Heidi Li's Potpourri

Maggie Walker - A Woman of Interest, especially as we go through a financial crisis

Maggie Walker, the first woman to charter a bank in the United States:

In 1903 she founded the St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. Mrs. Walker served as the bank's first president, which earned her the recognition of being the first woman to charter a bank in the United States. Later she agreed to serve as chairman of the board of directors when the bank merged with two other Richmond banks to become The Consolidated Bank and Trust Company. The bank thrives today as the oldest continually African American-operated bank in the United States. Its headquarters are currently located across the street from its original site at the corner of First and Marshall streets in Richmond. [source: National Park Service]

 

For more from this document go here, to the website of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond.

Women of Interest: An occasional series, entry 3: Helen Suzman

I hate bullies and like simple justice
--Helen Suzman

From the BBC:

Anti-apartheid icon Suzman buried

Top politicians and close friends attended Helen Suzman's close friends

Hundreds of mourners have attended the funeral of South Africa's celebrated anti-apartheid campaigner Helen Suzman, who died on New Year's Day aged 91.

Mrs Suzman, who for years was the only lawmaker to openly condemn the whites-only regime, was buried in a private Jewish ceremony in Johannesburg.

The mourners included President Kgalema Motlanther and the last leader of apartheid regime, F W de Klerk.

Mr de Klerk described Mrs Suzman as "one of South Africa's great icons".

"Suzman was my mentor, she was opposed to the abuse of power by the old apartheid regime," South Africa's opposition leader Helen Zille - who also attended the funeral - said.

"She was also opposed to the current abuses of power by the current ANC [African National Congress] government," Ms Zille added.

For 13 years, Mrs Suzman, the daughter of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, was the only MP to openly condemn South Africa's whites-only apartheid regime.

She was made an honorary dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 1989. She was also twice-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

'Corageous woman'

Mrs Suzman, who had been in a frail condition recently, died at her home in Johannesburg early on Thursday.

Mrs Suzman stepped down from parliament in 1989

She first entered the South African parliament in 1953, soon becoming a thorn in the side of the apartheid regime, says the BBC's Peter Biles, in Johannesburg.

She was a frequent visitor of jailed ANC leader Nelson Mandela when he was held in Robben Island prison for 18 years.

Mr Mandela - who was elected South Africa's first black president in 1994 - wrote of her in his biography: "It was an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman peering into our cells and strolling around our courtyard. She was the first and only woman ever to grace our cells."

After stepping down from parliament in 1989, Mrs Suzman continued to speak out against what she saw as the failings of the post-apartheid ANC administration.

Mrs Suzman was born in Germiston, Gauteng, on 7 November 1917.

In 1937 she married doctor Moses Meyer Suzman. The couple later had two daughters.

See also: BBC obituary, coverage of Suzman's life from the (South Africa) Mail and Guardian, and the Helen Suzman Foundation.

Women of Interest: An occasional series, entry 2

(source)

Born: Kattowitze, Germany, July 28, 1906

Died: La Jolla, California, February 20, 1972

Nobelist in Physics

Maria Goeppert-Mayer developed the nuclear shell model of atomic nuclei, an achievement honored when she became the third woman ever awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, in 1963. She shared the prize with J. Hans D. Jensen, who had independently developed a similar model, and with theoretician Eugene Wigner.

Although she lived a life of scholarly privilege, with the support of her family and many notable scientists, she was not able to secure full-time work in her field until she was 53. Mayer performed most of her scientific work as a volunteer.

Maria Göppert came from a family of academics. Her father was a professor of pediatrics and the seventh generation of university scholars in his family. When Maria was four, he moved the family from Kattowitze to Göttingen so he could teach there. Maria idolized her father. It was expected that she acquire an education because of her family pedigree in academics. Maria attended a small private school that prepared girls for the university entrance exams. In 1924 she enrolled at Göttingen in mathematics.

Göttingen was then a world center for physics (and the new study of quantum mechanics). The Göppert family had friends who were prominent scientists, and Maria's social contacts included Niels Bohr and her teacher, Max Born. While attending Born's physics seminar, Maria decided to study physics instead of mathematics. Born's other students included Fermi, Oppenheimer, Dirac, and von Neumann. Maria thrived in this environment. For her dissertation (1930), she calculated the probability that an electron orbiting an atom's nucleus would emit two photons of light as it jumped to an orbit closer to the nucleus. Her challenging calculation was confirmed experimentally in the 1960s.

Maria married physical chemist Joseph E. Mayer in 1930 and together they moved to Baltimore, where Joe was a professor at Johns Hopkins. Maria adopted a hyphenated form of their names and anglicized the spelling. She had an attic office and a mixed assortment of honorary job titles, but no pay. She nevertheless produced ten papers, a textbook, and her daughter Maria Ann during her time in Baltimore. She was pregnant with her son John in 1938, when Joe unexpectedly lost his job. They left Hopkins for Columbia University.

There, they wrote a classic textbook, Statistical Mechanics. Again, Goeppert-Mayer had office space, but no pay. During the Second World War, she worked on uranium isotope separation, under Harold Urey and others who helped develop the atom bomb. After the war, the Columbia physicists moved to Chicago, and the Mayers followed.

