Women Who Launch: Women Who Shattered Glass Ceilings

By Marlene Wagman-Geller

Finalist Pacific Book Awards 2018: “Find motivation in your career and life with the amazing history of women entrepreneurship, activism, and leadership.” —Stylish Southern Mama
 
Women Who Launch is filled with inspiring true stories of women activists, artists, and entrepreneurs who launched some of the most famous companies, brands, and organizations today and changed the world. It is at once a collection of biographies and a testament of female empowerment.
 
Juliette Gordon Low showed what’s good for the goose is good for the gander when she created the Girl Scouts of America. Sarah Josepha Hale—authoress of Mary Had a Little Lamb—convinced Lincoln to launch a national day of thanks, while Anna Jarvis persuaded President Wilson to initiate a day in tribute of mothers. Estée Lauder revolutionized the cosmetics industry. The tradition of these Mothers of Invention continued when, compliments of knitter Krista Suh, the heads of millions were adorned with pink pussy-cat ears in the largest women’s march in history. These women who launched prove—in the words of Rosie the Riveter—“We can do it!”
 
In Women Who Launch, readers will find:

• The stories behind renowned companies, brands, and organizations and the diverse women who launched them.
• Empowering quotes from strong women and those who refused to be kept down.
• Motivation to all women who want to succeed in their careers, launch companies, and change the world.

 
“These soaring stories will inspire you to live your dreams!” —Becca Anderson, author of The Book of Awesome Women

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781633536968

Marlene Wagman-Geller

Marlene Wagman-Geller grew up in Toronto and is a lifelong bibliophile. She teaches in San Diego. This is her first book.

Book preview

Women

Who

Launch

Women Who Shattered

Glass Ceilings

Marlene Wagman-Geller

Copyright © 2018 Marlene Wagman-Geller

Published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Cover, Layout & Design: Morgane Leoni

Mango is an active supporter of authors’ rights to free speech and artistic expression in their books. The purpose of copyright is to encourage authors to produce exceptional works that enrich our culture and our open society.

Uploading or distributing photos, scans or any content from this book without prior permission is theft of the author’s intellectual property. Please honor the author’s work as you would your own. Thank you in advance for respecting our author’s rights.

For permission requests, please contact the publisher at:

Mango Publishing Group

2850 Douglas Road, 3rd Floor

Coral Gables, FL 33134 U.S.A.

[e-mail]

For special orders, quantity sales, course adoptions and corporate sales, please email the publisher at [e-mail]. For trade and wholesale sales, please contact Ingram Publisher Services at [e-mail] or +1.800.509.4887.

Women Who Launch: Women Who Shattered Glass Ceilings

Library of Congress Cataloging

ISBN: (p) 978-1-63353-695-1, (e) 978-1-63353-696-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017962523

BISAC - SOC028000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women’s Studies

- BUS046000 BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Motivational

Printed in the United States of America

To the memory of my mother Gilda Wagman.

With love for my daughter Jordanna Shyloh Geller.

"Somewhere over the rainbow

Skies are blue

And the dreams that you dare to dream

Really do come true."

—Judy Garland as Dorothy (1939)

Contents

Prologue

Ladies Who Lunched

Chapter # 1

Seen the Glory (1861)

Chapter # 2

Success Was Sure to Go (1863)

Chapter # 3

Five Stone Lions (1883)

Chapter # 4

You Can’t Beat (1903)

Chapter # 5

Chutzpah (1903)

Chapter # 6

Do Not Pass Go (1904)

Chapter # 7

Now Abideth Faith, Hope, and Love (1912)

Chapter # 8

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1914)

Chapter # 9

I Did Invent It (1914)

Chapter # 10

A Stone Angel (1916)

Chapter # 11

We Can Do It! (1943)

Chapter # 12

Tiara-Wearing Queen (1946)

Chapter # 13

The Puzzle (1951)

Chapter # 14

Mother Confessors (1955–1956)

Chapter # 15

America’s Sweetheart (1959)

Chapter # 16

La Belle Dame Sans Merci (1962)

Chapter # 17

A Joyful Noise (1963)

Chapter # 18

Where Rosemary Goes (1968)

Chapter # 19

Roe v. Roe (1973)

Chapter # 20

The Queen of Green (1976)

Chapter # 21

What Becomes a Legend Most? (1980)

Chapter # 22

The Mantra (1983)

Chapter # 23

The Beast (1985)

Chapter # 24

The Woman in Pink (1992)

Chapter # 25

The Golden One (1995)

Chapter # 26

Wanna Have Fun (1997)

Chapter # 27

One Butt at a Time (2000)

Chapter # 28

Huff and Puff (2005)

Chapter # 29

Back Seat Betty (2006)

Chapter # 30

#MeToo (2007)

Chapter # 31

Our Gallup Poll (2009)

