Peerless Rockville Historic Preservation, a nonprofit committed to preserving buildings, artifacts and the history of Rockville, is leading this project, which will chronicle six women who profoundly helped to shape the city. The booklet will be called “Women Who Dared: A Guide To the Places in Rockville Where Women Dared to Challenge Expectations Both in Society and in Themselves.”

The booklets stories were mainly based on census records, oral histories, and property deed documents. The publication was funded by the Heritage Tourism Alliance of Montgomery County and state funds from the Maryland Heritage Areas Authority.

The new findings from researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and Boston University, observed 82,869 women who had not initially been diagnosed with psoriasis for about 15 years, from 1991 through 2005. The participants reported their own alcohol consumption and also, over the course of the study, reported whether a doctor had diagnosed psoriasis.

The findings revealed that even amongst moderate beer consumption, there was a marked elevation in risk of the disorder.  2.3 drinks in one week caused put the risk for psoriasis at almost 80 percent.

Click here to learn more about the findings.

The Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University hopes to prepare a new generation of potential female candidates for the 2012 elections.  In the coming two years, project participants will recruit women from all sides of the political spectrum to run for office.

Director of the Center for American Women and Politics, Debbie Walsh said “Our hope is to get women who hane made it in their fields, who have broken their own glass ceilings, who are at a point where they’re asking, ‘What’s next for me?’ ”

The group is expected to raise high dollars to support events at conferences of female engineers, health-care professionals and other fields.

Long, the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, will succeed Vice Adm. Robert B. Murrett, who headed the organization for four years.

Senator Ted Stevens

NWHM lost its longtime friend and supporter, Former Senator Ted Stevens Monday night, when his plane crashed in Southwestern Alaska.  Stevens was 86 years old. There were nine other passengers aboard the plane and five are believed to have been killed in the crash.

The much maligned longest- serving Republican in the Senate who was often monikered as “mean and miserable” was an invaluable source of support to our Museum.

Most folks don’t know about the unique relationship Senator Ted Stevens had with NWHM. Our Founder, Karen Staser and her husband, Jeff Staser were old friends of his and Jeff worked for him.

When we took over the project to get the Suffrage Statue, which was given by the Suffragists to the Congress to commemorate the passage of the 19th amendment, moved out of the Crypt of the U.S. Capitol into the Rotunda, he was the first to step forward to help.  When in 1995 we were told that the floor of the Rotunda would be unable to support the weight of the statue, Stevens stepped in and paid for an engineering survey of the floor, which proved it could in fact hold the weight of the statue.

The statue’s official name is the Portrait Monument and features Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony.

Senator Stevens told us that he was raised by women who were Suffragists and he knew all the Suffrage songs.  He even sang them for us.  He enlisted Senator John Warner to help with the legislation to move the Statue and got it passed unanimously in the Senate.

He stayed our friend throughout the rest of his life. RIP Senator Stevens…keep singing those songs….

It has been two years since Ms. Oliver passed away at the age of 69, from a long battle with cancer.  An impassioned and committed advocate for the cause of immigration, she continued to work until her death in July of 2008. The legacy of Myra’s dedicated work ethic and her passion for improving the lives of men, women, children and families embarking on the road to American citizenship, lives on through the work of the IIC.

Myra M. Oliver was born on October 8, 1938 in Waterbury, CT to Frank Manzo and Claire Beland. Her parents had immigrated to the country, her father from Italy and her mother from France. As a young child Myra was sent to a boarding school in Baltic, Connecticut along with her sister, and she enjoyed her time there.  From there she went on to graduate from high school and later from Central Connecticut State University. Oliver earned her Masters from the University of Bridgeport.

In 1974 Myra assumed the role of Executive Director of the IIC, where she worked eagerly and tirelessly with new immigrants and refugees on their path to full American citizenship.  Her dedication to the IIC’s mission of assisting people’s transition into American life was far reaching.  Under Myra’s leadership, the IIC was able to expand its operations to a statewide level with three offices, in Stamford, Bridgeport and Hartford. When she first took over in 1974, the organization’s budget stood at about $54,000 today it boasts a $1.2 million budget. During Myra’s tenure 10,000 new Americans have graduated to full citizenship. The organization also grew to provide service for almost 7,000 immigrants and refugees every year. Currently, the institute sponsors the largest naturalization ceremony annually in Connecticut.

