Zitkála-Sá: A 20th-Century Champion of Native American Activism

Her Opera “The Sun Dance” Made Stage History

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School became infamous as a place designed to
Born on a South Dakota Sioux Reservation, the young Gertrude Simmons was pulled between the Indian culture into which she was born and the Euro-American culture that educated her. At 19, she seized on her tribal roots and went on to become one of the most influential Native American activists of the 20th century.

Zitkála-Sá (pronounced Zitkála Shá), also known as Gertrude Evaline Simmons, was born in 1876, year of the Battle of Little Bighorn, on South Dakota’s Yankton Sioux Reservation. Her mother was a full-blooded Dakota Sioux named Ellen Tatiyahewin (“She Reaches for the Wind”) Simmons, her father a white man about whom little is known. We do know he abandoned the family, leaving her mother to raise their children in traditional Sioux ways.

Continue reading “Zitkála-Sá: A 20th-Century Champion of Native American Activism”

Triumph Against All Odds: Black Artist Elizabeth Catlett

A Highly Acclaimed 20th Century Sculptor and Printmaker

Artist Elizabeth Catlett and slavery print.
Inspired by the stories of her formerly-enslaved grandmothers, artist Elizabeth Catlett built an internationally acclaimed career around her artworks capturing the experiences of Black women.

Elizabeth Catlett never knew her father, a Tuskegee Institute math professor who died before she was born, but a small wooden bird sculpture he left behind gave wing to the artistic interests that would ultimately define her career. Born near Washington, D.C., in 1915, grandchild of formerly-enslaved people, her life’s work would give poignant voice to the dignity, pride, strength, and hard-won victories of Black women in a society dominated by white men.

Continue reading “Triumph Against All Odds: Black Artist Elizabeth Catlett”

Jessie Tarbox Beals: First Published Female Photojournalist

Blazed a trail for future female news photographers

At the turn of the 20th century, Jessie Tarbox Beals blazed a trail for female photographers when she became the first woman photojournalist to be published in the U.S. Her accomplishments are all the more notable because the photo process and equipment of her era required arduous amounts of physical labor and stamina. For instance, the camera she often balanced on top of 20-foot ladders weighed 50 pounds.

Jessie Tarbox Beals might have spent her life as a teacher, doing “genteel, sheltered, monotonous and moneyless work having neither heights nor depths.” Instead, thanks to a little box camera, a knack for self promotion and pure moxie, she became one of America’s first women to carve out a career in the tough, competitive, male-dominated field of photojournalism.

Continue reading “Jessie Tarbox Beals: First Published Female Photojournalist”

Ida Holdgreve: Wright Brothers’ Plane Seamstress

Played a major role in earliest era of powered human flight

Seamstress Ida Holdgreve at work in the Wright Brothers’ Ohio factory in 1911. Her work was crucial in the earliest era of powered human flight when airplanes were made of wood, wire and fabric, including the DH-4, which was the only American-built plane to fly in combat in World War I.

Had computers and Spell Check! existed in 1910, we might never know the name Ida Holdgreve. Lucky for her, a simple typo in a local newspaper ad led to her finding a place in history as the first woman to work in the American aviation industry.

Continue reading “Ida Holdgreve: Wright Brothers’ Plane Seamstress”

Hidden WWII Hero: Filipina-American Florence Finch

Saboteur, Resistance Fighter, and POW in the Pacific Theater

Military medals of Florence Smith Finch
After the Japanese invaded the Philippines at the start of World War II, Florence Finch became a spy, resistance fighter, and finally, a prisoner of war. She also went on to become the first Asian- American woman to wear a U.S. Coast Guard uniform. Later still, in a quieter career as an office worker at Cornell University, she never mentioned her military exploits or medals to her co-workers.

If there’s one thing the coronavirus pandemic has taught us, it’s that unsung heroes are all around us — people doing great things or committing acts of bravery or self-sacrifice quietly, without celebration or recognition, sacrificing their time and energy for the good of others. So it’s understandable that neither a small community in Ithaca, NY, nor people working at Cornell University knew they had been, for years, in the presence of a true, unsung, World War II hometown hero, Florence Finch.

Continue reading “Hidden WWII Hero: Filipina-American Florence Finch”

Mapping a Road Though Gender Barriers to Scientific Greatness: Marie Tharp

Deep Sea Cartographer who Proved Theory of Plate Tectonics Was True

Marie Tharp with her global map of the ocean floors.
A giant in the field of oceanographic cartography, Marie Tharp’s work changed earth science and our understanding of how ocean floors cracked as moving continents pulled them apart.

A map of the career of Marie Tharp would look something like a long zig-zag through the male-only barriers of geologic and catographic science until the 1950s when she broke through with a unique new map of the ocean floor and proof that the long-debated theory of “plate tectonics” was true.

Continue reading “Mapping a Road Though Gender Barriers to Scientific Greatness: Marie Tharp”