The Liz Library presents Irene Stuber's Women of Achievement


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July 2
WOMEN OF ACHIEVEMENT AND HERSTORY

Compiled and Written by Irene Stuber.
07-02 TABLE of CONTENTS:

Conchita Cintron, The First Professional Woman Bullfighter

Sara Bagley, Labor Organizer

Dorothy Bundy Cheney - " the winningest tennis player the sport has ever known"

DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS

QUOTES by Martin Luther, Pope Leo XIII, and Matilda Buchanan.

Posted 1999


CONCHITA CINTRON, THE FIRST PROFESSIONAL WOMAN BULLFIGHTER

Conchita Cintron, is recognized as the first woman to compete at a high professional level as a bullfighter. In her lifetime she mastered over 1,200 bulls.
      She started in Lima, Peru at age 12 in what was to be a lifetime struggle for recognition and respect since bull fighting is one of the most macho sports there is in a culture known for its machismo.
      However, she was so talented that she fought in most of the great rings Europe. She was arrested only once - in France - for appearing in a bullfight.
      In her farewell fight in 1949 in Spain she defied all the traditions... she rode into the ring on a horse, dismounted and fought the bull with textbook precision and then threw her sword on the ground and refused to kill the bull.
      She was arrested for refusing to kill the bull! She was released, however, when the crowd cheered her.
      She never appeared in the bull rings again.


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SARA BAGLEY, LABOR ORGANIZER

When the factory owners in Lowell, Massachusetts cut wages and insisted on increased productivity, Sara G. Bagley (circa 1840) organized and headed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association which tried to get the state legislature to investigate the abysmal working conditions. She also sought better wages, and a ten-hour work day for the women. She was not successful.


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Dorothy Bundy Cheney
"is the winningest tennis player the sport has ever known.

      "From any era. From any country.
      "Here's the score:
      "In five decades of senior serve-and-volley wars, she has won an astonishing 269 gold-plated balls, miniatures presented by the United States Tennis Assn. to winners of its national titles, amateur or professional, junior or senior. Many believe her total can only be beaten by someone playing until he or she is 138 years old.
      "Cheney's closest rival, of all ages, of either gender, is Gardner Mulloy, 82, a former U.S. Davis Cup player and four-time doubles champion of the U.S. Open. Mulloy has 100 balls and 'great respect for Dodo Cheney... but no hope of catching her.'
      "To inject a little perspective to all this math, Andre Agassi, when he won the U.S. Open in 1994, had just one gold ball in his trophy case.
      "The USTA assigns Grand Slam status as the ultimate honor for players winning all four national titles--on grass, hard courts, indoors or on clay - in a single year. Cheney thinks she has won 20 Grand Slams. Maybe 30 - she hasn't counted them lately.
      "Dorothy was playing tennis before Calvin Coolidge was president. Before Capone ruled Chicago, before Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, before Dempsey fought Tunney - and about the time Pete Sampras' grandparents were in diapers.
      "In 1927 - the year Lindbergh did make it to Paris - Dorothy May Bundy, 11, then of Santa Monica, entered the Southern California Junior Championships and left with her first cup.
      "In 1938 - with Helen Wills Moody, Alice Marble and Sarah Palfrey Cooke the reigning legends - Cheney won the Australian Open. She later played a Pacific Southwest tournament five months pregnant... 'I took my time and won the durned thing.' "
      DBC's mother, the late May Sutton Bundy who played tennis until the year before she died at 88, was the nation's youngest women's champion at age 16. In 1905, she became the first American to win a singles title at Wimbledon, a victory repeated two years later. DBC's father was a three-time national doubles champion, 1912-14. And Dodo's daughter, Christie Putnam of Escondido, shares one golden ball with her mother - the 1976 USTA mother-daughter title played on grass.
      But no one in the family knows what the do with the family's accumulation of 269 gold balls in the small bungalow Dodo occupies. DBC had three sons and two daughters, all tennis players of note - and grandchildren who also admirable players.
            -- The above is excerpted from an article by PAUL DEAN, TIMES STAFF WRITER, Los Angeles Times Sunday August 25, 1996. Cheney was turning 80 when the article was written.

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07-02 DATES, ANNIVERSARIES, and EVENTS

B. 07-02-1865, Lily Braun - leading German feminist and Socialist writer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

B. 07-02-1878, Lucy Sprague Mitchell - educator, writer, and college administrator. As dean of women and assistant professor of English she was one of the first women to hold a faculty position with the University of California. In 1916, she and her husband formed what was to become the Bank Street College of Education, a pioneering movement in early childhood education. She established the Writers Workshop to help writers of children's books. {married, four children}

B. 07-02-1891, Mabel Newcomer - head of economics department of Vassar College, expert economist who served with U.S. delegations on monetary affairs with world leaders.

DIED 07-02-1893, Georgiana Barrymore - co-founder of one of the great acting dynasties in America: daughter Ethel and sons Lionel and John. She was a noted actor of the 19th century stage who died at only 37.

