#dresslikeawoman

#dresslikeawoman orders were issued by this administration.    But what does that mean?  Scientist, athlete, space explorer, firefighter, soldier, mechanic, lawyer, nurse, leader, police officer, inventor, envelope pusher?

Shall we dress like Belva Lockwood, the first woman admitted to practice before the US Supreme Court in 1879 a single mom who worked her way through college and ran for President?  Lockwood was nearly forty when she decided to study the law. She finally found a law school that would admit her, but even there her diploma was held up until she demanded action.

Lockwood was admitted to the bar of the District of Columbia, but was refused admission to practice before the Supreme Court. She spent five years energetically lobbying a bill through Congress, and in 1879 Belva Lockwood became the first woman to practice law before the US Supreme Court.

In 1884 she accepted the nomination of the National Equal Rights Party and ran for president. Although suffrage leaders opposed her candidacy, Lockwood ran anyway. She polled over 4,000 votes and ran again in 1888.

Using her knowledge of the law, she worked to secure woman suffrage, property law reforms, equal pay for equal work, and world peace. Thriving on publicity and partisanship, and encouraging other women to pursue legal careers, Lockwood helped to open the legal profession to women.

Shall we #dresslikeawoman like Faye Glenn Abdellah, pioneer nursing researcher, helped transform nursing theory, nursing care and nursing education?  She was the first nurse officer to receive the rank of a two-star rear admiral and Deputy Surgeon General.

Her more than 150 publications, including her seminal works, Better Nursing Care Through Nursing Research and Patient-Centered Approaches to Nursing, changed the focus of nursing theory from a disease-centered to a patient-centered approach and moved nursing practice beyond the patient to include care of families and the elderly. Her Patient Assessment of Care Evaluation method to evaluate health care is now the stan

dard for the nation. Her development of the first tested coronary care unit has saved thousands of lives.

Dr. Abdellah developed educational materials in many key areas of public health, including AIDS, the mentally handicapped, violence, hospice care, smoking cessation, alcoholism, and drug addiction. Dr. Abdellah, after teaching at several prestigious universities, founded the Graduate School of Nursing at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences and served as the school’s first dean.

Or maybe #dresslikeawoman means to dress like Bessie Coleman?  She was the world’s first African American woman aviator who earned her pilot’s license in 1921 in France, two years before her more famous contemporary, Amelia Earhart.

Bessie Coleman, the tenth child in a family of thirteen, grew up in a large, single-parent family in rural Texas. She learned about aviation through childhood reading, finished high school and some teacher’s college training, and moved to Chicago.  She was denied entry into flight school in the US.  So, she learned French and went to France. In 1921 she earned an international pilot’s license from the highly respected Federation Aeronautique International.

She returned to the United States and spent the next five years touring the country, giving exhibition flights, barnstorming and parachuting at airports.  She left a substantial legacy because of her modeling a pathway for women and people of color in aviation, and her challenges to Jim Crow practices.

Or how about Grace Hopper, a mathematics genius who pioneered COBAL and invented the phrase “computer bug”?

Hopper earned her B.A. in mathematics and physics from Vassar College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale. Hopper began her professional career teaching mathematics at Vassar College, and remained there until the early 1940s.

In 1943, wanting to aid her country during World War II, Hopper joined the United States Navy. She was soon assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, where she began her legacy of groundbreaking computer programming with the Mark I, a precursor to electronic computers. Hopper became a faculty member at Harvard’s computation laboratory in 1946 and continued her programming work with the Mark II and Mark III computers.

The Mark I electromechanical computer was the early supercomputer that helped Manhattan Project scientists simulate the effects of an atomic bomb.  In 1947, a moth a got into a mechanical relay and jammed the system.  When Hopper removed it, she taped the moth into the team’s operational logbook with the caption “First actual case of bug being found:”

Believing that a much wider audience could operate a computer if it was more user-friendly and more programmer-friendly, Hopper joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (later the Sperry Corporation) in 1949. There, she worked on the UNIVAC I, the first commercial electronic computer.

In 1952, Hopper was credited with creating the first compiler for modern computers, a program that translates instructions written by a programmer into codes that can be read by a computer. Hopper went on to develop the FLOW-MATIC computer programming language (1957) and shortly after, pioneered the Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL).

As meme worthy as Einstein, she said:

A ship in port is safe, but this is not what ships are built for.  Sail out to sea and do new things.

 

 

#dresslikeawoman and take on the world.