Dedicated to helping the countless families she worked with in whatever way she could, Myra took immigrants into her home for days or weeks at a time until she could find them more permanent housing.

Myra’s respect and admiration for the many immigrant and refugee families she assisted, inspired the work she did.  Their courage and perseverance in building lives in a new place cultivated a profound respect and appreciation for her own freedoms and privileges as an American.

In celebration of her tremendous contributions to both Connecticut and the nation at large, Myra was honored by Senator Joseph Lieberman (CT) in 2004 as “One of Connecticut’s Best.”   Senator Lieberman lauded Ms. Oliver saying, “It is a founding principle of our great nation that immigrants have the chance to realize the American Dream that brought my grandparents, wife and so many others here in search of opportunity. For so many of CT’s immigrants the tireless work of Myra Oliver and the International Institute of CT provide crucial components for reaching that goal.”

In addition to her work at the IIC, Myra Oliver was a dedicated and loving wife and mother. For 48 years Myra Oliver and her husband Raymond J. Oliver supported and uplifted each other in a loving marriage that produced four sons.

NWHM remembers and honors the life of Mrs. Myra M. Oliver for the lasting impact she has had and continues to have in the lives of so many Americans.

During the 1980s, when the Soviet Union had begun to open up to the possibility of working with Western buisnesses under President Mikhail Gorbachev’s administration, Mrs. Carey Reilly was at the helm of negotiations to establish some of the first partnerships between Soviet and US companies. Some of those joint company ventures included PC World Magazine and engineering comapny, Honeywell.

Ms. Carey Reilly is survived by her husband of 31 years, her three daughters,  her brother and sister and two grandchildren.

As a journalist, Ewing’s writings focused on science and from the late 19490’s through the 1960’s she contributed to Science News, a publication of the Society for Science and the Public.  She covered a wide range of scientific topics including astronomy, physics and medicine. After her time at Science News she freelanced, writing for medical trade newspapers.

Although physicist John Wheeler is widely credited as coining the term ‘black hole,’ Ms. Ewing has been recorded as using the term as early as 1964 in her story “Black Holes in Space.”

Ms. Ewing was a graduate of Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin, where she received her degree in physics and chemistry in 1941. She also studied at the Universtiy of Chicago before entering the Navy in 1942, where she served as a Navy journalist during WWII until 1946.

In a trial study that tested 899 women, half received the drug and the other half the placebo. There was a 39 percent reduction in infection for those who got the drug. The reduction was 54 percent among those who reported using it at least 80 percent of the times they had intercourse.

Click here for more information about this study.

The study, which interviewed 21 New York women all vying to reconcile motherhood with tenured positions, found that they many portrayed their work and family lives in irreconcilable conflict. One woman described feeling she worked in “survival mode” just doing “the things that I can to not be kicked out.”

The findings were presented in June at a conference of the American Association of University Professors. According to the study, the number of women in academia has more than doubled in the last 20 years, but men still outnumber women in top positions by a considerable amount. Sixty-one percent of male professors have tenure, while women have only fourty-three percent.

Click here for further information about the study.

Click here for details of the study.

At age twenty-six, Goodall traveled to Tanzania with her mother, to observe the behavior of chimpanzees. She discovered that chimps not only ate meat (they were previously thought to only eat vegetation), but also that they made tools to help them catch bugs to eat. She continued her studies and founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977.

To read her full interview, click here.

NWHM was featured alongside more than 200 of the nation’s largest corporations’ procurement and supplier diversity executives, as well as federal, state and local government agencies. Stone and Nelson-Hooks enthusiastically shared information about the Museum’s founding, proposed permanent site, legislation, online presence, and resources with a steady stream of interested conference participants.

Visitors to the booth were held in rapt attention by Stone’s numerous stories of many little known facts about women. Our public service announcement video featuring NWHM Spokeswoman Meryl Streep was played as well as a tabletop display featuring the star-studded NWHM and Good Housekeeping’s April 2010 event: Shine On: Celebrating 125 Years of Women Making Their Mark. All this information sparked the interest of many, prompting them to inquire about membership. Stone and Nelson-Hooks left this networking showcase secure in the knowledge that they had enlightened many and were pleased to have gained a few more Museum members.

