Mae Jemison
Chelsea
A few years after Sally Ride first went into orbit, Mae Jemison was accepted into NASA’s astronaut program. As a girl growing up in Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s, Mae had dreamed of going into space. She adored science, and was constantly looking for patterns in stars, watching ants, and even learning all she could about pus after she got a splinter in her finger. Like Sally, she also had interests that stretched beyond science. Mae loved to dance and, in high school, had to make the decision whether to pursue dancing professionally or go to college. She chose the latter and went to Stanford.
After college, Mae went to medical school, then served as a doctor with the Peace Corps, based in Liberia. Later, she worked as a vaccine researcher with the Centers for Disease Control. Even across the world and in a lab, she never gave up on her dream of going into space. As part of the NASA astronaut program starting in 1987, Mae initially worked on launch support activities, including during the period of the 1988 Discovery flight. That was NASA’s first space mission after the Challenger tragedy more than two years before. In 1992, Mae finally realized her childhood goal of journeying into space. While thousands of miles above Earth, Mae investigated how weightlessness and motion sickness affected the shuttle crew, including herself, and conducted bone cell research. As a fellow dance lover, I’ve always appreciated that Mae took not only her medical training into space but also an Alvin Ailey poster (along with a Michael Jordan jersey).
“Never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations. If you adopt their attitudes, then the possibility won’t exist because you’ll have already shut it out.… You can hear other people’s wisdom, but you’ve got to reevaluate the world for yourself.”
—MAE JEMISON
While she left NASA soon after her space flight, Mae remained engaged in the sciences in a variety of ways, from teaching environmental studies at Dartmouth, to working on a satellite company aiming to improve health care delivery in Africa, to becoming the first actual astronaut to appear on the television show Star Trek. She later led NASA’s 100 Year Starship effort to advance the necessary research to bring interstellar travel out of the realm of Star Trek and science fiction and into reality. In 2017, Mae and Sally were two of the women featured in the inaugural Women of NASA LEGO set. My kids aren’t old enough to play with it yet, as some of the pieces are very small, but we have it high on a shelf, ready to go as soon as they are.
Today, more than sixty women have been to space, including fifty Americans who have flown with NASA. While that number is much higher than it was thirty years ago, women still comprise less than 20 percent of the number of Americans who have traveled to space and barely break 10 percent worldwide.
Sally and Mae are among the women who helped make it possible for American girls to imagine themselves in a space suit, on a spaceship, in outer space. Those women include Ellen Ochoa, the first Latina astronaut, who flew on four shuttle flights, logged more than a thousand hours in space, and went on to lead NASA’s Johnson Space Center, otherwise known as Mission Control. They include Sunita Williams, an American astronaut who ran the first marathon in space. (Really! She ran 26.2 miles on the space station treadmill while the Boston Marathon was taking place on Earth.) And they include Peggy Whitson, the first female space station commander and the woman and American who has spent the most time in space: 665 days. Their stories are proof that when one barrier is broken, it can set off a domino effect.
“It’s by pursuing things that [are] extraordinary that we build a better world today. We didn’t get to where we are now by being timid.… Let’s push bigger.”
—MAE JEMISON
Healers
Florence Nightingale
Chelsea
Between Sunday school and the church service at First United Methodist in Little Rock, I would go to our church library. It was there that I discovered Florence Nightingale and embarked on a now-lifelong fascination with the woman who helped invent modern nursing, dramatically improved hospitals, and pioneered data visualization.
Florence was named for her birthplace in Italy in 1820. (Though her parents were British, she was born during their extended honeymoon.) Her parents, especially her father, were committed to her education. She studied math, history, philosophy, and literature, and from a young age, she could read and write in French, German, Italian, Greek, and Latin. At the time, it was seen as imperative for a young woman of her social standing to learn “domestic pursuits,” such as cleaning, cooking, and sewing—and she did. But Florence’s interests lay elsewhere; she was much more interested in having spirited political debates with her father. (A woman after my own heart!)
From the time she was a teenager, Florence believed she had been called to help alleviate human suffering. She dreamed of being a nurse and persevered despite her family’s initial—and staunch—opposition. She defied her parents and signed up for training, becoming first a nurse, and then a superintendent of the Institution for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Distressed Circumstances, a hospital in London. She confronted outbreaks of cholera and other diseases while honing her administrative skills and working to improve hygiene throughout the hospital. She had just come to the realization that her passion was training others to become nurses when war broke out on the Crimean Peninsula in 1853.
British newspaper reports from the time depicted horrifying conditions for British soldiers being cared for at hospitals away from the front lines: Supplies were inadequate, conditions were unsanitary, staff was untrained, and patients were crowded into too-small facilities. At the British government’s request, Florence brought a delegation of thirty-eight nurses to try to improve conditions at a hospital in Scutari, the British base hospital in what was then Constantinople.
