Wilma Rudolf

#70/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

I was already reading about another talented lady when my daughter came home and recounted the story of Wilma Rudolf. They had read the book “Wilma Unlimited” in school and were supposed to do some thought-provoking questions about how she might have inspired them as home-work. I was totally intrigued and immediately started reading about Wilma Rudolf.

Wilma Rudolph was an American sprinter who became a world-record-holding Olympic champion and international sports icon in track and field following her stupendous success in the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome, Italy. She won three gold medals in the 100 and 200 meter individual events and the 4 x 100 meter relay at the said games. Wilma was acclaimed the fastest woman in the world in the 1960s and became the first American woman, to win three gold medals in a single Olympic Games. Due to the worldwide television coverage of the 1960 Summer Olympics, she became an international star along with other Olympic athletes such as Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali), Oscar Robertson, and Rafer Johnson who also competed in Italy.

Wilma Rudolph was born prematurely at 4.5 pounds (2.0 kg) on June 23, 1940, in Saint Bethlehem, Tennessee in the US. She was the twentieth of twenty-two siblings from her father's two marriages. Shortly after Wilma’s birth, her family moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, where she grew up and attended elementary and high school. Her father, Ed worked as a railway porter and did odd jobs in Clarksville, while her mother, Blanche, worked as a maid in Clarksville homes.

Wilma was a sickly child and contracted diseases easily. At birth, she wasn’t even expected to survive a year but not only did she survive but she was otherwise a very active child, always found hopping and running around. However, she suffered from several early childhood illnesses, including pneumonia and scarlet fever. For the racially segregated family and community, doctor was a luxury – not only due to looming poverty but also because there was just one doctor in the area who would agree to see black people. Wilma contracted infantile paralysis (caused by the polio virus) at the age of four. She recovered from polio, but lost strength in her left leg and foot and ended up with a twisted leg. Because there was little medical care available to African American residents of Clarksville in the 1940s, her parents sought treatment for her at the historically black Meharry Medical College (now Nashville General Hospital at Meharry) in Nashville, Tennessee, about 50 miles (80 km) from Clarksville where Wilma would go twice a week with her mom in the back seat of a bus. She had to pull out of school too but she did not let herself be contained and would hop around on one foot keeping herself active. Physically disabled for much of her early life, she wore a heavy steel leg brace until she was eight years old. Although the brace allowed her to go back to school, she would have to just sit and watch from the sidelines during sports as she enviously watched her classmates play Basketball. For two years Wilma and her mother made weekly bus trips to Nashville for treatments to regain the use of her weakened leg. She also received subsequent at-home massage treatments four times a day from members of her family and wore an orthopedic shoe for support of her foot for another two years. Because of the treatments she received at Meharry and the daily massages from her family members, she was able to overcome the debilitating effects of polio and learned to walk without a leg brace or orthopedic shoe for support by the time she was twelve years old. One Sunday out of the blue just outside the Church, Wilma decided to take off the brace and walk in. Her knees trembled but she took one step at a time with full concentration as she walked in much to the gasps of everyone around. There was no looking back then and the brace soon was packed and sent off back to the hospital. The next target for her was Basketball which she had by now fallen in love with and which she could now take up.

As already mentioned, Wilma was initially home-schooled due to the frequent illnesses that caused her to miss kindergarten and first grade. She began attending second grade at Cobb Elementary School in Clarksville in 1947, when she was seven years old. Rudolph attended Clarksville's all-black Burt High School, where she excelled in basketball. She led her team to the High School Finals where surprisingly her team lost. As she sat dejected after the game, she was approached by Ed Temple, Tennessee State’s track and field coach, who had come to watch the game to join the track and field team. Temple invited fourteen-year-old Wilma Rudolph to join his summer training program at Tennessee State. After attending the track camp, Wilma won all nine events. She entered at an Amateur Athletic Union track meet in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Under Temple’s guidance she continued to train regularly at Tennessee State University (TSU) while still a high school student. Wilma raced at amateur athletic events with TSU’s women’s track team, known as the Tigerbelles, for two more years before enrolling at TSU as a student in 1958. During her senior year of high school Wilma became pregnant with her first child, Yolanda, who was born in 1958, a few weeks prior to her enrollment at TSU in Nashville, for which she had earned a full scholarship thanks to her performance in the track and field team. She was the first member of her family to go to college. In college, Wilma continued to compete in track. She also became a member of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority. She graduated from Tennessee State with a bachelor’s degree in education in 1963. Wilma’s college education was paid for through her participation in a work-study scholarship program that required her to work on the TSU campus for two hours a day.

When Wilma was sixteen and a junior in high school, she attended the 1956 U.S. Olympic track and field team trials in Seattle, Washington, and qualified to compete in the 200 meter individual event at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. Rudolph, the youngest member of the U.S. Olympic team, was one of five TSU Tigerbelles to qualify for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics. She was defeated in a preliminary heat of the 200 meter race at the Melbourne Olympic Games, but ran the third leg of the 4 × 100 meter relay. The American team of Wilma Rudolph, Isabelle Daniels, Mae Faggs, and Margaret Matthews, all of whom were TSU Tigerbelles, won the bronze medal, matching the world-record time of 44.9 seconds. But the British and the Australian Teams were faster and won the silver and the gold respectively. In 1959, at the Pan American Games in Chicago, Illinois, Wilma won a silver medal in the 100 meter individual event, as well as a gold medal in the 4 × 100 meter relay with teammates Isabelle Daniels, Barbara Jones, and Lucinda Williams. In addition, Rudolph won the AAU 100 meter title in 1959 and defended it for four consecutive years. During her career, Rudolph also won three AAU indoor titles.

While she was still a sophomore at Tennessee State, Wilma competed in the U.S. Olympic track and field trials at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas, where she set a world record in the 200 meter dash that stood for eight years. She also qualified for the 1960 Summer Olympics in the 100 meter dash. At the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome, Italy, she competed in three events on a cinder track in Rome’s Stadio Olimpico: the 100 and 200 meter sprints, as well as the 4 × 100 meter relay. Wilma, who won a gold medal in each of these events, became the first American woman to win three gold medals in a single Olympiad. Wilma Rudolph was one of the most popular athletes of the 1960 Rome Olympics and emerged from the Olympic Games as “The Tornado, the fastest woman on earth.” The Italians nicknamed her “La Gazzella Nera” (“The Black Gazelle”) and the French called her “La Perle Noire” (“The Black Pearl”). Along with other 1960 Olympic athletes such as Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali), Oscar Robertson, and Rafer Johnson, Wilma became an international star due to the first worldwide television coverage of the Olympics that year. The 1960 Rome Olympics launched she into the public spotlight and the media cast her as America’s athletic “leading lady” and a “queen”, with praises of her athletic accomplishments as well as her feminine beauty and poise. Following her Olympic victories the United States Information Agency made a ten-minute documentary film, Wilma Rudolph: Olympic Champion (1961), to highlight her accomplishments on the track. Wilma’s appearance in 1960 on “To Tell the Truth”, an American television game show, and later as a guest on “The Ed Sullivan Show” also helped promote her status as an iconic sports star.