Chapter # 32

That’s All That I Remember (2013)

Chapter # 33

The Seven of Us Can’t Do (2013)

Chapter # 34

Monsters Ink (2014)

Chapter # 35

Mr. Darcy (2014)

Chapter # 36

Hats Off (2017)

Chapter # 37

Resistance to Tyranny (2016)

Epilogue

She Was Right

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Prologue

Ladies Who Lunched

If a sociologist held a mirror to the 1950s, it would have reflected a flat line in the march to level the gender playing field. The term ladies who lunched described the era’s wealthy wives—Mrs. So-and-Sos who used both their husbands’ given and surnames—handmaidens to the mundane. Their outlet was to frequent the best restaurants to see and to be seen. These establishments served small portions for high prices; skimpy servings were no problem, though, as the weight-conscious females did very little eating. The sauce for their meals was gossip.

The ladies who lunched in Manhattan were an especially well-heeled subset of the breed. The Colony in New York was the first restaurant in the 1930s to import Dom Pérignon, and the only one where the ladies could check their Yorkies and pugs along with their minks and chinchillas. A Van Cleef & Arpels was an adjacent concession. One of the members of this elite group, the Duchess of Windsor, was sadly serious when she famously—and fatuously—delivered her maxim, A woman can’t be too rich or too thin. She also made the lesser-known but equally expected pronouncement, All my friends know I’d rather shop than eat. Yes, these well-heeled matrons seemed so glamorous in their dresses with the nipped-in waists and their elegant black pumps. The crack in the pretty picture was that the ’50s was the era of the captive wife. Fanny Brice in Funny Girl sang a tongue-in-cheek reference to the arid desert of matrimony: I’m Sadie, Sadie, married lady,/Still in bed at noon,/Racking my brain deciding/Between orange juice and prune . . .

In sharp juxtaposition, there were intrepid women who launched rather than lunched—instead of waiting for a glass slipper, they shattered glass ceilings. One of these, Josephine Esther Mentzer, began life in an apartment over her Hungarian father’s hardware store in Queens. Armed with her uncle’s cold creams and her own innate chutzpah, she reinvented herself into the cosmetics queen Estée Lauder. Among her roster of friends and clients were Princesses Grace and Diana, First Lady Nancy Reagan, and the Duchess of Windsor. When she passed the torch to her sons—the Kennedys of the beauty world—she left them a legacy of billions. Her son Ronald Lauder’s $135 million purchase of Klimt’s world-famous painting Woman in Gold, a luxurious fin de siècle icon from her father’s native Hungary, would have met with her smile of approval. Similarly, Estée would have nodded her head—always perfectly coiffed—at her daughter-in-law Evelyn’s pink ribbon campaign, which became the ubiquitous symbol of the battle against breast cancer.

The founding of museums usually connotes male prerogative: the Guggenheim, after Solomon R.; the Smithsonian, after James Smithson; the Tate, after Sir Henry. Women’s lot was to have their likenesses hang on their walls, encased in gilded, often evocative poses. What added estrogen to this mix was waxworker wunderkind Marie Grosholz—the architect of Madame Tussauds, a hall of wonders that has remained for two centuries and is one of London’s crown jewels.

When one thinks of the newspapers of yesteryear, the image that comes to mind is men with ink-stained fingers bending over their printing presses. And the media tycoons behind the scenes cast the giant shadows of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. In the contemporary era, the formerly testosterone-fueled media has been impacted by Greek-born Arianna Huffington. On a shoestring budget, she launched the eponymous Huffington Post, which was subsequently sold to AOL for $315 million. As a well-connected wielder of political clout—she has the world leaders on her smartphone’s speed dial—if angered, she can huff and puff. . . .

The nemesis of women scaling to new heights can be attributed to the Lex Luthor of female empowerment: gender stereotyping. For our mothers, sexism was explicit. Their stories would make any Title IX compliance officer of today perform a full-body heave. My father told me that it was OK for girls not to do well in math, and that the only respectable profession was to be a housewife. However, he did make the concession that if I had to work, I could become a teacher—which I did. When my mother stated she wanted a job, her remark was met with hostility; he said that when a wife worked, it denigrated her husband’s ability as a provider. It would never have occurred to him to shop, cook, or change a diaper. In his defense, my old-country father was in good stead with the societal mores of the time. Letters for my mother were addressed to Mrs. Harry Wagman. It was a milieu where credit cards were only issued in a husband’s name, a female physician was so rare that she would inevitably be referred to as the woman doctor, and juries excluded the possessors of estrogen.

A conundrum faced by women is if they stay boxed in by the dictates of the paradigm—passive, sweet, agreeable—they may not be viewed as mover-and-shaker material. But if they try to break free from this mold—decisive, aggressive, and assertive—are often perceived as bossy. During the 2016 election, men held up iron my shirt signs, showing that sexism still has not been put to rest. To combat this mindset, Sheryl Sandberg, with her Lean In Foundation, has done her utmost to help combat collective chauvinism.

