Women’s History Month: the History Behind It and the Remarkable Women of Tennessee
Updated: Apr 19, 2023
Women’s history was first nationally recognized as National Woman’s Day that first took place on the 28th of February 1978 to honor the 1908 workers’ strike in New York. In 1980, it became National Women’s History Week, celebrated from March 2nd through March 8th because Jimmy Carter believed that there was too much women’s history to be recognized in just one day . Then, in 1987, March was designated for Women’s History Month. Some remarkable Tennessee women who have made a huge impact include: : Anne Dallas Dudley (1876-1955), Wilma Rudolph (1940-1994), Rhea Seddon (1947-present), and Pat Summitt (1952-2016).
Anne Dallas Dudley was an American activist in the women's suffrage movement in the early twentieth century. She was one of several women that founded the Nashville Equal Suffrage League - she was the vice president. Her and the president, Carrie Chapman Catt, led the efforts in Tennessee to ratify the 19th amendment, making Tennessee the 36th state to ratify the amendment.
Wilma Rudolph was an American sprinter and the first American to win three gold medals in a single Olympics in Rome in 1960. She still holds the title of the fastest woman in the world. At the age of four, she was diagnosed with polio and contracted scarlet fever and double pneumonia. Many doctors told her that she would not be able to ever walk again, but she proved all of the doctors wrong.
Margaret Rhea is still alive today - she is seventy-five years old. She was one of the six women to be selected by NASA in 1977 to become one of the first female astronauts. She flew on three different Space Shuttle flights as a mission specialist. She is also an author, writing about her experiences in the space program. The books that she published are Crew Resource Management: The Flight Plan for Lasting Change in Patient Safety (2005) and Go for Orbit: One of America’s First Women Astronauts Finds Her Space (2015). She is now a surgeon at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
As we all know, Pat Summitt was a phenomenal basketball coach for the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and a fabulous basketball player for University of Tennessee at Martin, but did you know that she competed in the Summer Olympics in Montreal, Canada in 1976? She was the first U.S. Olympians to obtain medals as a player and a head coach.
There are so many more women just in Tennessee that have made an impact on the world, and this month we need to show all of these powerful women gratitude for what they have done to improve the world around them and for the future generations.
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