In 1961, Wilma married William Ward, a North Carolina College at Durham track team member; they divorced in 1963. In the interim, she retired from track competition at the age of twenty-two, following victories in the 100 meter and 4 x 100 meter relay races at a U.S. - Soviet meet at Stanford University in 1962. At the time of her retirement, she was still the world record-holder in the 100 meter (11.2 seconds set on July 19, 1961), 200 meter (22.9 seconds set on July 9, 1960), and 4 x 100 meter relay events. She had also won seven national AAU sprint titles and set the women’s indoor track record of 6.9 seconds in the 60-yard dash. As Rudolph explained it, she retired at the peak of her athletic career because she wanted to leave the sport while still at her best. As such, she did not compete at the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan,[15][30] saying, “If I won two gold medals, there would be something lacking. I’ll stick with the glory I’ve already won like Jesse Owens did in 1936.” After retiring from competition, Wilma continued her education at Tennessee State and earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education in 1963. That year she also made a month-long trip to West Africa as a goodwill ambassador for the U.S State Department. She served as U.S. representative to the 1963 Friendship Games in Dakar, Senegal, and visited Ghana, Guinea, Mali, and Upper Volta, where she attended sporting events, visited schools, and made guest appearances on television and radio broadcasts. She also attended the premier of the U.S. Information Agency’s documentary film that highlighted her track career.

Wilma Rudolph, who did not earn significant money as an amateur athlete, shifted to a career in teaching and coaching after her retirement from track competition. She began as a second-grade teacher at Cobb Elementary School, where she had attended as a child, and coached track at Burt High School, where she had once been a student-athlete herself, but conflict forced her to leave the position. Wilma moved several times over the years and lived in various places such as Chicago, Illinois; Indianapolis, Indiana; Saint Louis, Missouri; Detroit, Michigan; Tennessee; California; and Maine. In May 1963, a few weeks after returning from Africa, Wilma participated in a civil rights protest in her hometown of Clarksville in an effort to desegregate one of the city's restaurants. Within a short time the mayor announced that the city’s public facilities, including its restaurants, would become fully integrated. She also married Robert Eldridge, who had fathered her child when she was in high school, later that year. The couple had three additional children, but divorced after seventeen years of marriage.

Wilma's autobiography, Wilma: The Story of Wilma Rudolph, was published in 1977. It served as the basis for several other publications and films. By 2014, at least twenty-one books on her life had been published for children from pre-school youth to high school students. In addition to teaching, Wilma worked for nonprofit organizations and government-sponsored projects that supported athletic development among American children. In Boston, Massachusetts, she became involved in the federal Job Corps program, and in 1967 served as a track specialist for Operation Champion. In 1981, Wilma established and led the Wilma Rudolph Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Indianapolis, Indiana, that trains youth athletes. In 1987, she joined DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, as director of its women's track program and served as a consultant on minority affairs to the university's president. The single mother of four children hosted a local television show in Indianapolis. She was also a television sports commentator for ABC Sports during the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California, and lit the cauldron to open the Pan American Games in Indianapolis in 1987 in front of 80,000 spectators at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. In 1992, two years before her untimely death, Wilma became a vice president at Nashville's Baptist Hospital. In July 1994 (shortly after her mother's death), Wilma was diagnosed with brain cancer. She also had been diagnosed with throat cancer. Her condition deteriorated rapidly, and she died on November 12, 1994, at the age of fifty-four, at her home in Brentwood, a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee. Across Tennessee, the state flag flew at half-mast on the day of her memorial-service.

Wilma was named United Press International Athlete of the Year (1960) and Associated Press Woman Athlete of the Year (1960 and 1961). She was also the recipient of the James E. Sullivan Award (1960) for the top amateur athlete in the United States and the Babe Didrikson Zaharias Award (1962). In addition, she had a private meeting with President John F. Kennedy in the Oval Office. She was also honored with the National Sports Award (1993) and was inducted into several women’s and sports halls of fame along with many other awards. Several other recognitions like naming of roads and tracks in her name, highlighted her glorious innings as an athlete par excellence. In 1996, the Women’s Sports Foundation presented its first Wilma Rudolph Courage Award to Jackie Joyner-Kersee. The annual award is presented to a female athlete who exhibits extraordinary courage in her athletic performance, demonstrates the ability to overcome adversity, makes significant contributions to sports, and serves as an inspiration and role model to those who face challenges, overcomes them, and strives for success at all levels.

As an Olympic champion in the early 1960s, Wilma was among the most highly visible black women in America and abroad. She became a role model for black and female athletes and her Olympic successes helped elevate women's track and field in the United States. In addition to her own athletic accomplishments, Wilma Rudolph is remembered for her contributions to youth, including founding and heading the Wilma Rudolph Foundation, which trains youth athletes. She has been memorialized with a variety of tributes, including her image on a commemorative U.S. postage stamp, the fifth in its “Distinguished Americans” series. “Wilma: The Story of Wilma Rudolph” (1977), her autobiography, was adapted into a television docudrama. Her life is also remembered in “Unlimited” (2015), a short documentary film for school audiences, as well as in numerous publications, especially books for young readers. 

Source: Wikipedia, Google and “Wilma Unlimited” by Kathleen Krull

Dhivya Suryadevara

#69/100 in #100extraordinarywomen 

In an industry not exactly known for its diversity, an iconic American carmaker has appointed its first female chief financial officer (CFO). And she’s from Chennai, India. 

On June 13, 2018, General Motors (GM), the maker of Buick, Cadillac, and Chevrolet cars, said that 39-year-old Dhivya Suryadevara will take over as CFO in September. Suryadevara joined the company in 2005, and has held various positions over the years. Since July 2017, she’s been serving as its vice-president for corporate finance. With Suryadevara’s appointment, GM joins a handful of companies, including Hershey Co and Signet Jewelers, that have women serving as both CEO and CFO. In 2014, Mary Barra became the first woman to make it to the top of a major automobile company as CEO of GM. In 2018, Dhivya became the first woman to become the CFO of a major automobile company. She would replace current CFO Chuck Stevens, who has been working at the auto company longer than Dhivya has been alive. 