Florence and her fellow nurses were not welcomed by the military hospital staff, who resented the idea that they should have to answer to a group of civilian women. The hostility of the doctors and the conditions of the hospital led Florence to refer to the facility as the “Kingdom of Hell.” Others might have given up, but Florence was determined to do anything and everything she could to help the soldiers in the hospital whose health was getting worse, not better.
Through tenacity and sheer force of will, Florence and her colleagues implemented basic standards of care at the hospital. Under her leadership, practices like applying clean dressings to wounds, bathing patients, and providing healthy meals became commonplace. She believed that psychological well-being was an important component of recovery—an uncommon view in the 1850s—and spent time helping soldiers write letters home and reading the responses from their loved ones. Her habit of walking the wards at night, tending to patients by a small light she carried with her, led to her being nicknamed “the Lady with the Lamp.”
When the war ended, Florence, suffering from exhaustion and illness, was welcomed home to England as a hero. But she was more interested in continuing her work than being celebrated. She used the money the British government gave her in recognition of her efforts during the Crimean War to establish a hospital and nurse training school in London. She met with government authorities and lobbied for a special commission to further investigate how to improve hospital conditions for soldiers and civilian patients alike. She had kept meticulous records during her time in Turkey. Her careful plotting and colorful visualizations of data, along with her statistical analyses, helped make the case for the importance of hygiene in all medical care. Florence also developed the “coxcomb,” a new type of graph to show how causes of mortality fluctuate over a twelve-month period; it is still in use today. Teaching about Florence Nightingale makes for some of my favorite moments every year at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. My students are often surprised by how much of what we take for granted today can be linked to Florence.
“How very little can be done under the spirit of fear.”
—FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
Throughout her life, even after she herself was bedr
idden and homebound with chronic illness, Florence kept up her work to make handwashing, good ventilation, good food, and clean sheets and bandages in hospitals all part of the standard of care—an effort that reduced the mortality rate at the British base hospital in Scutari from 40 percent to 2 percent. She elevated the profession of nursing, and women from across Britain and across different social classes came to her school, hoping to follow her example. Her most popular book, Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not, is still in publication today. Clara Barton, who lived in the same era and founded the American Red Cross, cited Florence as one of her inspirations. When Florence died in 1910, her family respected her wishes and refused a national funeral. “Her life was devoted to the relief of suffering at first,” reported the Times, “while her strength remained, by the tenderness of her own ministrations, and then by the great system of trained nursing which was one of the glories of this age.”
Clara Barton
Hillary
When the Civil War started in 1861, thirty-nine-year-old Clarissa Harlowe Barton, better known to her friends as Clara, was working in the United States Patent Office in Washington, D.C., as a copyist. Before that, she had spent more than a decade as a teacher, during an era when most teachers were men. (She even ran a free school for poor children in New Jersey, though when a male principal was hired at twice her salary to take over, she resigned in protest. “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing,” she said, “but if paid at all, I shall never do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay.”) She was forceful, independent, and focused. All her life, she would struggle with bouts of depression; the best thing to help her bounce back was usually a problem in need of solving.
When the war broke out and troops poured into D.C., Clara quickly realized many of the soldiers were hurt and hungry. She gathered clothing, food, and bandages and brought them to the troops being housed in the not yet completed U.S. Capitol Building. To Clara, they were “her boys.” In addition to gathering medical supplies, she read to the men, cooked for them, wrote letters for them, listened to their problems, and prayed with them. Soon, though, she realized that the place she was needed most was the battlefield itself.
Clara lobbied the army to give her the credentials she needed to bring supplies and support to the front lines and volunteer. She convinced them to let her go. One night in 1862, after a particularly brutal battle in northern Virginia, she showed up at a field hospital around midnight with a wagonload of supplies. A surgeon working at the camp wrote: “I thought that night if heaven ever sent out a[n]… angel, she must be one—for her assistance was so timely.” She became known as the Angel of the Battlefield.
“She always had faith in the possibility of something better. It irritated her to be told how things had always been.”
—WILLIAM ELEAZAR BARTON, BIOGRAPHER
Danger didn’t bother Clara; being stuck with the medical units at the back of the military procession, sometimes days behind the action, did. During a winter-imposed break in Civil War battles, she wrote in her diaries: “I am depressed and feel dissatisfied with myself.” She struggled with the “thin black snakes” of sadness that threatened to close in around her until the fighting started up again and she could throw herself into another task. She even contemplated killing herself. More than once she raced ahead so she could be there for soldiers on the battlefields until the official aid got there. “I could run the risk,” she explained. “It made no difference to anyone if I were shot or taken prisoner.” It clearly did make a difference to the soldiers whose lives she saved through her daring.
