The Resolute Woman

Category: resolute-women

  • The opportunity to get over it

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    Major General Jessica Wright, undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, remembers when she was a brand-new lieutenant, and a superior told her that he didn’t like females in the military. “There were 500 things going through my head,” the major told Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, who write about the incident in their book…

  • A fascinating spectacle

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    Joyce Carol Oates, whose latest novel is Carthage, says that the book that changed her life was Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, a combination of the two classics in one volume. Her grandmother Blanche Morgenstern gave her the volume for her ninth birthday in 1947, Oates writes in the June/Jul…

  • The woman who defeated Al Capone

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    Mabel Walker Willebrandt was a remarkable woman who earned a law degree in 1916 and served as assistant attorney general in President Harding’s administration, the most senior woman in the federal government at the time. In the 1920s, mobsters seemed “invincible,” writes Bill Bryson in his book One Summer—America 1927. It was almost impossible to…

  • A woman inventor in 1715

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    Sybilla Masters invented a power-driven method for grinding corn in 1715. According to Catherine Thimmeah in Girls Think of Everything—Stories of Ingenious Inventions by Women, this was the first documented invention by an American woman. “Because America was still a British colony, Sybilla went to England to obtain a patent for her invention,” Thimmeah writes.…

  • The struggles of a lifetime

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    Sometimes when I need inspiration, I find it. Why do I keep fighting the same battles? Why do I have to constantly remind myself that I really do want to eat vegetables instead of chocolate, that sometimes I talk too much, that feeling depressed doesn’t solve my problems? When I flipped through a book by…

  • Begin anywhere along the way

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    I’ve been thinking about Barbara Scheiber’s novel We’ll Go to Coney Island because, just like the characters in the book, I’ve been feeling stuck—stuck in a swamp of old feelings of depression, old feelings that make me want to eat chocolate, old feelings that make me want me to give up and stay stuck. And,…

  • Failure is impossible

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    On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony voted. By voting, Anthony had broken the law because women didn’t get the right to vote until after she died. She was tried in court on June 17, 1873. “Her attorney called her as a witness, but the judge declared that Susan B. Anthony was incompetent as a…

  • Move on

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    Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, didn’t grow up dreaming about becoming an astronaut. She wanted to be a professional tennis player, reports Lynn Sherr in the June 17, 2014, issue of The Dallas Morning News. Sherr is the author of a new book Sally Ride: America’s First Woman in Space. “When she…

  • How Georgia O’Keefe worked

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    Georgia O’Keefe drove her Model A across the desert and back, and up and down over the hills, says Jeanette Winter in her children’s book My Name Is Georgia. Even in winter, she “went far out into the faraway and painted in the bitter cold.” She painted when the wind was so strong it nearly…

  • Make some goals

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    A long-term study of 6,100 Americans concluded that having a “sense of purpose” may be the strongest predictor of longevity. “Finding a direction for life and setting overarching goals for what you want to achieve can help you actually live longer,” said Patrick Hill, a psychology professor at Carleton University. We read about the study…