The journey to the White House was a long and challenging one for Dr. Kreps, who was born January 11, 1921 and grew up in a poor Kentucky coal -mining town.  The daughter of a coal-miner, Dr. Kreps worked hard to financially support herself through Berea College in KY, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1942 with an economics degree. The following year, Kreps earned a scholarship to Duke University where she would eventually earn her Ph.D.

Between 1963 and 1967 Dr. Kreps instructed economic classes focusing on labor demographics at Duke University, eventually rising to the rank of full professor.  In 1967 she became dean of the Women’s College and associate provost.

Dr. Kreps’ economic study centered on the labor demographics of older people and women and in 1971 she published Sex in the Marketplace: American Women at Work, the first book to examine the correlation of women’s participation in the labor force to women’s expected responsibility for household work.  In her work, Kreps noted society’s expectation that women “meet this obligation regardless of the demands of their market jobs – a career constraint not imposed upon men.”

After being appointed to Secretary of Commerce in 1976,Dr.  Kreps was asked to respond to a claim by Jimmy Carter stating that it had been hard to find qualified women to fill cabinet posts. Kreps replied:

“I think it would be hard to defend the proposition that there are not a great many qualified women,” she said. “We have to do a better job of looking.”

As Secretary of Commerce, Dr. Kreps oversaw trade missions in Japan, India, North Africa and other countries.  She also spearheaded negogiations that opened trade to Communist China in 1979.

Dr. Kreps broke countless gender barriers during her lifetime.  Her career in academia, buisnes and government challenged the pervading social and cultural attitudes towards women’s abilities and aptitude.  Kreps is survived by her two children and four grandchildren.

A grant from the Letitia Corum Memorial Fund is hoping to find out why more women are not involved in these fields. A report from AAUW in February of 2010 “shows that while the number of male and female math and science students is roughly equal in elementary through high school, only 20 percent of female students end up graduating from college with a degree in STEM fields.”

To read more about the study, go to http://www.aauw.org/learn/research/whysofew.cfm

What do you think? How can young girls be encouraged to enter the STEM fields?

Did you know that there were tons of heroines who played an important part in winning the Revolutionary War? While natives attacked a fort in frontier Virginia, teenager Betty Zane made a daring sprint to obtain essential gunpowder. Did she make it back to the fort safely or was she caught in enemy lines? Discover Betty Zane’s fate at www.nwhm.org!

Photo: Melina Mara-The Washington Post

A young boy learning about the founders of the suffrage movement.

Image from the Washington Post.

Join Us
~ Celebrate Women ~

Our Nation’s Capital, Washington, D.C., has many wonderful museums, but one important museum is missing. Help us to recognize and honor the lives of Women.

Help us build The National Women’s History Museum.

~*~

The National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) is a nonprofit, educational organization. Our mission is to enlighten the public on women’s many contributions to our nation.

The NWHM website (www.nwhm.org) provides a wealth of information, including 19 online exhibits and over 250 fascinating biographies. Legislation has been passed by the House and is pending in the Senate.

Click here to view Ticket Prices
To RSVP: Email rsvp@nwhm.org or call 202-546-9250.

To order tickets (via a mail-in form) click here.
To order tickets online, click here. PLEASE BE SURE TO DESIGNATE THE SEPTEMBER 21ST EVENT.

But two recent Chicago events reminded me of why this museum exists and must take its place at the National Mall — community, sisterhood, remembrance and cultural (r)evolution.

Chicago Event #1

Partners Anita Ponder, Jennifer Breuer, and Laurie Holmes and the Women’s Committee of Drinker Biddle & Reath LLC hosted a dialogue among 40 successful and diverse Chicago women about how gender roles have had an impact on their lives and what the Museum can do to inspire cultural change. We explored an incredible range of topics. We discussed the legacies of ground-breaking Chicago women who came before us. We shared personal stories and aspirations. We shared links to our online exhibits on African American women and Chinese-American women. Our plans for exhibits about Latinas and Jewish American women were presented. We talked about the Museum’s mission to be a change agent for gender equality. It was intense and electric!

