
She’s probably best known for an expose in which she went undercover in an insane asylum, and another in which she traveled around the world in 72 days to break the fictional record in the book by Jules Verne. She later became the executive of a manufacturing company and was awarded several patents, including for the 55-gallon oil drum barrel that is still used today.
7 other things worth your time
Big progress on freeing the Ever Given from the Suez Canal. I’m writing this at midnight ET; by the time you get it in the morning it seems the ship might even be freed and the canal reopened. Lots better than the “weeks” that people were predicting just days ago. (WSJ)
A group of Dutch scientists have a new Covid-related study I might not have thought of: trying to figure out the degree to which wildlife are being endangered by the millions of used face masks and other protective equipment we’re leaving around everywhere now. (Naturalis)
The players union for Major League Baseball says it’s open to discussing the idea of moving the 2021 All-Star Game from Atlanta, in the wake of the restrictive new voting laws the state of Georgia just passed. (CBS Sports)
How a $25 million donation to help students get online got all caught up in politics in San Francisco. (Vox)
The world’s largest oil exporter, Saudi Aramco, is no longer the world’s most profitable company. The oil giant brought in $49 billion profit during the pandemic year, but was outpaced by Apple, which brought in $57.4 billion. (Quartz)
How did a small town of 16,000 in upstate New York wind up giving out 50,000 vaccines? (Short version: New York City residents making the trek, since appointments open up there more often than in the city). Also: Want to get your Covid-19 vaccination card laminated? Staples and Office Max say they’ll do it for free. (USA Today, CNN)
Prince William was named 'World's Sexiest Bald Man’ according to … well, some kind of survey. I hardly feel qualified to comment on several counts, but I just don’t see this. (People)
Thanks for reading. I’ve shared some of these stories before at Inc.com. If you’re not a subscriber, please sign up for the daily Understandably.com email newsletter—with thousands and thousands of 5-star ratings from happy readers.
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Sorry to burst the bubble, but Geraldine Hoff Doyle's claim to be the original face for Rosie the Riveter was disproved. The correct person is Naomi Parker Fraley - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naomi_Parker_Fraley
Here is another courageous woman
She was repeatedly rejected, belittled, patronized, and underestimated.
Born in Baltimore on April 6, 1906, she spent her childhood summers milking goats.
She was expected to marry into privilege and settle into the role of wife and mother, according to A Mighty Girl.
But, she had other ideas.
She at first wanted to become a diplomat, but women accounted for only six of the 1,500 U.S. diplomats at the time and she was repeatedly rejected.
After an accident in Turkey, she lost her left leg below the knee,” according to Intel. “She was fitted with a wooden prosthetic leg, which she affectionately nicknamed ‘Cuthbert.’”
Because she was a woman, she was rejected by the United States Foreign Service. Because she had a disability, she was turned down by the Department of State.
So, she did what many women and people of color did during that time - she went to France, where she became an ambulance driver at the start of World War II.
After meeting a British Intelligence Officer, she joined the newly-created Special Operations Executive (SOE), becoming the second female agent to be sent to France.
“After limited training, this one-legged American woman was among the first British spies sent into Nazi-occupied France in 1941,” according to NPR. “She posed as a reporter for the New York Post.”
Her name was Hall, Virginia Hall.
She was the “real-life female James Bond,” wrote Dusica Sue Malesevic.
She “was the baddest broad in any room she walked into,” according to the Hartfield Book Company. “When the State Department proved to be a sexist boys’ club that wouldn’t allow her in, she gave the finger to society’s expectations of women and became a spy for the British.”
She is “one of the most important American spies most people have never heard of,” according to NPR.
This is part of a continuing series on the Peace Page for Women’s History Month.
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“The odds of success, let alone survival, were not high for Virginia Hall when she was sent to spy behind enemy lines during World War II,” according to Sonia Purnell, author of Hall’s biography.
“No one in London gave Agent 3844 more than a fifty-fifty chance of surviving even the first few days,” wrote Purnell. “For all Virginia’s qualities, dispatching a one-legged thirty-five-year-old desk clerk on a blind mission into wartime France was on paper an almost insane gamble.”