B. 07-02-1923, Wislaw Szymborska was the surprise winner of the 1996 Nobel prize for literature - surprising to English speaking peoples because few of her works have been translated into English.
      She was the ninth woman to win the prestigious award. The prize in 1996 was worth $1.1 million. Although 73 at the time of the award, Reuters news stories all referred to her "girlish" charm. She is shy and retiring and although her body of work is not large, it is known for its specificity and ability to take ordinarily accepted truths and turn them, by close examination, into ridiculous self- delusions.
      The academy Szymborska won the award for her "poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality." It called her "the Mozart of poetry...but with something of the fury of Beethoven in her creative work." The Nobel jury noted in particular her poem "On Death, without Exaggeration," containing the verse: "There is no life/ that couldn't be immortal/ if only for a moment."

B. 07-02-1930, Barbara G. Walker - U.S. author.

B. 07-02-1951 Cheryl Ladd - U.S. actor and model.

B. 07-02-1952, Linda M. Godwin (Ph.D.) - NASA astronaut and mission specialist is a veteran of three space flight, logged 633 hours in space, including a 6-hour spacewalk to unload gear and supplies for Mir. LMG joined NASA as a physicist in 1980 and was chosen as an astronaut in 1985. She served as a mission specialist on STS-37 in 1991, and was the Payload Commander on STS-59 in 1994, and a mission specialist for STS-76, the Mir docking mission in 1996. http://www.infinet.com/~iwasm/nasa.htm

B. 07-02-1959, Wendy B. Lawrence, (Commander, USN, Ph.D.), NASA Astronaut who graduated the United States Naval Academy in 1981 and was designated as a naval aviator in 1982. She was scheduled for the Mir flight in 1997 was pulled so astronaut David Wolf could do the space walks. WBL has more than 1,500 hours flight time in six different types of helicopters and made more than 800 shipboard landings. WBL flew as the ascent/entry flight engineer and blue shift orbit pilot on STS-67 in March 1995, recording 399 hours in space. (Why is walking weightless in space a macho thing?) http://www.infinet.com/~iwasm/nasa.htm

Event 07-02-1960: Dr. Barbara Moore arrived in Los Angeles after walking the 3,027 miles in 86 days from New York.

Event 07-02-1962: after 25 ballots, the city council of Richmond, Virginia, compromises and elects Eleanor P. Sheppard the city's first woman mayor.

Event 07-02-1964: President Lyndon Johnson signed the far-reaching Civil Rights Act of 1964. Congressional Representative Martha Griffiths (D-MI) prevailed over the Southern members of Congress. The includes a prohibition against discrimination in employment on the basis of sex in Title VII.

Event 07-02-1979, the Susan B. Anthony $1 coin was introduced. So close to the size of a quarter, it couldn't be used with confidence. Who believes that was accidental? The treasury is about to issue a new $1 coin that will be gold in color and will feature the imagined likeness of Native American Indian Sacagawea. Ironically, very little fact is known about Sacagawea who has been pictured on U.S. stamps more than any other woman - and has being chosen to represent all American woman on our money. The popular legend that shows her as the primary guide of the Lewis and Clark expedition is primarily the work of Oregon author Eva Emery Dye whose FICTION book The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark (1902) exaggerated what was known of Sacagawea's life. Some records of the expedition indicate an Indian woman who may have been Sacagawea died early on. Others claim she lived until an old age.
      But to paraphrase a popular saying - And she did it all while walking behind her white husband who rode a horse while she was pregnant with small children. She cared for him and the children as well as doing everything else. A remarkable example of who life was like for women of that era - if the correct story is told.

Event 07-02-1989, in an unprecedented move, the newly elected Japanese Prime Minister named two women to his cabinet. His successor had been forced out of office by women's pressures after an illicite affair with a geisha woman When Toshiki Kaifu was re-elected in 1990, he promptly removed the two women from office.

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QUOTES DU JOUR

MARTIN LUTHER:
     
"An earthly kingdom cannot exist without inequality of persons. Some must be free, some serfs, some rulers, some subjects."
            --Martin Luther; Werke, Vol xviii, p327. (Luther named himself as one of the rulers!)

POPE LEO XIII:
     
"Inequality of rights and power proceeds from the very Author of nature, from whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named."
            --Pope Leo XIII; Quod Apostolici Muneria, 1878. (Note the lack of maternity, i.e. supporting not the immaculate conception but the immaculate - no woman - birth.)

MATILDA BUCHANAN:
     
"Females are not anybody's 'honey,' 'sweetheart,' 'bitch,' 'ho,' or 'slop.' First and last, a psychologically healthy female belongs only to herself. Any act that is destructive to her self-worth is destructive to her humanity."
            -- Matilda Buchanan, English teacher, Central High School, Little Rock, 1995.


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© 1990-2006 Irene Stuber, Hot Springs National Park, AR 71902. Originally web-published at http://www.undelete.org/. We are indebted to Irene Stuber for compiling this collection and for granting us permission to make it available again. The text of the documents may be freely copied for nonprofit educational use. Except as otherwise noted, all contents in this collection are © 1998-2009 the liz library.  All rights reserved. This site is hosted and maintained by the liz library.

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