Maria worked at the Institute for Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago and at the Argonne National Laboratory. In 1948 she started her work on the nuclear shell model. Chicago received her willingly and gave her great respect, but no salary. In 1956, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Three years later, she and Joe accepted professorships at the new University of California campus at San Diego.

When the Nobel Prize was awarded to her in 1963, a San Diego newspaper ran the headline "S.D. Mother Wins Nobel Prize." Shortly afterward, her health began to decline and she died in 1972.

Note from Heidi Li: Respect, membership in the National Academy of Sciences, a Nobel Prize - and no salary. Unpaid labor - what institutions does THAT remind you of? Puts me in mind of the need for:

Women of Interest: an occasional series, entry 1

Alice Beck Kehoe (reprinted in its entirety) from Scientific American

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Where Are They Now? -  December 16, 2008
Alice Beck Kehoe: Overturning Anthropology Dogma Since the [Tender] Age of 16
A dream summer job lead to a 1952 Westinghouse finalist spot, then a career in anthropology

By Laura Vanderkam

Her finalist year: 1952

Her finalist project: A paper arguing that Native Americans had contact with other cultures from across the Pacific

What led to the project: Alice Beck Kehoe always loved archaeology and anthropology. Her parents subscribed to National Geographic, and when she discovered Alfred Kroeber's lengthy textbook, Anthropology, in a public library, she read it straight through.

Because of that fascination, when the Mount Vernon, N.Y., resident looked for a summer job at age 16, she had her eyes on the anthropology department of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She wrote a letter to the department asking if they needed a typist. They did: She earned $25 a week typing up catalogues of various collections, finishing her assignment before the summer was over.

She used the extra weeks to help the curators. One of them, Gordon Ekholm, had recently put on an exhibit about pre-Columbian transpacific contacts between cultures in the Old and New worlds. Young Alice never worked for him, specifically, but she studied his research and reached similar conclusions—that there must have been contact by some New World populations with people from outside in the days before 1492—in a paper she entered in the 1952 Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Despite the fact that anthropology and archaeology papers were extremely rare among the top contenders, she was named a finalist.

The effect on her career: "My self-esteem and self-confidence were certainly strengthened by having been selected," she says. "On the one hand, I realized that I didn't have the kind of brilliance some people had." She was extremely impressed by the math and physics projects other finalists had done. On the other, "It was exciting to think I was counted, literally, in this company. For a girl in the 1950s, that really helped."

She went to Barnard College at Columbia University to study anthropology. Her first job after college was working at the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Mont. She developed more than a professional interest in the young museum director, Thomas Kehoe, who hired her. She married him, and the two attended graduate school at Harvard University.

Kehoe found the subject of her dissertation in 1959 after Thomas took a job in Canada as the provincial archaeologist in Saskatchewan. Traditional anthropological theory maintained that the ghost dance religion—widespread among Native Americans in the late 19th century—had died out. Kehoe discovered that the practice was still alive and informing the spirituality of Saskatchewanian residents who were descended from Sioux refugees of the 1862 uprising and subsequent massacre of the tribe in Minnesota.

The fact that reality so clearly contradicted the theory made a big impression on her—and contributed to her lifelong battle against anthropological and archaeological theories based mostly on the prejudices of the day. "American archaeologists tend to be politically naive," she says. They go into archaeology because they aren't interested in economics or politics or things like that. "They want to go out in the country and dig in the ground and handle things." But just as the national myth of Columbus "discovering" the Americas stifled work on other cross-cultural contacts for years, Kehoe maintains that assumptions about the inferiority of non-European people or women have also led to a lack of scholarship. (For instance, the assumption that the people living in pre-Columbian America were "primitive" and therefore not up to much of importance led to a lack of study in their varied histories and cultures until relatively recently.)

After a new party took power in the Saskatchewan provincial government and eliminated Thomas Kehoe's job in 1964, the Kehoes decamped for Lincoln, Neb., where Alice taught at the University of Nebraska until Thomas applied for and landed what she calls his "dream job" at the Milwaukee Public Museum. Kehoe began teaching at Marquette University in 1968 and remained there until her retirement in 2000. (The couple divorced in 1993; Thomas died a few months ago.)

During and after her academic career, Kehoe became a prolific author, writing several books including America Before the European Invasions; The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization;and The Land of Prehistory.

What she's doing now: Kehoe's most recent book, Controversies in Archaeology, came out earlier this year and aims to introduce students to hot-button issues from pre-Columbian contacts to the lost civilization of Atlantis. She wrote it at the behest of Mitch Allen, publisher of Left Coast Press. "Alice Kehoe is an original, there were no copies made," Allen says. "One of the founding mothers of feminist archaeology, she has been a thoughtful and electrifying presence in the discipline for half a century."

Her specialty is putting controversial theories through the rigor of archaeological field methods and analysis; Allen notes that he asked her to write the book because "she would explain the importance of scientific hypothesis testing for archaeology students" while making sure that they would "not be shy about embracing the conclusions of those tests, no matter how far from conventional wisdom the answers were."

In her retirement Kehoe enjoys writing and traveling: She's off to Angkor Wat in Cambodia in January to see the pyramids there that bear a similarity to the ones in Mexico. Coincidence? Part of the fun of anthropology and archaeology, she says, is figuring that out.