As of now, she is managing two simultaneous jobs at General Motors, as she over­sees funding for the automaker’s capital activities, banking relation­ships, and $80 billion pension plan. She commutes between New York City, where her home and family are, and Detroit. Earlier in the month, she played a key role in getting a $2.25 billion investment in GM Cruise by Japanese tech giant SoftBank Group Corp, and GM’s investment in San Francisco-based on-demand transportation company Lyft. 

GM CEO Mary Barra, who has made significant strides to increase female leadership in the company, says Dhivya is ready. "Dhivya's experience and leadership in several key roles throughout our financial operations positions her well to build on the strong business results we've delivered over the last several years," Barra said. Although Dhivya never imagined going into the automotive industry, she has said that she's always enjoyed anything "challenging and complicated." That was also the theme of her upbringing in Chennai, India. After her father passed away when Suryadevara was young, all parenting duties fell onto her mother. "My mom had to raise three children on her own, which is difficult to do anywhere, let alone in India," she said. "She wanted to make sure there were no corners cut when it came to our education and to prove that we could have the same resources as a two-parent household." Her mother's high expectations stayed with Suryadevara as she completed her bachelor's and master's degree in commerce at the University of Madras. When she was 22, Suryadevara traveled to the U.S. for the first time to attend Harvard Business School, where she got an MBA. 

She began her career at PricewaterhouseCoopers before moving to investment banking at UBS. At 25, she joined GM as a senior financial analyst at the treasurer’s office, and she’s been with the company ever since, eventually becoming one of the youngest chief investment officers of GM Asset Management, in which she managed $85 billion worth of assets for the company’s pension plans. She served as CEO and Chief Investment Officer for GM Asset Management from 2013 to 2017. Dhivya is also a chartered financial analyst and a chartered accountant. In 2015, she was named one of Fortune Magazine’s 40 under 40. At the time, she revealed that her very first car had been a Buick Enclave. 

Dhivya’s husband and 12-year-old daughter are based in New York. Weekends, she’s home, and the weeks are dependent on what’s going on at any given time. She spends a lot of time going back and forth. But that had never deterred her. She says, “It teaches you to be more efficient. When I’m in Detroit, I take more meetings and focus on work so that it’s easier for me to be with my family when I’m in New York. And I work while I travel. I get hundreds of e-mails each day. I use my time on the plane to go through them.” 

Dhivya unwinds by exercising, especially boxing. She finds it very therapeutic. She also refrains from giving any Mantra for “maintaining a balance” and believes that it’s about prioritization. She doesn’t have time to cook; she recognizes that and doesn’t even bother. “You can’t follow a template that works for someone else. I don’t have a silver bullet for balance, but I try to make the most of every week, recognizing that there will be some weeks that are hard.” 

In taking on the CFO role, Dhivya Suryadevara joins a class of female chief financial officers that’s grown in recent years. Let’s hope her tribe increases further. 

Source: Google search.

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.

Mikaila Ulmer

#66/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

I bring a small and cute package today but don’t be mistaken, this lady is a firebrand. Many entrepreneurs get their start after college, but not Mikaila Ulmer. 

The Austin, Texas, girl founded a successful company, Me & the Bees Lemonade, securing a $60,000 investment on the TV show “Shark Tank” and a contract with Whole Foods. She’s been featured on “Good Morning America” and NBC News, and in Forbes and Time magazines. She was named among the Top 25 People Shaping Retail’s Future by the National Retail Foundation, spoke onstage with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella before 15,000 people at the WE Day Seattle conference in 2016, and introduced President Barack Obama at the 2016 United State of Women Summit.

And all this before her 13th birthday.

The path to CEO started in a most unlikely way for the 12-year-old, after she was stung by a bee twice in a week at age 4. Her parents suggested she channel her newfound fear into a research project, so Mikaila began reading about bees and was soon fascinated by them — and concerned about their dwindling numbers. At the same time, her great-grandmother, who passed away in late 2016, sent the family a 1940s cookbook that included her recipe for flaxseed lemonade. 

That fall, her mom and dad encouraged her to make a product the lemonade for a local children's business competition, the Acton Children's Business Fair, and Austin Lemonade Day. Mikaila's lemonade was a hit. "The first time I sold it, I thought, 'This is only going to be a one-time thing. I am going to do it once, get the money, donate some and then save some and then use the rest to buy this awesome toy that I wanted.' I do not remember what it was!" Mikaila tells CNBC. But though she was exhausted, Mikaila adds, "I realized I am really enjoying doing this." Six months later, she and her family made more lemonade and sold it. Then, when Mikaila was seven, a local pizza shop asked to carry her lemonade. "It seemed like no matter how many lemons I squeezed, we would always sell out," she says.

The research about the bees was also an eye-opener. “I learned that bees are dying at an alarming rate, so we need to save them,” she says. “Because of my research, I decided to start a business that could save the bees and use my great-granny Helen’s recipe as well.” Mikaila was soon selling her flaxseed and honey-sweetened beverage at events and her own lemonade stand. With the help of parents Theo and D’Andra Ulmer, the budding social entrepreneur and bee ambassador started her company in 2009 at the age of 4, growing it into a thriving enterprise that donates a percentage of its profits to organizations working to save honeybees. The company’s evolution has surprised Theo Ulmer, who initially saw his daughter’s venture as a valuable learning opportunity and a way to foster positive relationships. “I don’t know that I foresaw anything of this magnitude when we started, not at all,” he says. “But Mikaila has always been impressive in that regard. I’m not surprised that it was something that if she put her mind to it, she would be a success at it.”

She wanted to use her Great Granny Helen’s recipe to help honeybees. So instead of sweetening with anything else, she decided to sweeten the lemonade with local honey. It would not only have helped the bees and the beekeepers, but would also have been a lot healthier, as well. It was a sweet success from the start. She started off with a lemonade stand in the beginning, and used to tout: Buy a Bottle…Save a Bee! She started with one lemonade stand, and stuck around for three years, during which she kept on selling out. Due to the drastic increase in demand, she decided to expand and got into her first pizza store, and that’s how she started going big. Over the period of time, BeeSweet Lemonade started getting sold out at entrepreneurial events as well. The locals also loved the idea that her lemonade was made from locally-sourced and natural ingredients, and what cheered them even more was that some portions of the profits were being donated to support organizations who were working to save the honeybees.

But the path to profitability has had some bumps — most notably, when the company had to change its original name, BeeSweet Lemonade, in 2016 over a trademark issue. Mikaila came up with the name, which signified both her personal mission and a plea to the world to be kind to bees, and she had an emotional connection with it. “She had to work hard to let something go that she’d grown comfortable with,” Ulmer says. The brand-savvy businesswoman got to work on finding a new name, soliciting suggestions from contacts and customers and holding informal focus groups with her classmates. It was a challenging time, Ulmer says, but one that led to personal and professional growth. “She got a lot of support from people during the process, and that really helped her,” he says. “It brought people into the story, and I think that helped her to become a lot more comfortable with what she’s doing and why she’s doing it.” 