William Wordsworth, in his poem My Heart Leaps Up, wrote, The Child is father of the Man—our youth is a preface to the future. Deeply ingrained bias can be traced to the paradigm that boys are brought up believing they need to get jobs and make money; their fire engines and toy cars put them in the driver’s seat. Girls are raised to marry good providers, their dolls and dollhouses conditioning them for their roles as mothers. It is time for the blending of the blue and the pink. Until the traditional mindset is altered, men will continue to hunt trophy wives and women will continue in their perspective that husbands are ATM dispensers.

Many felt that the righteous postscript to this long and winding road of sexism would be a woman in the White House. Amidst many of her supporters’ tears—long felt a woman’s prerogative—in her concession speech Mrs. Clinton stated, I know that we still have not shattered that highest and hardest glass ceiling, but someday someone will. Let’s cling to that note of optimism. After all, we have the staunchest of shoulders upon which to stand. And when all people are created and treated with equality we, in Wordsworth’s vein, can live his words, My heart leaps up when I behold/A rainbow in the sky. . . .

Here’s to the ladies—the kick-ass heroines—who launched careers and businesses exhibiting the words and belief of Rosie the Riveter: We can do it!

Chapter # 1

Seen the Glory (1861)

Songs have oftentimes encapsulated the spirit of protest and become synonymous with a movement. In 1772, former slave trader turned abolitionist John Newton penned Amazing Grace, an ode against slavery. In 1969, during his bed-in, John Lennon composed Give Peace a Chance against the Vietnam War. In 1972, Helen Reddy, the voice from Down Under, became the roar of Women’s Liberation. Another paean was born during a clash between the Blue and the Gray.

Nineteenth-century women—like children—were expected to be seen and not heard, unless the latter was in praise of their husbands. Julia Ward was born in 1819 into early New York power and privilege; her silver spoon came from her father Samuel, one of the country’s first bankers. Julia and her five siblings lived in a succession of opulent Manhattan mansions on Bond Street; what transformed these into prisons were her religious father’s restrictions on his daughters. Julia’s burning aspiration was to be a great literary light and to write the novel or the play of the age. Another outlet was singing, in which she excelled, and which led to her nickname, The Diva. That moniker could also have come from her constant thirst for attention. This petite, Titian-haired beauty enjoyed rides around the city in her lemon-yellow carriage, dreaming of a prince to come to her rescue.

During an 1841 visit to Boston, Julia was smitten by Samuel Gridley Howe, a man eighteen years her senior. He was a celebrity in literary and philanthropic circles, and he had spent years in Greece in support of that country’s struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. He returned home with Lord Byron’s helmet as a relic of the poet, a feat that fired Julia’s romantic imagination. For his service, the King of Greece bestowed on him the title of Chevalier of the Order of St. Savior—which gave rise to his nickname, Chev. As a Harvard-educated doctor, he obtained a position as the head of the new Perkins School for the Blind, an institution he made famous through his accomplishments with a deaf and blind student, Laura Bridgman.

Samuel was also interested in the twenty-two-year-old Julia—she and her sisters were known as the Three Graces of Bond Street. He wrote his friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about how his lady was gushing over with tenderness & love. He felt he had found in her a helpmeet—a woman who would be happy as the wife of a busy man, not to mention the mother of many hoped-for children. When Samuel asked for her hand, Julia declared, The Chevalier’s way will be a very charming way, and is, henceforth, to be mine. Because of Ward’s immense wealth from her father’s will, her brother Sam and uncle John required Samuel to sign an antenuptial agreement, wherein the bride’s inheritance would remain under the control of her male relatives. This legality was included because they viewed Chev as a confounded bit of Boston granite. Longfellow likewise harbored reservations about his friend’s fiancée, saying that she was a damsel of force and beauty . . . carrying almost too many guns for any man who does not want to be firing salutes all the time. Julia, in an uncharacteristic move for the era, retained her maiden name, and became Julia Ward Howe.

The couple moved in rarified circles alongside the Lowells, the Cabots, Louisa May Alcott (who could not abide Julia), Horace Mann, the Brownings, and Henry James. Ward Howe met Charles Dickens on his trip to America, and decades later had Oscar Wilde as a houseguest. Although the dashing doctor and the beautiful poetess presented a pretty picture of marital bliss, cracks soon appeared in the union of Chev and the Diva. Julia craved autonomy, while Samuel assumed her father’s role as domestic dictator. A red alert sounded when Samuel told his young wife he wanted her kept in a chrysalis, declaring that if she ever emerged and grew wings, I shall unmercifully cut them off, to keep you prisoner in my arms. Julia wrote her sisters, The Dr. calls me child. Another problem might have been that Samuel was hiding in a Victorian closet, secretly in love with Charles Sumner, the best man at his wedding. Two hours after he returned from his honeymoon, Howe wrote Charles, Julia often says Sumner ought to have been a woman & you to have married her. Tensions were exacerbated on their sixteenth-month wedding anniversary to Europe. Samuel was London’s lion because of his halcyon Grecian past, burnished by his Perkins School accomplishment. Literary lights such as Thomas Carlyle invited the Howes to lunch, where Samuel served as the sun around which the host and guests orbited. The Diva was not impressed; she was not content to bask in spousal glory.