As the war ended, Clara searched for another problem to solve. In 1865, she found one. That year, President Lincoln wrote in a letter: “To the Friends of Missing Persons: Miss Clara Barton has kindly offered to search for the missing prisoners of war. Please address her… giving her the name, regiment, and company of any missing prisoner.” She helped start the Office of Correspondence with Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army, and she and her team answered 63,000 letters and identified over 22,000 missing men. Clara went on to help establish a national cemetery for the Union soldiers who died at Andersonville Prison in Georgia, the largest Confederate prison camp.
In 1869, while traveling in Europe, Clara heard about the global Red Cross network, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Its members had called for international agreements to provide voluntary aid, and Clara took up the cause when she came home, helping to wage a successful fight alongside famous friends like Frederick Douglass to argue for the creation of an American chapter of the organization.
In 1881, at sixty years old, she founded the American Red Cross, which she led for the next twenty-three years. During her time, the American Red Cross helped victims of a forest fire in Michigan and a dam break in Pennsylvania. It shipped cornmeal and flour to Russia, where famine was rampant, and provided disaster relief to residents of the Sea Islands in South Carolina after a flood and survivors of a hurricane in Texas.
After she stepped down as president of the American Red Cross, Clara helped found the National First Aid Association of America and served as its honorary president. The organization focused on first aid instruction and emergency preparedness, both of which would later become key activities of the American Red Cross. She took up other causes, from prison reform to public education, suffrage to civil rights. She was recognized around the world for spearheading relief efforts during periods of immense suffering. Her firm, uncompromising personality sometimes rubbed people the wrong way, if you can believe it.
Clara was ahead of her time, and she refused to wait for society to catch up. She had bold ideas about our country’s obligation to help not only our own citizens but people around the world in times of crisis. She charged bravely forward. Because she did, she helped more people than we will ever know find relief, comfort, and peace—even when she had a hard time finding it herself.
Elizabeth Blackwell, Rebecca Lee Crumpler, and Mary Edwards Walker
ELIZABETH BLACKWELL
REBECCA LEE CRUMPLER
MARY EDWARDS WALKER
Chelsea
Elizabeth Blackwell was an unlikely candidate to become the first woman in America to receive a medical degree. She wrote in her autobiography, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women, that as a young woman, she initially “hated everything connected with the body.” But she found herself called to medicine by a dying friend who Elizabeth believed suffered unnecessarily because she didn’t have access to a well-qualified woman physician. Elizabeth understood before most that the life experiences of doctors matter to the quality of care that patients receive, particularly when prejudice and bigotry abound.
In the 1840s, a decision to become a doctor didn’t mean Elizabeth could immediately start studying medicine. Although she had been tutored alongside her brothers and been a teacher, she was still a woman. She moved to Philadelphia in 1847, hoping friends there could help her apply to medical school. All but one school rejected her: Geneva Medical College in rural New York. Though it turned out her admission had been intended as a “joke” by the school, Elizabeth took them seriously and enrolled.
In 1849, she received her medical degree, having earned the grudging respect of her professors and classmates. She traveled abroad to gain more experience, working in London and Paris, where she contracted an infection that cost her the vision in one eye. Although she knew it would prohibit her from becoming a surgeon, as she had once dreamed, she refused to give up her medical career. She opened a small women’s health clinic in New York that grew into the New York Infirmary for Women and Children.
In time, she became more and more convinced that women doctors were an important part of ensuring that women patients received good care. In the late 1860s, she opened one of the first medical colleges for women in the United States, with a focus on training new doctors to care for poor women and children. A few years later, she helped establish the first medical school in Britain
to train women as physicians.
I first learned about Elizabeth from Sara Auld, my senior-year roommate at Stanford. Sara’s thesis focused on Charlotte Blake Brown, one of the first woman doctors in California. Like Elizabeth, Charlotte left home to study medicine and then opened a hospital focused on women and children in San Francisco. Listening to Sara talk about her research into this remarkable nineteenth-century American is one of my favorite memories from college.
Sara’s interest in Charlotte and Elizabeth prompted us to look for other women medical pioneers and heroes, leading us to Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first black woman doctor in the United States. Born in Delaware in 1831, she grew up in Pennsylvania watching her aunt care for sick people in their community. Rebecca worked as a nurse until she was accepted to medical school. After she graduated in 1864 from the New England Female Medical College, she started her career as a physician caring for low-income women and children in Boston. When the Civil War ended, she moved to Virginia, where she worked for the Freedman’s Bureau to care for freed slaves.
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 16