Looking Back
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This past March we embraced Women's History Month on our Facebook page. Looking back into American history, each day we found heroines worth remembering.
I learned so much, but forgot to share here, with you.
So, with no further ado...The List:
#1 - Louise Arner Boyd
Stunned was I to stumble upon her private collection of Arctic maps in the upstairs rooms…maps that SHE created aboard expeditions SHE commissioned, alone.
#2 - Juliette Gordon Low
Her home in Savannah has since become a museum for Juliette’s life work, the Girl Scouts of America. Worth a visit (which I did)!
“She imitates nobody. Everything she does is novel and original” (Boston reporter).
#4 - Kate Spade
“I hope that people remember me not just as a good businesswoman but as a great friend—and a heck of a lot of fun.”
#5 - Margaret Abbott
“When she died at 76, Margaret Abbott remained unaware that she had ever been an Olympian, much less her country’s first female champion.
#6 - Joan Haddad Saliba
First woman mayor of my hometown, Hartwell GA. Friends still tell tales of her indefatigable spirit and will.
American aesthete, first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her writing takes my breath away.
Scaling the French Alps from Chamonix in 1927, she and her climbing partner, Winifred Marples, shattered preconceived notions that women could not ascend great peaks unassisted by men.
#9 Roberta Flack, who left this earth on Feb 24, 2025.
How many knew her higher education began at the age of 15, with a full music scholarship to Howard University?
On October 6, 1919, she founded the First Woman’s Bank in Clarksville, TN (allowing women to open their OWN accounts).
Recognizing white-owned banks did not readily accept deposits from black organizations, Ms. Walker determined to found her own bank.
#12 Annie Edson Taylor - for the fun of it!
Just look at how she decided to celebrate her 63rd Birthday…
#13 Nellie Mae Rowe
Featured in the Self-Taught Art Collection of Atlanta’s High Museum, the first such dedicated department. My dear friend recommended I take a look, and wow…
America’s first bestselling author (The Wide, Wide World).
One of history’s Lowell Mill Girls in the 1830s-1840s, she wrote numerous works for the monthly periodical, Lowell Offering.
#16 Sally Ride - because, I mean…SPACE!
#17 Alma Woodsey Thomas - American abstract artist
She was THE first person to graduate from Howard University’s Fine Arts Department, in 1924. After decades teaching high school art, Alma exhibited her own collected works in a solo show at the Whitney Museum in New York. At the age of 77, this was her debut.
#18 Esther de Berdt Reed - American Revolutionary
She organized women to donate their own funds, purchase linen and cloth, then use to sew shirts for men fighting on front lines of our American Revolution.
#19 Harriet Quimby - 1st licensed female pilot in USA
“She was considered a radical woman in her day because she smoked, owned a car, flew an airplane, traveled the world extensively – alone.”
#20 Augusta Savage
The only Black artist, and one of four women, commissioned to create an exhibit for the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing, NY.
#21 Maria Tallchief - America’s first major prima ballerina
“Above all, I wanted to be appreciated as a prima ballerina who happened to be a Native American,” and she was!
#22 Nicole Hughes Maxwell - ethnobotanist
Maxwell brought “medical secrets of the Amazon” to America.
#23 Annie Smith Peck - American mountaineer
Born in 1850, Peck began the sport of mountaineering in her 40's. She took her last climb (Mount Madison, NH) at the age of eighty-two.
#24 Alice Roosevelt Longworth - First Daughter
Alice was more than the maliciously witty and scandalous First Daughter of a former President.
#25 Mary Jane Patterson - teacher, principal, pioneer of Black education
Born to a previously enslaved mother and freeborn father, Patterson earned her Bachelor degree at Oberlin College in 1862. She was the first African-American woman in the United States to achieve this distinction.
#26 Mary Stuart Hall - attorney and public-spirited woman
Although not formally credited with the founding of Boys & Girls Clubs of America, she is the woman who revived what others had started, what was threatening to fade away.
#27 Emily Warren Roebling - self-styled engineer
“When the Brooklyn Bridge was completed after fourteen years of construction in 1883, Emily Warren Roebling — the ‘woman who saved the Brooklyn Bridge’ — was the first to cross it by carriage, carrying a live rooster in her lap as a sign of victory.”
#28 Elizabeth Hardwick - Author, she co-founded The New York Review of Books.
“There is simply no accounting for her gifts. She was a unicorn, born among horses.” -William Deresiewicz
#29 Nell Blaine - Driven by “the push and pull of color.” She was the youngest member of American Abstract Artists of 1940s.
#30 Maria Mitchell - American astronomer, professor, trailblazer.
Her sense of wonder was appreciated and nurtured by an incredibly loving father.
#31 Georgia O’Keeffe - Painter
Yes, I know, she is already well documented. But I love her. And could not finish this month without her.
Did you know….
(From the exhibition, “My New Yorks”)
“In 1924 the artist and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz, moved into NYC's Shelton Hotel, then the world’s tallest residential skyscraper.
‘Pink Dish and Green Leaves,’ [my personal favorite from the exhibition], attempts a view from her apartment window unlike any other. The artist’s only East River composition to visualize a portion of her domestic space in the Shelton Hotel, the work is a luminous still life and cityscape, depicting an expansive industrial vista beyond the glass compote and windowsill.
O’Keeffe wrote about this work, 'The pink dish with the city is frankly my foolishness — but I thought to myself — I am that way so here it goes — if I am that way I might as well put it down.’”
And so…we’ll put it down, our month of history with American Women.