“Racism is a grown-up disease and we must stop using our children to spread it.”
—RUBY BRIDGES HALL
The picture so common in modern history books is in black-and-white, making it seem much older than a mere six decades ago: A small girl in a neat dress, carrying a book bag, her head held high, descends the steps of her new school surrounded by grown men in suits. Out of the camera’s eye is a jeering crowd of white adults and children protesters, carrying signs reading “We Don’t Want to Integrate” and “All I Want for Christmas Is a Clean White School.” Instead of learning with the other students, Ruby spent most of that first day in the principal’s office with her mother, prevented from getting to her classroom by the chaos in the halls. Norman Rockwell later depicted the moment in his painting The Problem We All Live With, considered an iconic image of the civil rights movement.
The rest of that first year wasn’t much easier. Protests against integration continued across the city. Ruby’s father eventually lost his job. Angry segregationists repeatedly showed up at Ruby’s school, determined to drive her away; they never succeeded. Her mother was turned away from local stores, and her grandparents lost their land. Ruby remained determined to get the education she deserved. Only one teacher was willing to teach Ruby: Barbara Henry, who had moved from Boston to the South in hopes of helping to integrate the schools. They studied together, alone in a classroom.
Chelsea
Eventually, the protests died down. Other black students enrolled in William Frantz Elementary over the following years. Ruby went on to graduate from a desegregated high school in the area. She worked as a travel agent and consistently advocated for racial equality in and out of the classroom. She stayed in touch with Dr. Robert Coles, a Harvard child psychiatrist who had begun counseling her in 1960. Inspired by their conversations, he published a children’s book, The Story of Ruby Bridges, in 1995. Four years later, Ruby published her memoir, Through My Eyes, and, also in 1999, she started the Ruby Bridges Foundation, which works to eliminate racism in schools through community service. She and her husband still live in New Orleans, where they raised their four children, and where a statue of Ruby stands outside of William Frantz Elementary.
I first learned about Ruby Bridges at Horace Mann, the junior high school I attended in Little Rock. Horace Mann had previously been the all-black high school that Ernest Green and other members of the courageous Little Rock Nine attended before integrating Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Our teachers took the school’s legacy seriously, and taught us about desegregation in Arkansas and across the country. What we didn’t learn then—and I wish we had—was how segregated our schools still are, the result of many racist legacies, including white flight and redlining, a form of housing discrimination. Solving this injustice requires dedicated research and resources. It will take policies and action at the federal and local level to address everything from enrollment, curriculum, and discipline in schools to housing and transportation. Just as important, as many have pointed out, it requires the political will from our elected leaders to create good schools that are truly integrated.
In 2001, my father awarded Ruby the Presidential Citizens Medal. Her warmth and youth, even then (she was in her forties) were a reminder of just how much we asked of her at such a young age—to take a stand not just for her own right to an education but for the rights of millions of black Americans, with her head held high. Decades later, she remains a believer in the power of love and one person’s ability to make a positive difference. “I now know that experience comes to us for a purpose,” she has said, “and if we follow the guidance of the spirit within us, we will probably find that the purpose is a good one.”
Malala Yousafzai
Hillary and Chelsea
One of the women whose story has stuck with us since we first heard her name is Malala Yousafzai, the young Pakistani woman who was shot in the head in 2012 by Taliban fighters for her conviction that girls deserved to go to school. After surviving the shooting, she went on to finish high school and attend university, and continues to speak out about the difference that education can make in the lives of girls everywhere.
Malala’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, raised his daughter to be brave and determined. Ziauddin is an educated man who could have left Pakistan with his family. Instead, he used his education for the advancement of his community in the Swat Valley in Northwest Pakistan. He realized the greatest need was to educate women and girls, so he started a girls’ school, despite the local Taliban banning girls from getting an education. One of his students was his daughter, Malala.
“They thought that the bullets would silence us. But they failed. And then, out of that silence came thousands of voices. Weakness, fear, and hopelessness died. Strength, power, and courage were born.”
—MALALA YOUSAFZAI
By the time she was two and a half years old, she was sitting in classrooms with ten-year-olds, following along, and loving every minute. From the moment she learned to read, she loved books. She carried a Harry Potter book bag and read biographies of Benazir Bhutto, the late prime minister of Pakistan and the first woman in modern history to lead a Muslim nation, and Barack Obama. She often quoted a line from her favorite book, The Alchemist: “When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.”