Bit by bit, distribution expanded. Soon, Whole Foods started carrying “Me & the Bees Lemonade”. The business was growing so fast, and so big that Mikaila and her family were finding it exceedingly difficult to produce the lemonade. Hence, they decided to get external help and pitched a potential expansion on the 6th season of the TV show ‘Shark Tank’. Shortly after her product hit the shelves of Whole Foods, Mikaila appeared on ABC's hit reality show "Shark Tank." What’s more, Mikaila Ulmer, then in the capacity of the “BeeSweet Lemonade” founder and CEO, amazed the nation when, at nine years old, she walked away from ABC's hit reality show "Shark Tank" with a $60,000 investment deal with Daymond John. Now for all those who aren’t aware, Shark Tank, is a TV show that is hosted by few highly successful billionaires, namely: Kevin O’Leary, Barbara Corcoran, Daymond John, Robert Herjavec, Lori Greiner, Mark Cuban, Ashton Kutcher, etc., who invest in businesses out of their personal capacity. And believe me when I say this – Shark Tank is a tough nut to crack! They rarely have sympathy for the old or the young. But luckily, one little girl impressed these sharks with her sweet lemonade so much that, fashion mogul – Daymond John invested $60,000 in BeeSweet for a 25% stake. And since then there has been no looking back for BeeSweet (later Me & the Bees). The visibility helped the business. In the year after the show aired, sales grew by 231 percent, says Mikaila. She also received a low-interest “local producer loan” from Whole Foods, which helped her to expand beyond the lemonade’s original flavour and experiment with other versions. Although, the Terms weren’t disclosed, but its loans run up to $100,000!

Me & the Bees Lemonade is based in Austin, Texas, but the Generation- Z influencer and her privately-owned company have garnered national attention. Over the past few years, Ulmer has visited the White House and met former president Barack Obama on numerous occasions. Earlier this year, Ulmer launched the Healthy Hive Foundation and became a member of Microsoft's People of Action network. She also travels with Dell Women's Entrepreneur Network (DWEN) throughout the world, most recently to Cape Town, South Africa, where she taught Finance 101 at DWEN's youth program. In July, a group of NFL players and businessmen invested $810,000 in Ulmer's company.

The exposure led to invites from the White House, first in 2015 for the annual kids’ “state dinner,” then to the following year’s White House Easter Egg Roll, where Mikaila served up her lemonade and popsicles to about 10,000 guests as one of the event’s celebrity chefs. Her first time meeting the president was intimidating, she admits. “I’d never met Mr. Obama yet, and we all know that he’s very important. I was definitely nervous,” she says. Not so when the then 11-year-old introduced President Obama at the women’s summit in June 2016. Wearing a white, eyelet-trimmed dress with sandals and a matching hair wrap in her trademark yellow, she delivered an impassioned speech about entrepreneurship with poise and confidence beyond her years. “Entrepreneurs hold the American dream, and the biggest dreamers are kids,” Mikaila said, to applause and cheers. “We dream big. We dream about things that don’t even exist yet. We believe in our dreams. We jump out of bed in the morning because we had the craziest idea and can’t wait to grab a notebook and get started. We believe in the impossible. We see possibilities, while others just see problems.” Obama strode onto the stage a few minutes later, clearly impressed. “What an amazing young lady,” he said, then quipped, “I will be back on the job market in seven months, so I hope she’s hiring.” She may well have been. The company’s lemonade, made at a commercial facility near San Antonio, Texas, is sold at a growing number of grocery shops, coffee shops and natural and organic food stores nationwide. Aside from lemonade — currently available in flavors with mint, ginger, iced tea and prickly pear — the company’s products include tote bags, ball caps and gift sets. And Mikaila is always thinking bigger. “She’ll tell you, ‘I want to see my lemonade product global, but I also want to have brand extensions,’” her father says. “To have someone at her age talking about brand extensions and different lines of business that she wants to get into, all integrated and interrelated with her current product, that’s surprising.” 

Being a middle-school CEO has benefits and drawbacks. Mikaila gets help from her parents: Her mom assists with marketing and her dad with the finance operations. But she also has to do her homework first before working for her company. (Her favorite subjects in school are science and Spanish.) Her business responsibilities include doing trade show demos, media interviews, business presentations, workshops about bees and about entrepreneurship, depositing her money in the bank, putting in money orders, depositing checks, checking the business email and posting on social media. Mikaila adds, “I still get underestimated for being a 13-year-old entrepreneur, so it can be hard looking for investors or partners because they're like, ‘You're a kid, we love your product and your mission but come back when you're a little bit older or come back when you're willing to work with your company full time and not got to school.’ That is definitely a challenge. Another challenge is balancing school, work and play. I still go to school during the week, I still have to do my homework and I still have sleepovers, so it's hard to balance all those things along with running the company.” 

For Mikaila, life as a seventh-grade CEO involves some tradeoffs. After school, when her peers are playing sports or hanging out, she usually heads to the company office with one or both parents to do homework or attend to business — maybe an interview or photo shoot, or dealing with a production or distribution issue. The family often travels on weekends, visiting prospective retailers or taking Mikaila to speaking engagements. Sleepovers and birthday parties are sometimes passed up, school occasionally missed. “When I’m traveling during school, it is hard because there’s a lot of makeup work that greets me when I return,” Mikaila says. “This year, procrastination was one of the main things that I had to learn not to do.” But the sacrifices are worth it. Mikaila relishes being the owner of a business, using her profits for a worthy cause and teaching people about bees. She’s also a mentor to other budding female entrepreneurs. She helped her friends at school launch a company making soaps and bath products to sell at a business fair, and traveled to South Africa to speak to girls at a women’s entrepreneur conference about how to start and run their own businesses. “I think what people recognize most about Mikaila is that she’s not just in this to create revenue, but she’s also in it to solve a bigger problem,” says her mother.

Me & the Bees is at a key juncture, with opportunities for growth and the attendant challenges of taking a family-run venture to the next level as a viable commercial enterprise. It set a goal of quadrupling sales annually, but achieving that will require scaling up production and expanding distribution. The company is also competing with major beverage manufacturers that have large budgets to pay for marketing and in-store demos that can attract customers and boost sales. Technology is helping to facilitate the day-to-day operations — the family uses various Microsoft apps and programs to collaborate, keep in touch and create presentations, and the company increasingly relies on technology to support sales and automate some processes. Managing home life, full-time work and a growing company is a constant balancing act for the family, which also includes 9-year-old Jacob, the company photographer, and Khalil, 21, who is studying computer science in college. D’Andra runs business operations and manages the household, while Theo works full-time as a program manager at Dell and processes orders for Me & the Bees at night, sometimes working 20-hour days. Trips for Mikaila’s speaking engagements often double as mini-vacations, with the family spending an extra day or two sightseeing together in a new city. “That’s one of the ways we find balance,” D’Andra Ulmer says. 