We talked about feminine values and similarities as well as contrasts in gender roles across different ethnic and racial groups. Noting that men share the common language of sports (“how ‘bout those Bears?”), one woman called for us to help find a similar language to bring women together. The inimitable Hedy Ratner, President and Founder of the Women’s Business Development Center responded: “Shoes!  We meet. You say “Great shoes!” …we bond.” The crowd broke up. It was a Sex and the City moment….. And we bonded.

Chicago Event #2

My friend Kaarina Koskenalusta, the (first woman) President and CEO of the Executives’ Club of Chicago invited me to join the Speakers Table at her final Women’s Leadership Breakfast of the season. I accepted immediately. Kaarina introduced me to a ballroom filled with 1400 executive women and men as a former Chicagoan and an Officer of the National Women’s History Museum. And then she said: “Susan needs to raise a lot of money to build this important legacy and tribute to all women on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Please support her in this effort.” The packed Chicago Hilton Ballroom clapped and cheered.

I connected with Sherren Leigh, the publisher of Today’s Chicago Woman Magazine and a sponsor of the Executives’ Club Women’s Leadership Series. She and the magazine’s Associate Publisher flew to New York in April to join us for Good Housekeeping’s star-studded ShineOn event that benefited the Museum. Sherren has been supportive in helping us to extend our Chicago network.

It’s About “Us”:

Our president Joan Bradley Wages often states that the National Women’s History Museum goes far beyond the “hall of fame” approach to history. Of course, we tell the wonderful stories of individual women leaders. But we go much further to look at what women have accomplished together. Our exhibits explore how women as a collective force, for example, were the community builders of Jamestown , the first colonial settlement in the United States. Among other things, our exhibit on the Progressive Era tells the stories of the women of the settlement houses in Chicago and New York who gave rise to the passage of major public health, education and labor reforms.

Welcome to the Community:

And so, with the privilege of joining the amazing women at Drinker Biddle and of the Executives’ Club last month, I rejoined a community — a sisterhood of smart, successful, and supportive women in Chicago. I hope they will join my community of women who will build a museum on the National Mall that celebrates women. Women’s history teaches us that together we can be the architects of our future culture.

— Susan Sudman

Secretary, National Women’s History Museum

Mary Ann Bickerdyke

As caretakers of children, family and community, it was natural that women were the nurses, the caregivers, as human society evolved. Nursing may be the oldest known profession, as some nurses were paid for their services from the beginning. This was especially true of wet nurses, who nursed a baby when the mother died or could not nurse her child. A woman whose infant did not survive birth, or who was ready to wean her child, or who was capable of nursing more than one baby, would accept employment as a wet nurse, usually going to live in the home of her employer.

The home, in fact, was the center of health care, and for the first two centuries after European exploration of North America, all nursing was home nursing. Even when the nation’s first hospital began in Philadelphia in 1751, it was thought of primarily as an asylum or poorhouse; another century or more would pass before the public viewed hospitals as reputable and safe.

The Civil War gave enormous impetus to the building of hospitals and to the development of nursing as a credentialed profession. Initial wartime volunteers, however, often were seen as no different from “camp followers,” the women (sometimes mistresses and sometimes wives) who followed their soldier men. It was an era of sharp class definitions, and especially in the South, “respectable” women could not be seen in a military hospital.

Some women had the courage and common sense to defy decorum, though, especially in the North, where the US Sanitary Commission became the forerunner to the Red Cross. The best known of these women, of course, is Clara Barton—but her genius was in supply distribution and in development of systems for the missing and dead, not in nursing. Barton herself acknowledged that she actually nursed for only about six months of the four-year war and that other women did much more.

Perhaps the best known nurse at the time, was Mary Ann Bickerdyke of Illinois. A middle-aged widow, her accidental career began when she delivered money raised by local charities to the giant, if temporary, hospitals that the Union built at the junction of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. After witnessing suffering soldiers who had literally no one to care for them, she went on to be the only woman that General William T. Sherman allowed with his army. At the Tennessee battle of Lookout Mountain, she was the sole nurse for some two thousand men.

