Gladys West

#68/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

Gladys West had no idea, at the time, that her recordings of satellite locations and accompanying mathematical calculations would become today's GPS system and affect so many areas of life. She remarks, "When you’re working every day, you’re not thinking, ‘What impact is this going to have on the world? You're thinking, ‘I’ve got to get this right.'" And apparently, she did just that. 

Last year, Gladys was honored during a Black History Month celebration and U.S. Navy Captain Godfrey Weekes, who served alongside her, described how significant of a role she played during her time spent at Dahlgren. “She rose through the ranks, worked on the satellite geodesy [science that measures the size and shape of Earth] and contributed to the accuracy of GPS and the measurement of satellite data,” he wrote. "As Gladys West started her career as a mathematician at Dahlgren in 1956, she likely had no idea that her work would impact the world for decades to come."

Gladys Mae West (née Brown), born in 1931, is an American mathematician known for her contributions to Global Positioning Systems. As a girl growing up in Dinwiddie County south of Richmond, all Gladys knew was that she didn’t want to work in the fields, picking tobacco, corn and cotton, or in a nearby factory, beating tobacco leaves into pieces small enough for cigarettes and pipes, as her parents did; to provide for their family. She saw education as a "way out". When she learned that the valedictorian and salutatorian from her high school would earn a scholarship to Virginia State College (now University), she studied hard and graduated at the top of her class. She got her free ticket to college, majored in math and taught two years in Sussex County before she went back to school for her master’s degree. She sought jobs where she could apply her skills and eventually got a call from the Dahlgren base, then known as the Naval Proving Ground and now called Naval Support Facility Dahlgren.

“That’s when life really started,” she said. Gladys began her career in 1956, the second black woman hired at the base and one of only four black employees. One was a mathematician named Ira West, and the two dated for 18 months before they married in 1957. “That was a great time to be at the base,” Ira said. “They were just discovering computers.” While he spent most of his career developing computer programs for ballistic missiles launched from submarines, Gladys’ calculations eventually led to satellites. She collected information from the orbiting machines, focusing on information that helped to determine their exact location as they transmitted from around the world. Data was entered into large scale “super computers” that filled entire rooms. Gladys worked on computer software to ensure that calculations for surface elevations and geoid heights were accurate. She took pride in knowing that data that she was entering was correct and she would work tirelessly to make certain of her work’s accuracy.

The process that led to GPS is too scientific for a newspaper story, but Gladys West would say it took a lot of work—equations checked and double-checked, along with lots of data collection and analysis. Although she might not have grasped its future usage, she was pleased by the company she kept. “I was ecstatic,” she said. “I was able to come from Dinwiddie County and be able to work with some of the greatest scientists working on these projects.”

Ralph Neiman, her department head in 1979, acknowledged those skills in a commendation he recommended for Gladys, project manager for the Seasat radar altimetry project. Launched in 1978, Seasat was the first satellite designed for remote sensing of oceans with synthetic aperture radar. “This involved planning and executing several highly complex computer algorithms which have to analyze an enormous amount of data,” Neiman wrote. “You have used your knowledge of computer applications to accomplish this in an efficient and timely manner.” He also commended the many hours she dedicated to the project, beyond the normal work week, and the fact that it had cut the processing time in half, saving the base many thousands of dollars. Dr. Jim Colvard was technical director—the top civilian position at NSWC Dahlgren – from 1973 to 1980 and knew her as one of his students in a graduate program and as a professional employee. “She was an excellent student and a respected and productive professional,” he wrote in an email. “Her competence, not her color, defined her.”

While she may not be as well known as other women in STEM fields, her contribution is undeniable. Gladys West retired from the base in 1998, a year after her husband, and the two celebrated by traveling to New Zealand and Australia. She was excited about the new stage of her life and all the things she might get into. She’d been taking one course at a time toward her doctorate in philosophy from Virginia Tech and was ready for the last step, to write her dissertation. “However, the Almighty apparently had other plans for me,” she said. Five months after retirement, she had a stroke that impaired her hearing and vision, balance and use of her right side. She was feeling pretty sorry for herself until “all of a sudden, these words came into my head: ‘You can’t stay in the bed, you’ve got to get up from here and get your Ph.D.’ ” She did just that.

She and her husband started taking classes at the King George YMCA to rebuild her strength and recover the mobility she’d lost in the stroke. She had to have a quadruple bypass later, then dealt with breast cancer in 2011. The two continue to attend five exercise classes a week, and both are going strong. He ran a half-marathon six years ago, at age 80, and she’s in the midst of writing her memoirs. “Gladys and Ira are two of the finest people I’ve ever known,” said Cindy Miller, a King George resident and former technical writer at Dahlgren. “They’re just good, solid-to-the-core, God-fearing people.”