For Mikaila, her enterprise is an environmental and social mission. She donates more than 10% of the profits from the sale of her business to organizations including: Heifer International, Sustainable Food Center of Austin and Texas Beekeepers Association, which help save the bees. She can often be seen educating families about the importance of honeybees and how to save them, and also passionately facilitates workshops about honeybees and entrepreneurship as well. One of her advices for other kids, or in fact for anyone who might also like to start their own business is: GO BIG! In fact, in addition to being a well-known speaker, and being featured as a panelist at several conferences like SXSW ECO, SXSW EDU, and SXSW Interactive; she’s been featured in Oprah magazine and even has her own YouTube channel. Today, Mikaila leads workshops on how to save the honeybees, and she participates in social entrepreneurship panels. "I think she is a pretty hard worker," D'Andra told NBCBLK. "I'm impressed with how she gets her homework done during her travels. She has a gift for public speaking but what makes me very proud is that she is not only a smart entrepreneur but she's a good person and she's kind to people. That's more important than business."

Now 13, Mikaila Ulmer has been named one of TIME magazine's most influential teens of 2017 and says that she is reflecting on her nine years of experience as an entrepreneur to write a children's book on how to start and grow a business. And yes, she reminds us, she’s doing it for the bees! 

Source: Google search.

Dakshayani Velayudhan

#65/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

Popular narratives of history have led us to believe that it was men alone who were the architects of the Indian Constitution. However, among the 299 members of the Constituent Assembly, 15 were women. Unfortunately, very little is known about them. They came from different walks of life — lawyers, freedom fighters, politicians, and suffragettes. Led by Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar they discussed, debated and put forth their opinions while defining the principles that would guide the then recently Independent India. One of those women behind the Constitution was Dakshayani Velayudhan, one of the youngest and the only Dalit woman who helped shape the Constitution of India.

Dakshayani Velayudhan was the first and only Dalit woman to be elected to the constituent assembly in 1946. She served as a member of the assembly, and as a part of the provisional parliament of India from 1946-1952. At 34, she was also one of the youngest members of the assembly. 

Dakshayani was born on July 4, 1912, on the island of Bolgatty in Cochin. The water that lapped on its shores had no caste, but the land certainly did. The Pulayas, men and women, could not wear clothes to cover their torso. KP Karuppan, who fought for their rights, wrote a report in 1934 about the conditions of Pulayas in the beginning of the 20th century: “I saw them only in a dirty mundu. The women were all half-naked. Some of them covered themselves with grass.” They could not cut their hair. They were not allowed into government schools. They had no access to the public roads and markets of mainland Ernakulam. They had to slink away and make way for an upper caste. They could not enter hospitals. They were untouchable and unapproachable. In the violent, vicious codes of discrimination that dictated the movements of Malayalis just 100 years ago, a Pulaya had to keep 64 paces from a Namboodiri. 

Dakshayani was the child of change. She was growing up in a land getting convulsed by radical social movements. Her life was defined and shaped by the upheavals in Kerala society in the early 20th century. Even before her birth, two of Kerala’s biggest reformers, Sree Narayana Guru and Ayyankali had begun movements that would push Kerala’s virulently casteist society to the brink. They organized civil disobedience movements that defied the restrictions on movement and school entry for the depressed classes. They organized satyagraha marches and encouraged women and men to discard practices imposed on them as a sign of their lower class. Restrictions included walking on streets marked for upper class, walking with head bowed before the upper class, wearing necklaces to indicate caste and more.

One of the more novel forms of protests came from an organization called the Pulaya Mahajan Sabha in 1913. Founded by Kallachamuri Krishnaadi Asan, Pt. Karuppan and T.K Krishna Menon, along with K.P Vallon, the Sabha, named after the Pulaya caste, organized a Kayal Sammelan or lake meeting in Vembanadu lake. The meeting that took place on a catamaran was in defiance of the king who had proclaimed that no Dalit group could have a meeting in his land. By holding the meeting on water, the group claimed that “they did not disobey the order” of the king.

Dakshayani Velayudhan was the niece of Krishnaadi asan, and the sister of K.K Madhavan lawyer, MP and editor of Veekshanam (Congress Daily). She was one of the first girls in her Pulaya community to wear an upper cloth. She was also a part of the group of people who saw the death of discriminatory practices in the then Travancore district that sought to clearly demarcate the upper and lower castes. Dakshayani has written about her early childhood in the forthcoming autobiography — “not born in a poor Pulaya family” and was loved and favoured by her father in a family of five children. The change she would later come to be known for — being the first Dalit girl to wear an upper cloth and the first Dalit woman graduate in India — had already started with her birth. At a time when Dalit girls were given “peculiar names like Azhaki, Poomala, Chakki, Kali, Kurumba, Thara, Kilipakka,” her parents named her Dakshayani, meaning Durga or daughter of Daksha. “Pulaya and other Dalit castes could only use certain kind of names,” Meera, her daughter, says, adding how her mother mentions this facet in the book. “She wrote about about how Pulaya women used to tell her that she had been given an Ezhava girl’s name.” Ezhava, though a backward class, was considered above the Pulayas.

Dakshayani wrote that her brothers were among the first in the community to cut their long-knotted hair and wear shirts. They were taunted and abused for it by Ezhavas and Latin Christians on the island. She said: When they took the road, others hooted at them; when they took the boat, others threw stones at them. Little Dakshayani too wore a dress when she went to school. At that time Cochin had begun to give free education to children of depressed classes. So while her mother Maani, her elder siblings — a sister and two brothers — and Krishnethi converted to Christianity, her mother did not convert her and her younger brother KK Madhavan. “There was agency in that conversion. It is not that they were manipulated or influenced. My uncles, who were petty contractors, got more work after conversion,” says Dakshayani’s daughter Meera. The bright Dakshayani took a ferry and walked a couple of hours to the school — and back. She went on to do her bachelor’s in chemistry from Maharaja’s College in Ernakulam — the only girl in the class. By then, the roads had opened for Dalits, but the prejudice never went away. Growing up at a time of tremendous social changes, and into a family that spearheaded many of these changes, the right to wear an upper cloth was just the first in a series of firsts in her life. Movements that called for democratization of public spaces, education, work security, equality and abolition of caste slavery saw her generation become the first group of educated Dalits in India.

