Women’s History Month: A Look at Female Empowerment

There can be no doubt that the influence of women has shaped the world in which we live. Whether they were mothers — such as Nancy Elliott Edison, who homeschooled her son, Thomas, who became a famous inventor, or activists like Carrie Nation who was an advocate of temperance long before Prohibition, their impact on America cannot be denied. In honor of Women’s History Month, let’s examine the stories of a few women of valor whose stories are seldom brought to light.

Susan Cuddy was a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy. The remarkable portion of her story is that she was the first Asian American woman in that branch of the service and as a gunnery officer became the first woman to teach air combat. During WWII she trained pilots how to dogfight plane to plane and firing .50 caliber machine guns.

Wally Funk wanted to fly from the time she was eight years old. Adulthood brought a career as a pilot and flight instructor, but her sights were set on space. In 1961 she was part of the Mercury 13, a program subjecting women to the same testing as men to learn whether they were capable of space travel. The women never got the chance for space flight, though. Wally Funk never gave up, purchasing a spot on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic space flight, hoping to take the maiden voyage to space.

Amy Sherald didn’t think she would live long enough to become an artist, let alone create Michelle Obama’s portrait for the National Gallery in 2018.

Fourteen years before that, she was told she had congestive heart failure. In 2012 her heart function dropped to single digits and she needed a transplant.

She credits living like she had no future with pushing her art, because she didn’t have time to take the safest route. That worked for her, even when she was in her late 30s and waiting tables. She tells other artists the dream is free, but the hustle to make the dream come true is sold separately.

Eliza Pinckney, at 16 should have been getting married, but in 1739 she was running three plantations and was the first to plant North American indigo. By 1775, because of Pinckney, her home state of South Carolina was exporting more than a million pounds a year. The crop, in today’s money, would be worth more than $30 million. One of her pallbearers was George Washington.

Mary Goddard was the first postmaster of Baltimore and probably the first female employed by the U.S. government, managing that post office during the Revolutionary War.

Goddard was also the publisher of Maryland Journal for a decade and in 1777 printed the first copy of the Declaration, revealing the signers. Those names became famous while hers is largely forgotten.

Madam C.J. Walker was the first American woman to become a millionaire in her own right. Walker married at 14, was widowed by 20, a single mother who made poor wages taking in laundry, one of the few options available to black women in that era.

Living in Denver in the 1890s Walker realized the dry climate was causing her to lose her hair. She created a hair growth product that evolved into a line of hair care products and other cosmetics. She hawked the products door to door, through newspaper ads and trained salespeople called ‘Walker agents’. As she aged, she had a home designed by an African American architect and built in the same neighborhood as John D. Rockefeller.

These women and many others just as remarkable and determined, have changed the American landscape and psyche until now there is seldom seen or heard that someone is the ‘first woman’ to do or become anything.

Connie Burcham can be reached at Fditor@WatongaRepublican.com