In the Confederacy, the most prominent nurses were Captain Sally Tompkins and Phoebe Pember. Tompkins was commissioned as an officer in the Confederate army so that she could have the power to commandeer supplies. She converted her Richmond mansion into Robertson Hospital and established a reputation for extraordinary quality: Tompkins’ hospital had by far the lowest death rate of any facility in the North or South, even though physicians sent their worst cases to her. Her staff of six—four of whom were black women still in slavery – treated more than 1,600 patients and lost only 73, an uncommonly low number in an era before germ theory was understood.

Phoebe Levy Pember

Phoebe Levy Pember has become somewhat better known since the Post Office recently included her on a series of Civil War stamps. A young widow from a wealthy, Jewish family based in Charleston and Atlanta, she went north to the Confederate capital of Richmond and eventually ran the world’s largest hospital. On an average day, Pember supervised the treatment of 15,000 patients, most of them cared for by nearly 300 slave women.

The war thus led to greater respect for nurses, something that Congress acknowledged in 1892, when it belatedly passed a bill providing pensions to Civil War nurses. More important, the war served as the beginning of moving the profession from the home to the hospital and clinic. The result was an explosion of nursing schools in the late nineteenth century. Usually these schools were closely associated with a hospital, and nurses—all of whom were assumed to be female—lived and worked at the hospital.

Often called “sisters” (as British nurses still are), their lives were indeed similar to those of nuns. Forbidden to marry, they were cloistered in “nurses’ homes” on hospital grounds, where every aspect of life was strictly disciplined. Student nurses were not paid at all, and because too many hospitals valued this free labor over classroom and laboratory time, many spent their days scrubbing floors, doing laundry, and other menial tasks. Curricula improved, however, in part because of the development of a tradition with caps: each nursing school had a distinctive cap that women wore after graduation, and because her educational background was literally visible every day, schools soon raised standards so that their graduates would affirm their quality.

As was indicated in NWHM’s last newsletter, there were more female physicians (and hospital administrators) during the 19th century than most people realize today—and some of these female physicians recognized the need for nurses and worked to professionalize the occupation. Dr. Marie Zakrewska founded a medical school for women in Boston that was affiliated with her New England Hospital for Women and Children in 1862, during the Civil War—and a decade later, in 1872, she began an associated nursing school that was the nation’s first.

Linda Richards

Linda Richards was its first graduate and thus is known as America’s first professionally trained nurse. Richards went on to establish her own precedent-setting programs as superintendent of nursing at New York’s Bellevue Hospital and at Massachusetts General Hospital; she also set up the first nursing school in Japan.

Like most educational institutions at the time, these schools did not admit African Americans, and the informally trained black women who nursed during the Civil War seldom were able to obtain credentials. The first credentialed black nurse was Mary Mahoney, who graduated in 1879 from Dr. Zakrewska’s nursing school in Boston. As segregation remained the rule far into the 20th century, Mahoney led the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, which began in 1908.

During the four decades between the Civil War and the beginning of the twentieth century, the image of nurses moved from being viewed as somewhat less than honorable to a respected profession. The next century would bring still more changes, and nurses of the 19th century would scarcely recognize the occupation as it is in the 21st century. They would, however, agree that a world of difference has occurred in the care of patients, and that has been an unmitigated good—achieved primarily by women.

-Written by Doris Weatherford

Cataract in Human Eye

June 15, 2010–According to new research appearing in the June edition of Archives of Ophthalmology, eating healthily can improve a woman’s defense against the damaging effects of cataracts. The study, which surveyed more than 1,800 women, found that those that scored the highest for adhering to the nationally recommended dietary guidelines, also had a 37% lower risk for cataracts.

The healthy diet linked to the lowered risk included high amounts of fruits, vegetables, proteins and whole grains, and low amounts of salt and fat.

The article cites a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences at the beginning of 2010 that studied the how teachers sometimes transmit their aversion to math onto female students.

Click here for the full article

Louise Bourgeois' Maman at the National Gallery of Canada

French-born American sculptor Louise Bourgeois, most famous for her psychologically centered sculptures, died on May 31 in her Manhattan home.  Bourgeois carved out a long career of nearly five decades, in which she produced some world-famous sculptures including the Maman spider structures.