But, Hall “proved exceptionally adept at eluding the Gestapo,” according to A Mighty Girl.
“She learned how to change her appearance within minutes depending on whom she was meeting,” Purnell wrote. “Altering her hairstyle, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, putting on glasses, changing her makeup, wearing different gloves to hide her hands, or even inserting slivers of rubber into her mouth to puff out her cheeks: it all worked surprisingly well.”
She “emerged as a fearless guerrilla leader who helped liberate whole swathes of France,” according to Time.
“She armed and trained three battalions of French resistance fighters for sabotage missions that helped paved the way for the Allied invasion,” according to A Mighty Girl. “One of her many radio reports shows the breadth of her missions; in it, she states that her team has destroyed four bridges, derailed freight trains, severed a key rail line, and downed telephone lines. By the war's end, Hall had spent over three full years operating undercover behind enemy lines and, in the words of an official British government report at the end of the war, she was ‘amazingly successful.’”
“There’s a saying that the actress Ginger Rogers did everything her on-screen dance partner Fred Astaire did except backwards and in heels,” according to writer Raquel Laneri. “Well, Virginia Hall . . . did everything that the fictional James Bond would do, except in real life and with one leg.”
She also “masterminded jailbreaks for captured agents, mapped drop zones, reported on German troop movements, set up safe houses, and rescued escaped POWs and downed Allied pilots.”
"She was able to play on the chauvinism of the Gestapo at the time,” said Craig Gralley, a retired CIA officer who has written his own book about Hall — a novel, “Hall of Mirrors”.
“None of the Germans early in the war necessarily thought that a woman was capable of being a spy."
“When James Bond was still in diapers, Virginia Hall was behind enemy lines, playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse with Hitler’s henchmen,” according to the Hartfield Book Company, which published “Code Name Badass: The True Story of Virginia Hall” by Heather Demetrios.
“The Nazis called her ‘La Dame Qui Boite,’ the lady who limps,” according to the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame. “Hunted by Gestapo Chief, Klaus Barbie ("The Butcher of Lyon"), [Hall] had to make a harrowing last-minute escape over the snow-capped Pyrenees, dragging her prosthetic limb, ‘Cuthbert’ behind her.”
“Barbie ordered ‘wanted’ posters of Hall that featured a drawing of her above the words ‘The Enemy's Most Dangerous Spy — We Must Find And Destroy Her!’, wrote Greg Myre of NPR.
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“Hall was rewarded by becoming the only civilian woman of the war to be decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross for “extraordinary heroism,” according to Time.
She was also made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) and was nominated for the French Croix de Guerre, according to the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame.
After the war, Hall “joined the newly formed CIA, which succeeded the OSS, and worked there for 15 years, mostly at headquarters.”
British author Sonia Purnell wrote Hall’s biography, titled, “A Woman of No Importance”.
Explaining the irony in the title, Purnell said, “Through a lot of her life, the early life, she was constantly rejected and belittled. She was constantly just being dismissed as someone not very important or of no importance."
"I do think that she became America's greatest spy of World War II," Gralley said.
“Virginia Hall, of Baltimore, became our country's first and arguably greatest spy of the Second World War,” according to the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame. “During the course of her astounding career, and despite a significant physical disability, she served as an intelligence officer for the British Special Operations Executive, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, and the Central Intelligence Agency.”
“CIA officers have said that the techniques she developed 80 years ago to build up the French Resistance still inform the agency’s missions today, including Operation Jawbreaker in Afghanistan before and after 9/11,” according to Time.
“Her story is on display at the CIA Museum inside the spy agency headquarters in Langley, Va. — but this is off-limits to the public.”
"She was the most highly decorated female civilian during World War II," said Janelle Neises, the museum's deputy director.
“She was a woman very much ahead of her time,” said Judith Pearson, author of “The Wolves at the Door,” about Hall’s World War II activities.
Years later, when admirers talked about her adventures, Hall would simply reply, "Not bad for a girl from Baltimore."
Take that, James Bond.
~ jsr
This is from The Jon S. Randal Peace Page on Facebook