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.