When the Taliban began shutting down the schools in Pakistan, as they had done years earlier in Afghanistan, Malala’s father kept speaking out. His young daughter began speaking out as well, saying that she had a right to hold a pencil in her hand, to learn to express her views and dreams just like anybody else. She went to protests with her father, once running up to a local reporter and asking to be on his show. “All I want is an education, and I am afraid of no one,” she told his audience. At eleven years old, she gave a speech in front of the national press called “How Dare the Taliban Take Away My Basic Right to an Education.” She blogged anonymously for BBC Urdu about life under Taliban rule. Later, in a TED Talk, her father said: “Don’t ask me what I did, ask me what I did not do. I did not clip her wings.”
When the Taliban couldn’t shut down the school because her father was so courageous, and when they couldn’t shut up Malala because she had learned to speak for herself, they boarded her school bus and tried to kill her. Nine months later, still recovering from her injuries, she was back in school and speaking at the UN. For strength and good luck, she wore a shawl that had belonged to Benazir Bhutto. It was Malala’s sixteenth birthday; as she spoke, her family watched proudly from the audience.
Today the Malala Fund raises money to support girls’ education around the world. Malala is a student at Oxford University, where she is learning to balance school and work, occasionally starting assignments the night before they’re due after staying up too late talking with friends, and championing the rights of the 130 million girls around the world who are out of school. Malala believes there has never been a more opportune time to take up the cause. “Everywhere you go today,” she wrote in an essay for Vogue, “you see feminist T-shirts and hashtags—‘The future is female,’ ‘Girl Power,’ ‘Who runs the world?’—but if we really believe this, we need to support girls on the front lines of this fight.… Whether you’re a feminist or an economist—or just a person who wants to live in a better world—you should want to see all girls in school.” She concluded with her trademark optimism and certainty: “If one girl with an education can change the world, just imagine what 130 million can do.” If Malala can continue finding new ways to champion girls everywhere, so can we all.
Earth Defenders
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Chelsea
Marjory Stoneman Douglas published her first piece at sixteen and never stopped writing. As a young woman, she helped care for her sick mother, a concert violinist, after her parents’ divorce, while also pursuing her studies. Like my mom, she went to Wellesley College and was very active on campus, notably in the women’s suffrage movem
ent. Unlike my mom, she graduated with a perfect grade point average!
In 1915, in her midtwenties, after her mother passed away and after her own divorce, she followed her father to Florida. (Her ex-husband may or may not have been officially separated from his last wife and spent time in jail for writing bad checks shortly after marrying Marjory. “I left my marriage and all my past history in New England without a single regret,” Marjory said later.) In the then small town of Miami, her father published what would become the Miami Herald. While Marjory’s initial job was as a society columnist, she quickly began to cover other topics, including women’s rights, civil rights, and nature—notably, the Florida Everglades, the only subtropical preserve in North America. The conventional wisdom at the time, in the 1910s, was that the Everglades weren’t particularly special. Marjory set out to convince people otherwise.
Marjory loved her job, and she cared deeply about her country. The following year, she joined the Naval Reserve and then the Red Cross to help care for World War I refugees. After the war, Marjory wrote for the paper and for other publications as a freelancer. She tackled issues related to public health, urban planning, women’s suffrage, civil rights, and Prohibition, and also wrote essays, plays, and books. In the early 1940s, she found what would be the work of the second half of her life: celebrating and preserving the Everglades. She was even more determined that Floridians would recognize how special the Everglades are. She worried that Floridians didn’t understand what was at stake: a vital, unique ecosystem and their own health. Today, one out of every three people in Florida depends on the Everglades for their drinking water.
In the summer of 2018, I read her seminal work, The Everglades: River of Grass. Published in 1947, the same year the Everglades opened as a national park, Marjory argued that the Everglades is not a swamp but a river. She made a forceful case that its exceptional environment of plants and animals merits protection. Her beautifully written and illustrated book grew out of extensive study and reporting on the Everglades. It took her five years to research and write.
HILLARY
I first heard about Marjory through our alma mater, Wellesley College. She had graduated with the title of class orator, which turned out to be very apt! I wanted to meet her, so on a trip to Miami in January 1992, I visited her at her home in the Coconut Grove neighborhood. I arrived late in the afternoon to see the “Grandmother of the Glades.” At the time, she was 101. As our visit started, she informed me that she always had a glass of scotch at five p.m. and asked me to join her, which I did.
In 1993, my husband awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her conservation work. She wanted to accept it in person despite how hard travel was for her, so we invited her to come a day early and stay at the White House to rest up and prepare for the ceremony. I’ll never forget the night Marjory spent in the White House at 103 years old! It may well be that she was the oldest person to sleep in the White House. I’ve always thought it fitting that students at her namesake school are following her lead in doing their part to build a better, safer America. She and they are an inspiration.