She was the first Dalit woman to earn a degree. Armed with a scholarship from the Cochin State government, she went on to get a B.Sc Chemistry from Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam and a teachers training certificate from Madras University. In her project, “Woman Architects of the Indian Republic”, Priya Ravichandran writes about the discrimination and ill-treatment Velayudhan faced while completing her Bachelor’s degree from the Madras University. She was the only girl student in the entire science department and an upper caste teacher refused to show her the experiments. Dakshayani, who graduated in 1935, learnt it by observing from a distance. That didn’t stop her. Nothing quite did. She graduated with a high second class in 1935 and went for a teacher’s training course in Madras. This defiance and grit marked much of her life.

When she returned, she was posted in a government school in Peringottukara in Thrissur. The reason: the backward caste Ezhavas dominated the place, which meant there weren’t many upper castes who would be offended by a Dalit teacher in the classroom. The sea may not have caste, but a well does. Dakshayani, who was given accommodation in the house of a rich Ezhava, was not allowed to draw water from the well. But her mother, who had converted to Christianity, was allowed. So she stayed back with her daughter. 

In 1940, Dakshayani married Dalit leader Velayudhan — who was the uncle of KR Narayanan who would go on to become the first Dalit president of India — at Gandhi’s ashram in Wardha, in a ceremony officiated by a leper and attended by the Mahatma and Kasturba. Meera recalls an anecdote that when Dakshayani grew tired of the jaggery and chappati in the ashram, Gandhi asked her to cook fish in her hut and have it. But she found cooking too much of a hassle. Dakshayani later became a member of the Provisional Parliament and Velayudhan an MP in 1952, which makes them possibly the first Dalit parliamentarian couple of India. 

In 1942, Dakshayani was transferred to a high school in Thripunithura, an upper caste-dominated area. In her book, Dakshayani writes about an incident when as a teacher at a government high school in Trichur district she met a Nair woman on the road who demanded that Dakshayani make way. Owing to the way people from the Pulaya community were treated this was still prevalent. There were paddy fields on both sides along the road. Dakshayani refused and remained defiantly steadfast. “I told her directly on her face, if you want to go past me, you may get down into the field and go,” she writes. The field was four to five feet below the road level.” The woman was ultimately compelled to get down on the field and walk,” she writes. The stigma and the institutional discrimination she faced as an educator in a government school pushed her to reconsider her career and see politics as a valid means of getting justice for her community and as a chance to serve the country. Disillusioned by the prejudice and determined to contribute to her community, she decided to seek a nomination — reserved for Scheduled Castes — to the Cochin Legislative Council. Thus, she followed in the footsteps of her brother, K.P Vallon, and was nominated to the Cochin legislative council in 1945. in 1946, she was nominated to the constituent assembly from Madras Presidency. She was the first and only Dalit woman to be elected to the constituent assembly.

On August 2, 1945, Dakshayani spoke for the first time in the council — in English. Pointing out that the funds allocated for the uplift of depressed classes were dwindling, she called for proportionate reservation in panchayat and municipality and lashed out at untouchability as inhuman. Dakshayani said as long as untouchability remained, the word “Harijan” was meaningless, it was like calling dogs “Napoleon”. On July 22, 1946, the firebrand speaker became a member of the Constituent Assembly. 

In that August congregation of 389 people, there were just just 15 women. And there was only one Dalit woman — Dakshayani Velayudhan. She was just 34. She was both a Gandhian and an Ambedkarite but she also challenged them both and argued on the strength of her own convictions. Her belief was that “a Constituent Assembly not only frames a constitution, but also gives the people a new framework of life.” A staunch follower of Gandhi, she strongly opposed untouchability but believed that as long as it was practised, the word Harijan (popularised by Gandhi ) would remain irrelevant. She refused to view Dalits as minorities and believed that “[t]he Harijans are Indians and they have to live in India as Indians and they will live in India as Indians.” Dakshayani placed the struggles of her community ahead of her gender, unmistakably evident in her impassioned speech at the Constituent Assembly where she didn’t speak as a Pulaya woman but hoped to see “no barriers based on caste or community” in the Indian Republic. She was vociferous in her support for Article 17 of the Constitution of India that abolishes untouchability and forbids its practice in any form. Often told by other members that she asked too many questions, Dakshayani’s presence among other female members in the Constituent Assembly, like Vijaylakshmi Pandit, Sarojini Naidu, many of whom came from privilege, was a telling sight in itself.

Dakshayani’s term in the constituent assembly was defined by two objectives, both inspired and molded by her time with Gandhi and Ambedkar. One was to make the assembly go beyond framing a constitution and to give “people a new framework of life” and two, to use the opportunity to make untouchability illegal, unlawful and ensure a “moral safeguard that gives real protection to the underdogs” in India. Her idea of moral safeguards rested on the idea that an Independent India as a “socialist republic” would give equality of status and guarantee an immediate removal of social disabilities that would enable the Harijans to enjoy the same freedom that the rest of the country enjoyed. Interesting in her arguments, on the 19th of December 1946 soon after Nehru had tabled his aims and objectives resolution was the invocation of the Licchavi Kingdom of ancient India as an example a republic. Licchavi kingdom which originated in Benaras, was infact a tribal confederation as described by Kautilya. It had a council of ‘rajas’ who elected a leader to rule over them. The other notable part of the discussion is her take down of Churchill’s promise to safegaurd the scheduled castes in an independant India and her remark that the communist party was only exploiting the harijans. She held strong to the conviction that only an Independent socialist republic can help uplift the dalits and give them the liberties exercised by every other citizen.

Dakshayani’s admiration for Gandhi and his vision for India was only matched by her respect for Ambedkar and his mission to raise the status of untouchables in India. Their antithetical positions regarding the status of minorities, and her own views on how the minorities should be represented was one of her most defining speeches during the assembly. Delivered on the 28th of August 1947, after Sardar Patel submitted his Minority report, her arguments against separate electorates in any form and her censure of the reservation system was in support of a nationalist narrative that sought economic and social upliftment rather than looking to politics as a means to eradicate the system of untouchability. She noted in her speech on 28th August 1947 “As long as the Scheduled Castes, or the Harijans or by whatever name they may be called, are economic slaves of other people, there is no meaning demanding either separate electorates or joint electorates or any other kind of electorates with this kind of percentage. Personally speaking, I am not in favour of any kind of reservation in any place whatsoever.” Her dismissal of the separate electorates and reservations was in keeping with the notion that an Independent India should work towards creating a stronger, common national identity rather than maintain practices that would further the social fissures that the British left behind. Her concern as evidenced through her speeches was not the political safeguarding of minority rights, but the breakdown of integrity and stability of a nation that would push back the advancement of Harijans, economically and socially. She saw an independent, united India as being more beneficial to the abolishment of castes, rather than a measured divvying up of electoral politics.