Ms. Bourgeois often cited pain as the guiding force within her work. “The subject of pain is the business I am in,” she said.  “To give meaning and shape to frustration and suffering.  The existence of pain cannot be denied.  I propose no remedies or excuses.”

Born on Dec. 25, 1911, Bourgeois was most well known for her Cells, Spiders, books, drawings and sculptures.  Throughout the 1940s, she exhibited her work in New York City, where she made her debut at the Peridot Gallery in 1949 with her sculpture entitled: “Louise Bourgeois, Recent Work 1947-1949: Seventeen Standing Figures in Wood.”

Bourgeois gained fame later in her career when in 1982, the New York Museum of Modern Art created a retrospective of Bourgeois’ work, marking the first retrospective the museum had ever organized on a female sculptor.  Later in her career, the Tate Modern museum in London mounted a major retrospective of her work that went on display from October 2007-2008.  The exhibition travelled to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2008.  It later traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC in 2009.

“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of “Show Boat” included in “Till the Clouds Roll By (1946),” a movie about the life of Jerome Kern,” said Ms. Horne in a 1990 interview.

Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1917, Horne began her music career at New York City’s Cotton Club, in 1934. In the early 1940s, she became a jazz recording artists with RCA records, but left a short time thereafter to headline a nightclub gig on the west coast. During the same time, Horne also made her debut on the silver screen, mostly appearing in MGM musicals—her most famous, Cabin in the Sky (1943). Horne, unfortunately, was never featured as a leading actress because of her race. At the time, there existed strict rules in many theatres, which banned films featuring African American performers.

By 1945, Lena had become “the nation’s top Negro entertainer,” according to screenwriter and critic Frank Nugent. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Lena continued to act in films, television and produce music which have become classics. She played Glinda the good witch in “The Wiz” (1978), the film version of the all black Broadway music, based on the “Wizard of Oz.” In 1981, she won two Grammy awards for her album “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music.”

Horne is survived by her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley. The gifts given to the world throughout Ms. Horne’s six-decade career— her activism, vivacity, sass and powerfully expressive voice, will be enjoyed by generations to come.

Further data this year reveals that there has been a surge in female candidates for Congress—there are 239 female candidates for the House and 31 for the Senate. These numbers represent a record high and even surpass the previous precedent set in 1992, the “Year of the Woman,” in which there were 222 women who ran for the House and 29 for the Senate.

NWHM’s new face to the world heralds passage of its building site legislation out of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on April 21.  It now heads to the Senate floor.  HR 1700, which passed the House on a voice vote last October, and its Senate companion, S. 2129, will provide a permanent home for the Museum by allowing NWHM to purchase the vacant site at 12th Street and Independence SW at fair market value.   The Museum expects the legislation to pass out of the Senate soon.

The website redesign brings a fresh, clean look as well as technical upgrades.  The wealth of information available on the site can now be accessed using a search feature and a palette of colors are used to identify sections such as “Online Exhibits,” “Building the Museum,” and “Education & Resources.”

The website redesign is part of the program design being developed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates (RAA), a world leader in museum interpretative programs.  RAA is world renowned  and designed the interior exhibits of the Holocaust Museum, NEWSEUM, U. S. Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, DC, as well as 140 other museums from Beijing to London.

RAA Project Director Melanie Ide stated, “This is not just the launch of NWHM’s new website, but a new era for the Museum…one that will see the Museum’s digital, physical and cultural presence take root and expand.”

NWHM President & CEO Joan Wages stated, “NWHM is entering an exciting stage of its development and this makeover of NWHM’s face-to-the-world reflects our coming of age and readiness to take our place at the National Mall.”

The socio-political and cultural progress that Dr. Height bequeathed to the generations that follow her, spanned four decades— from the New Deal era through the post-modern era. For more than 40 years, Dr. Height committed her life’s work to achieving her dream of human rights for all people.

On April 29, 2010, President Obama offered the eulogy at Dr. Height’s funeral, and NWHM would like to take this moment to honor to the life, spirit and enduring legacy of such a remarkable woman.