Marjory didn’t stop her advocacy after publishing River of Grass—far from it. She continued working to protect Florida’s wetlands, taking on developers, industrial farms, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. I think Marjory’s straight-talking, no-nonsense approach would resonate today, as would her gutsiness. She once said in an interview that the tension between nature and humans’ interactions with it “is an enormous battle between man’s intelligence and his stupidity. And I’m not at all sure that stupidity isn’t going to win out in the long run.”
“I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist. I say it’s got to be done.”
—MARJORY STONEMAN DOUGLAS
Still, Marjory clearly had faith in us to ultimately do the right thing for nature and ourselves. Otherwise, I don’t think she would have worked as tirelessly as she did. We’re hurtling toward a tipping point in being able to prevent catastrophic global warming and its consequences. Whether we succeed in mitigating the effects of our coming climate catastrophe or not will hinge on how we treat our natural resources, something Marjory understood throughout her remarkable 108 years.
Rachel Carson
Hillary
Some trace the rise of the modern American environmental movement to 1966, when toxic smog descended on New York City over Thanksgiving, killing more than 150 people. Others point to 1969, when the Santa Barbara oil spill—the third largest in U.S. history—turned Southern California’s beaches black. Still others reference the day that same year when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, choked with pollution and slick with oily industrial waste, caught on fire. But before these catastrophes hit the headlines, there was a book, and there was the woman who wrote it.
Rachel Carson was born in 1907 and grew up on her family’s small Pennsylvania farm. She knew from the start that she wanted to be a writer, and she published her first short story when she was eleven years old. She spent her childhood exploring the meadows, orchards, and woods around the farm, and although she lived hundreds of miles from the ocean, she began to daydream about the sea, imagining it in her mind’s eye.
“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road—the one less traveled by—offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
—RACHEL CARSON, FROM SILENT SPRING
She was a voracious reader and graduated at the top of her high school class before attending the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) in Pittsburgh. She first studied English but soon changed to biology. On a summer research trip to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, she saw the ocean at last.
Rachel earned a master’s degree in zoology from Johns Hopkins but stopped short of getting her doctorate when her father died unexpectedly in the middle of the Great Depression. Rachel had already been supporting her parents, her older sister, and her sister’s two daughters on a lab assistant’s salary; now, as the family’s sole wage earner, she went to work for the federal Bureau of Fisheries, writing radio scripts and educational pamphlets.
For the next decade and a half, Rachel worked for the federal government by day and wrote about the ocean by night. An eleven-page essay she wrote for a Bureau of Fisheries assignment turned into a long piece in The Atlantic after her boss told her it was too good to end up in a government pamphlet; that essay turned into her first book. A few years after her father died, Rachel’s sister did, too; Rachel adopted and raised her two nieces into adulthood. Her second book was serialized in the New Yorker and went on to spend eighty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. She used the earnings to buy a house on the Maine coast, where she wrote a third book, this one about the sea. When one of her two nieces died suddenly, Rachel adopted her four-year-old grandnephew and raised him.
Rachel introduced her readers to scientific terms we take for granted today, like “ecology,” and brought to life the many interactions of species and landscapes, weather and water, sky and sea. Her books were poetic and profound, scientifically rigorous and utterly accessible. She called the ocean “mother sea” and gently urged her readers to orient themselves in the wider circle of nature, and to understand, as she did, that this planet is wild and wonderful, precious and delicate, and urgently in need of protection.
After the end of World War II, the pesticides and chemicals developed for use in warfare began flooding into the U.S. consumer market without regard for their potential harm to people and the environment. The U.S. Department of Agriculture began using one chemical in particular, DDT, to try to stop an invasive species of insects in their tracks; the chemical didn’t kill the bugs, but it seemed to kill just about everything else that flew, ran, or swam. Rachel had pit
ched an essay on DDT to Reader’s Digest, but they turned her down. In the late 1950s, a citizen’s committee filed a lawsuit against the chemical companies in New York State court. Rachel wrote about it for the New Yorker.
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”
—RACHEL CARSON, FROM THE SENSE OF WONDER
That assignment became Silent Spring, which was published in 1962. At the time, some five hundred new chemicals a year made their way into the consumer market, many for pest control, with little or no oversight. Rachel opened the book by imagining an American town in the near future where almost everything—the bees in the apple trees, the frogs in the ponds, the birds whose songs tell people that winter is over—has been destroyed by the unfettered use of dangerous chemicals. “These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes—nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ ” she wrote. “Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life?”
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 10