Her speech in support of a system that would use economic and social means to create an equal and just society coincidentally came 15 years after the Poona pact of 1932 was signed. The fruit of Gandhi’s fast against the suggested separate electorate of the Communal Award and the Poona deal that Ambedkar would pillory time and again, went on to set the tone for the Government of India Act of 1935 that would become the basis for Independent India’s constitution.

Dakshayani’s political, social and personal realm was dotted by independent thought and opinion. Her biggest criticism was reserved for the draft constitution presented by Ambedkar. She stood up on 8th November 1948 to declare that she found the draft constitution “barren of ideas and principles”. The blame she pointed out had to be shared by all members of the constituent assembly who in spite of their lofty ideals, illustrious backgrounds and prodigious speeches could not come up with an original constitution. Her criticism like many others centered around the idea of maintaining a strong center without much decentralization and the idea of a slightly reworked adaptation of the British India government act of 1935. She expressed dismay about carrying over the idea of governorship and centrally administered areas from British system and in the lack of originality in the framing. One fascinating idea that she suggested was to have the draft constitution put to vote during the first general elections and to test its mettle with the people who would ultimately use it. A democratic test of the document that would make India a republic, she felt would ensure the process of constitution making was fair.

Dakshayani was deeply involved in her home and family. She wrote long letters to her daughter, that were a guiding force. “I was always proud of my background, confident of my abilities and never felt downtrodden, ” Meera says while recollecting the impact her mother’s fearless thinking had on her. “When I started my menstruation, I was nine, during holidays, she sketched and explained what was happening to the body and asked my father to get some sanitary pads to take to school,” Meera says. Velayudhan did not actively pursue electoral politics. “She was more comfortable working in the slums of Munirka (Delhi) among sweeper women. After holding one of the early national conference of Dalit women in Delhi, mainly Ambedkarites, she formed a women’s organisation, Mahila Jagriti Parishad (1977),” the daughter adds.

Unlike many of her peers and fellow women members, she moved away from direct electoral politics into creating groups that worked towards the upliftment of Harijans. She saw untouchability being abolished by a constitutional article and lived to see reservations last longer than the 10 years the members agreed upon. Her final foray into electoral politics was an unsuccessful contest for a Lok Sabha seat in 1971. Her husband’s cousin K.R Narayanan went on to serve as India’s first Dalit President. Dakshayani passed away in July 1978. She was 66.

At five feet, Dakshayani was “unassuming and serious” and walked with a slight slouch, Meera says. It came during the early years in Mulavukad, when she and others from her community walked with their head down and backs hunched. But the value of standing tall, head held high and striving in the face of great adversity was never lost on her. Meera remembers an innocuous incident, while studying at night, “I was preparing for an exam, possibly all slouched, with a flask of coffee to keep awake. When she saw me sitting like that, she patted me on the back and said sit straight.” She would remind her of how the early years of stooping before the upper castes had given her a slight hunch. What she didn’t let on was that when she straightened her shoulders and looked at the world, Dakshayani Velayudhan shattered to smithereens the cast-iron ceiling of caste. And perhaps, therein lies Dakshayini Velayudhan’s greatest contribution, not just for the Dalit community, but for a nation, standing one’s ground and holding our head high. 

Source: Google search.

Dr. Leila Denmark

#64/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

Leila Denmark, the world's fourth-oldest person at 114, overcame deep-rooted prejudice to become one of America's first paediatricians, and the oldest practising medical practitioner until poor eyesight finally forced her retirement at the age of 103. Leila began her 73-year career treating sick children in 1928, the same year that another pioneer, aviator Amelia Earhart, became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean, and the year that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin.

She practiced medicine in Atlanta for 73 years and well past her 100th birthday. When she retired, at 103, the veteran pediatrician was the oldest practicing physician in the country, according to the American Medical Association. And she only retired because she couldn’t see as well as she once did, “otherwise she would have kept on,” said her daughter, Mary Denmark Hutcherson. “She was an excellent diagnostician and she dispensed medical advice over the phone until she was 110 because her mind was still sharp," Mary said. "It was her eyesight that was failing.” Over the years reporters would call and want to interview her, but the doctor made her intentions clear from the beginning, her grandson said. “She’d tell them if all they wanted to talk about was her age or where she was practicing, that was not what she wanted to talk about,” said Dr. James D. Hutcherson, who lives in Evergreen, Colo. But she loved to talk about babies and how to keep them healthy, he said.

Leila Alice Daughtry was born in February 1898 on a farm in the small town of Portal, Bulloch County, Georgia, about 170 miles south-east of Atlanta, the state capital. The third of 12 children to Elerbee and Alice Cornelia Hendricks Daughtry, she grew up in a farming community, attending high school at an agricultural and mechanical school. From a young age she had a passion to heal, learning to tend to plants and wanting to heal animals. Initially drawn to teaching, Leila earned a BA degree from Georgia's Tift College in 1922 and then taught science. However, realising that her ambitions lay in medicine, she pushed aside the prejudices that existed particularly in the South, and enrolled at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta in 1924. That was the time when her fiancé John Eustace Denmark had just been posted to Java, Dutch Indies, by the United States Department of State, and wives were not allowed to accompany their spouses to that post. Four years later and the only woman in a class of 52 students, she became the third woman to earn a medical degree from the college.

Three days after graduation, she married her long-term sweetheart, the banker John Eustace Denmark. The couple moved to Atlanta, where she began her internship in the segregated black wards of Grady Hospital. That same year, Leila became the first resident physician and admitted the first sick baby at the newly founded Henrietta Egleston Hospital for Children (now Children's Healthcare of Atlanta) when it opened later in 1928. In 1930 she began a second internship at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, before returning home to give birth to her only daughter, Mary Alice. The following year Leila established her private practice in paediatrics in her Atlanta home so that she could embody the advice she gave to parents: "Be the one to raise your child". Her emphasis was on good parenting, good nutrition and common sense. She also gave time each week to the Central Presbyterian Church, which opened a charity baby clinic. Throughout her career, her office was always in or near her home and open all hours for those in need of care.

When a whooping cough epidemic swept through Atlanta in 1932, Leila was spurred on to conduct pioneering research in the diagnosis, treatment and immunisation of the disease that killed so many underprivileged babies. Working with Eli Lilly and researchers at Emory University, Leila's findings led to the development of the pertussis vaccine and the modern-day DPT vaccination. During her 70 years as a paediatrician, Leila preached preventive medicine and old-school parenting techniques. At the mid-point of her career, from ideas formulated over the previous four decades, a book outlining tips for raising healthy children was published in 1971, “Every Child Should Have a Chance”. It has been reprinted several times. She wrote a second book, with Madia Bowman, titled “Dr. Denmark Said It!: Advice for Mothers from America's Most Experienced Pediatrician” written in 2002.