As for the GPS, the Wests use it when they travel, although she still prefers to refer to a paper map. That perplexes Carolyn Oglesby, the couple’s oldest daughter. The Wests have three children and seven grandchildren. “I asked her why she didn’t just use the Garmin [GPS] since she knows the equations that she helped write are correct,” Oglesby said. “She says the data points could be wrong or outdated so she has to have that map.” Gladys West is still doing her own calculations. 

Source: Google search.

Gloria Steinem

#67/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

I was wondering who should be an appropriate woman to share her story with everyone on the event of International Women’s Day. This day is all about the Feminist movement and equality and inclusion of genders, races and classes. Who then should it be if not the most famous face of feminism, Gloria Steinem? Gloria Steinem is the nearest thing we have to a grande dame of feminism, a mantle she abhors.

Gloria Steinem has been at the forefront of American feminism for a half century. Social activist, writer, editor and lecturer, Gloria, was born in Ohio on March 25, 1934 to Ruth (née Nuneviller) and Leo Steinem. Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was chairwoman of the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association, a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women, and the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education, as well as a leader in the movement for vocational education. Pauline also rescued many members of her family from the Holocaust. The Steinems lived and traveled about in the trailer from which her father, Leo, carried out his trade as a traveling antiques dealer. Before Gloria was born, her mother Ruth, then aged 34, had a "nervous breakdown" which left her an invalid, trapped in delusional fantasies that occasionally turned violent. She changed "from an energetic, fun-loving, book-loving" woman into "someone who was afraid to be alone, who could not hang on to reality long enough to hold a job, and who could rarely concentrate enough to read a book." Ruth spent long periods in and out of sanatoriums for the mentally ill. Gloria was ten years old when her parents finally separated in 1944. Her father went to California to find work, while she and her mother continued to live together in Toledo, Ohio.

While her parents divorced as a result of her mother's illness, Gloria did not attribute it to a result of chauvinism on the father's part, and she claims to have "understood and never blamed him for the breakup." Nevertheless, the impact of these events had a formative effect on her personality: while her father, a traveling salesman, had never provided much financial stability to the family, his exit aggravated their situation. Gloria concluded that her mother's inability to hold on to a job was evidence of general hostility towards working women. She also concluded that the general apathy of doctors towards her mother emerged from a similar anti-woman animus. Years later, Gloria described her mother's experiences as having been pivotal to her understanding of social injustices. These perspectives convinced Gloria that women lacked social and political equality.

Gloria attended Waite High School in Toledo and Western High School in Washington, D.C., graduating from the latter. She then attended Smith College and she studied government, a non-traditional choice for a woman at that time. It was clear early on that she did not want to follow the most common life path for women in those days marriage and motherhood. “In the 1950s, once you married you became what your husband was, so it seemed like the last choice you’d ever have I’d already been the very small parent of a very big child my mother. I didn’t want to end up taking care of someone else,” she later told People magazine. In the late 1950s, Gloria spent two years in India as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow, where she was briefly associated with the Supreme Court of India as a Law Clerk to Mehr Chand Mahajan, then Chief Justice of India. After returning to the U.S., she served as director of the Independent Research Service, an organization funded in secret by a donor that turned out to be the CIA. She worked to send non-Communist American students to the 1959 World Youth Festival. In 1960, she was hired by Warren Publishing as the first employee of Help! magazine.

Esquire magazine features editor Clay Felker gave freelance writer Gloria what she later called her first "serious assignment", regarding contraception. He didn't like her first draft and had her re-write the article. Her resulting 1962 article about the way in which women are forced to choose between a career and marriage preceded Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique by one year. In 1963, while working on an article for Huntington Hartford's Show magazine, Gloria was employed as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club. The article, published in 1963 as "A Bunny's Tale", featured a photo of Gloria in Bunny uniform and detailed how women were treated at those clubs. Gloria has maintained that she is proud of the work she did publicizing the exploitative working conditions of the bunnies and especially the sexual demands made of them, which skirted the edge of the law. However, for a brief period after the article was published, Gloria was unable to land other assignments; in her words, this was "because I had now become a Bunny – and it didn't matter why." In the interim, she conducted an interview with John Lennon for Cosmopolitan magazine in 1964. In 1965, she wrote for NBC-TV's weekly satirical revue, That Was The Week That Was (TW3), contributing a regular segment entitled "Surrealism in Everyday Life". Gloria eventually landed a job at Felker's newly founded New York magazine in 1968. In 1969, she covered an abortion speak-out for New York Magazine, which was held in a church basement in Greenwich, New York. Gloria had had an abortion herself in London at the age of 22. She felt what she called a "big click" at the speak-out, and later said she didn't "begin my life as an active feminist" until that day. As she recalled, "It [abortion] is supposed to make us a bad person. But I must say, I never felt that. I used to sit and try and figure out how old the child would be, trying to make myself feel guilty. But I never could! I think the person who said: 'Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament' was right. Speaking for myself, I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn't going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life, and therefore it felt positive.” In December 1971, she co-founded the feminist-themed magazine Ms. with Dorothy Pitman Hughes; it began as a special edition of New York, and Clay Felker funded the first issue. Its 300,000 test copies sold out nationwide in eight days. Within weeks, Ms. had received 26,000 subscription orders and over 20,000 reader letters. The magazine’s first independent issue appeared in January 1972. The magazine was sold to the Feminist Majority Foundation in 2001; Gloria remains on the masthead as one of six founding editors and serves on the advisory board. Also in 1972, Gloria became the first woman to speak at the National Press Club. In 1978, Gloria wrote a semi-satirical essay for Cosmopolitan titled "If Men Could Menstruate" in which she imagined a world where men menstruate instead of women. She concludes in the essay that in such a world, menstruation would become a badge of honor with men comparing their relative sufferings, rather than the source of shame that it had been for women. On March 22, 1998, Gloria published an op-ed in The New York Times ("Feminists and the Clinton Question") in which, without actually challenging accounts by Bill Clinton's accusers, she claimed they did not represent sexual harassment. This was criticized by various writers, as in the Harvard Crimson and in the Times itself. The original item has since been scrubbed from the NY Times archives and as noted by Nathan Dial, who reposted it on Scribd with the comment: "the fact that it's not on the NYT's page is disturbing.”