Despite the doctor’s questionable sexual orientation and Julia’s growing disdain, she became pregnant soon after tying the knot. Samuel wrote of the news to Charles, Only a year ago, Julia was a New York belle. Now she is a wife who lives only for her husband & a mother who would melt her very beauty, were it needed, to give a drop of nourishment to her child. That is not how Mrs. Ward Howe saw it. She wrote her sister Louisa, In giving life to others, do we lose our own vitality, and sink into dimness, nothingness, and living death? What wore at the fabric of her soul was the worry that she did not care for her sons and daughters to the acceptable degree. I am alas one of those exceptional women who do not love their children, she wrote, and then crossed out do not love with the words cannot relate to.

Another source of resentment was Samuel did not permit Julia the comfort of ether during her six deliveries. His rationale: women needed discipline. He stated, The pains of childbirth are meant by a beneficent creator to be the means of leading them back to lives of temperance, exercise, and reason. In 1847, Howe confided to her sister that her life had become unspeakable and unbearable: You cannot know the history, the inner history of the last four years. Secretly, she began writing a novel, The Hermaphrodite. She never sought publication, knowing full well that her husband, as well as antebellum America, would not approve. However, in 1854 she anonymously published a volume of poetry, Passion-Flowers, without her husband’s consent. In thinly veiled prose, it revealed marital misery. Nathaniel Hawthorne declared that Julia ought to have been soundly whipt for publishing them. Samuel raged that the poems border on the erotic, and the couple engaged in a period of estrangement. Finally, Samuel demanded that his wife resume sexual relations, or he would initiate divorce. Faced with the prospect of losing her children, Julia acquiesced. She confessed, I made the greatest sacrifice I can ever be called upon to make.

In 1861 the couple was in Washington, where Julia met the President and observed the sad expression of Mr. Lincoln’s deep blue eyes. It was four months since the Union defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run, and from her room at the Willard Hotel, she spied an advertisement for a business that embalmed and forwarded the bodies of the dead. That evening, the words to a song drifted into her mind. Fearful she would forget the lines by the morning, she wrote down the verse that compared the sacrifices of the Northern soldiers to the crucifixion of Christ: As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.

Samuel, no doubt, rolled his eyes at his wife’s latest literary endeavor—The Battle Hymn of the Republic—which she sent to the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, receiving a remuneration of five dollars for its publication in February 1862. The ethereal poem became one of the world’s most beloved hymns and showered upon her the recognition she had always sought.

Sadly, this success did not heal the fabric of their marriage. Julia commented, I have been married twenty-two years today, and in the course of this time I have never known my husband to approve of any act of mine which I myself valued . . . everything has been contemptible or contraband in his eyes. But he had not succeeded in silencing her spirit. In 1876, the day after her husband’s funeral, Julia wrote, Began my new life today. She had been married for thirty-three years and would live another thirty-four, during which she struggled alongside Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony for women’s rights.

Howe’s hymn was destined to become an intrinsic fabric of the world’s tapestry. In 1939, at his wife’s suggestion, Steinbeck used one of its lines for the title The Grapes of Wrath. In 1965, it was the opening hymn at the funeral of Winston Churchill, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last public address, delivered the night before his assassination, ended with the line, Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. In 1968, as the twenty-one-car funeral bearing the body of Robert F. Kennedy crept through Baltimore, thousands of people lining the tracks sang the century-old lyrics, Glory, glory hallelujah . . . Its haunting memory was also heard at the Washington National Cathedral after the terrorist attacks of 2001. Less reverently, in 2016 George W. Bush swayed to its accompaniment at the memorial for five slain Dallas police officers.

A week before Julia’s passing in 1910 at age ninety, Smith College conferred upon her an honorary degree, with a chorus of two thousand white-clad girls singing her hymn at the ceremony. Although she had engaged in a three-decade-long civil war with her husband, she was vindicated through literary immortality; despite everything, her eyes had seen the glory.

Chapter # 2

Success Was Sure to Go (1863)

Hamlet railed, Frailty, thy name is woman! and in this vein, female Victorians struggled against the slings and arrows of misogyny: they could not vote, serve on jury duty, or attend university.