Unmoved by generations of baby experts advocating "hands-off" parenting, her book extolled a child-rearing philosophy that placed responsibility for a child's health and happiness solely on parents. She later explained, "If we had every mother taking care of their children, we wouldn't need prisons." Leila also believed strongly that a woman should not leave home to join the workforce, a stance that drew criticism from the media as well as others in the medical community. She suggested that children placed in day care would grow to have little self-discipline or confidence in others.

To keep costs to a minimum in a country that had no free healthcare service, Leila did not employ a nurse or receptionist and relied on a "sign-in sheet" to bring order to her waiting room. She also rarely charged patients more than $10 for an office consultation, and it was not unusual for her to spend an hour counselling a new mother. Over the years, her Alpharetta farmhouse office was visited by families from all walks of life. Her medical instruments were few and barely changed: a stethoscope, an otoscope, blood pressure cuff, chemicals to test urine and to measure haemoglobin, and, most of all, her inquiring mind. Leila gained a reputation for being able to diagnose a child's illness from just looking – and as a no-nonsense doctor who did not mince her words. In an interview, she recalled, "When a mother asks, 'Doctor, what makes my baby so bad?'" she was likely to get the answer, "Go look in the mirror. You get apples off apple trees."

Leila received many honours and awards, including the Fisher Award (1935) and honorary doctorates from Tift College (1972), with the citation "a devout humanitarian who has invested her life in paediatric services to all families without respect to economic status, race, or national origin"; Mercer University (1991); and Emory University (2000). She was Atlanta's Woman of the Year in 1953 and won the Atlanta Business Chronicle's lifetime achievement award in 1998. In 2002, the Georgia General Assembly commended Leila "for her stellar medical career". On her 100th birthday in 1998, Leila refused a slice of cake because there was too much sugar in it. When she refused cake again on her 103rd birthday, she explained to the restaurant's server that she had not eaten any food with added sugar for 70 years. As she approached her 110th birthday, Leila credited her longevity to drinking only water, eating no refined sugars and including a protein and vegetable with every meal. She added, "You keep on doing what you do best, as long as you can. I enjoyed every minute of it for more than 70 years. If I could live it over again, I'd do exactly the same thing."

Leila lived independently in her Alpharetta, Georgia home until age 106. She moved to Athens, Georgia to live with her only child, Mary (Leila) Hutcherson. On February 1, 2008, Leila celebrated her 110th birthday, becoming a supercentenarian. According to Hutcherson, Leila's health deteriorated severely in the autumn of 2008 but later improved as she neared her 111th birthday. She died in 2012 at the age of 114 and 2 months. She was one of the few supercentenarians notable for something other than their longevity. Leila Denmark's husband predeceased her in 1990. She was survived by her daughter. Her family said it is important to note that Dr. Denmark didn’t set out to become famous. Her only goal was to raise healthy babies and help them become healthy adults. 

Source: Wikipedia and Google search.

Karnam Malleswari

#63/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

Before September 19, 2000, Karnam Malleswari was passed off as another nondescript weightlifter. After September 19, 2000, she became a household name, a celebrity whom news reporters chased for story bytes. After all, she had won a bronze medal in weightlifting at the Sydney Olympics. It's been over seventeen years since she achieved this feat but she remains the only weighlifter ever in India to have won an Olympic medal. With that, she had also become the first Indian woman to win an Olympic medal.

Malleswari was born on June 1, 1975 in a small village Voosavanipeta in Andhra Pradesh. She has four sisters and all are well trained in weightlifting. She started her career when she was 12 and was trained under coach Neelamshetty Appanna. She practiced weightlifting in her village gymnasium. Her younger sister Krishna Kumari is also a national level weightlifter. Karnam Malleswari did her schooling from ZPPG High School in Amadalavalasa. Her father was a constable in the Railway Protection Force. She moved to Delhi with her sisters and was soon spotted by the Sports Authority of India. Then in 1990, Malleshwari joined the national camp and four years later, she was a world championship winner in the 54-kg class. Malleshwari was coached by Leonid Taranenko, a renowned weightlifter, who holds a number of world records.

Malleswari won the world title in the 54 kg division in 1994 and 1995 and placed third in 1993 and 1996. In 2000, Sydney Olympics, Malleswari lifted 110 kg in the “snatch” and 130 kg in the “clean and jerk” for a total of 240 kg. She won the bronze medal and became the first Indian woman to win an Olympic medal. By her incredible achievement, she lifted the sagging spirits of not just the Indian contingent which had accompanied her at Sydney but also those of everyone back home. This amazing lady had made every Indian chest swell with pride. That was the only medal India had won in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

The feat achieved by Malleswari was much applauded and was celebrated widely among all the sections of the nation transcending regional boundaries that often limits us as a country. This victory was different; this victory brought glory not only to one region or a particular class of people but to every section of the society. This victory was merely not against the competitors but was also against all those detractors and that section of society who looked down upon her for taking up sports as her career and that too for specifically choosing weight lifting as her area of interest. The victory of Karnam Malleswari was a tight slap on all those people who thought she would never win as weight lifting was a ‘Masculine’ sport.

Prior to the Olympics, in 1994 she won gold in a World Weightlifting Championships in Istanbul and in 1995 she won the Asian Weightlifting Championships in Korea in the 54 kg category. She won the World Weightlifting Championships title in China, in the year 1995 with a record lift of 113 kg. Even before her Olympic win, she was a two-time weightlifting world champion with 29 international medals, which includes 11 golds medals.

Along with the national and international medals, she was also awarded with the Arjuna Award in 1994, Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna in 1999, India's highest sporting honour, and the civilian Padma Shri in 1999. In 1997, she had married a fellow weightlifter Rajesh Tyagi. Just after her 2000 Olympic win, she gave birth to a son in 2001. She had planned to return to competitions at the 2002 Commonwealth Games, but withdrew eventually due to the death of her father. She retired after failing to score at the 2004 Olympics. She currently lives in Yamunanagar with her husband and works at Food Corporation of India.

True to her name ‘Karnam’ which in Sanskrit stands for Pride, Dignity, and Fame, India’s Weightlifting champion proved that if a woman desired, she could become physically as strong or even stronger than men. Malleshwari is known as the "iron girl of Andhra Pradesh". Karnam Malleswari is an epitome of inspiration for the simple reason that she did not let the social conditioning prevent her from chasing her dreams and for the dedication she has shown and sacrifices she has made to reach to the top spot which was left vacant until she announced her entry into world of sports and for boldly speaking against the shortcomings in the process of selection of players. We salute this lady for the passion she has for sports and for her unwavering determination to prepare the next champion who will carry on the legacy left behind by her.

Source: Wikipedia and Google search.