Gloria first expressed her feminist views in such essays as “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.” In 1971, she joined other prominent feminists, such as Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan, in forming the National Women’s Political Caucus, which worked on behalf of women’s issues. That was when she took the lead in launching the pioneering, feminist Ms. magazine. Under her direction, the magazine tackled important topics, including domestic violence. Ms. became the first national publication to feature the subject on its cover in 1976. As her public profile continued to rise, Gloria Steinem faced criticism from some feminists, including the Redstockings, for her association with the CIA-backed Independent Research Service. Others questioned her commitment to the feminist movement because of her glamorous image. Undeterred, Gloria continued on her own way, speaking out, lecturing widely, and organizing various women’s functions. She also wrote extensively on women’s issues. Her 1983 collection of essays, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, featured works on a broad range of topics from “The Importance of Work” to “The Politics of Food.” 

In 1986, Gloria faced a very personal challenge when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was able to beat the disease with treatment. That same year, Gloria explored one of America’s most iconic women in the book Marilyn: Norma Jean. She became a consulting editor at Ms magazine the following year after the publication was sold to an Australian company. Gloria found herself the subject of media scrutiny with her 1992 book “Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem”. To some feminists, the book’s focus on personal development to be a retreat from social activism. Gloria was surprised by the backlash, believing that a strong self-image to be crucial to creating change. “We need to be long-distance runners to make a real social revolution. And you can’t be a long-distance runner unless you have some inner strength,” she explained to People magazine. She considers the work to be “most political thing I’ve written. I was saying that many institutions are designed to undermine our self-authority in order to get us to obey their authority,” she told Interview magazine. She was also diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia in 1994. Gloria had another collection of writings, “Moving Beyond Words: Age, Rage, Sex, Power, Money, Muscles: Breaking Boundaries of Gender”, published in 1994. In one of the essays, “Doing Sixty,” she reflected on reaching that chronological milestone. Gloria was also the subject of a biography written by another noted feminist Carolyn G. Heilbrun entitled “Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem”.

Although she didn’t marry until the age of 66, Gloria Steinem has had some high-profile relationships over the years, with director Mike Nichols and publishing magnate Mort Zuckerman, among others. In 2000, Gloria did something that she had insisted for years that she would not do. Despite being known for saying that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, Gloria decided to get married. She wed David Bale, an environmental and animal rights activist and the father of actor Christian Bale. They loved each other and wanted to be together, she has said, but married only because his visa was about to run out. Still, she is glad that they did it. At the age of 66, Gloria proved that she was still unpredictable and committed to charting her own path in life. Her wedding raised eyebrows in certain circles. But the union did not last long. Bale died of brain cancer in 2003. “He had the greatest heart of anyone I’ve known,” Gloria told O magazine.

Gloria Steinem is someone who cannot sit still or stop planning. Over the years she has tried to join her friends in meditation groups, but it has never worked. Inevitably her mind races ahead to forthcoming deadlines. For her, being out on the road is a form of meditation; she has very little social life outside the movement. It’s a wonder she still has the appetite for it. Prior to leaving, she says, she always hopes something will come up to prevent her travelling. But then she gets on her way, and is ignited again, not least by the prospect of a general election in the US. Steinem was a democratic and Barack Obama / Hillary Clinton supporter.

A life devoted to a single political movement gives rise to certain habits of thought. Steinem sees everything through the filter of what it means for women, minorities and society’s least empowered, categories that often overlap. Recipient of innumerable awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, Gloria Steinem continues to work for social justice. As she recently said, “The idea of retiring is as foreign to me as the idea of hunting.”

Source: Wikipedia and Google.