Strong Women Archives - Page 3 of 13 - Kathleen Colvin, Author

Costume Designer Edith Head (1897-1981) Knew the Power of Collaboration

I’m staring at the cell phone, listening to two other women. It’s 9:15 PM at night, past my bedtime, and we’re still planning. The Willamette Writers Conference in Portland is just a little over a month away, and I’m on the conference committee. We’ve got work to do. The two other women can’t easily work uninterrupted until their children are in bed.

Edith Head dressed stars from Mae West to Grace Kelly to Elizabeth Taylor. Over her long career, she was nominated for 35 Academy Awards from 1948 through 1966. She won eight times, the most Oscars won by any woman.

“You can lead a horse to water and you can even make it drink, but you can’t make actresses wear what they don’t want to wear,” Edith Head once said.

Her solution? Collaborating.

Unlike most of male colleagues, she frequently consulted with actresses. In turn, they requested her work on their films. She also worked with actresses on what to wear to the Academy Awards show, taking into consideration even the color of the backdrop on the award stage.

Edith Head is a legend for her fashion contributions. She collaborated because it was the smart thing to do.

Even though I was tired last night, I stayed in the meeting, because collaborating is smart.

Top image by oneredsf1 via https://www.flickr.com/photos/colorizedimages/. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0).

Field Engineer Emily Roebling (1843-1903) Was Also Tested

My irritation flares at a man at the gym. Even though he’s doing bicep curls wrong, he pompously decides to tutor me. He’s testing me. I doubt he’d speak so condescending to a man.

Emily Roebling was tested when she took over for her husband Washington, the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Washington’s father, the former chief engineer and designer of the bridge, had died from tetanus after a barge crushed his foot. Emily’s husband then became paralyzed by a form of decompression sickness caused by changing air pressure, one of the perils of early bridge sites.

Emily became the surrogate chief engineer. She consulted with her husband and went back and forth to the construction site. Her work included negotiating with material suppliers who had to create new shapes of steel and iron. The men came to New York to see Washington but found they had to meet with Emily.

Emily hadn’t formally studied engineering, but according to an 1883 New York Times article, “her knowledge of engineering helped them out with their patterns and cleared away difficulties that had for weeks been puzzling their brains.”

No doubt she had to deal with condescending men. The 1883 article mentions the name of one man who had “tested” her engineering skill, as if that was something to be proud of.

She prevailed. When the Brooklyn Bridge, called the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” finally opened, Emily was the first to cross it.

I brushed off the man at the gym. We’ll always be tested. We’ll handle it.

Handbag Designer Judith Leiber (1921 – 2018) and the Love of Her Life

Photograph of Judith Leiber — Photo courtesy of the Judith Leiber Company

This past Monday was the sixth anniversary of my husband’s heart attack. On that day, just like every year, we go back to the hospital where he was saved. We eat a meal in the cafeteria, walk past the room where he recovered, and sit in the garden where we planned the rest of our lives.

It’s a happy ritual. But I was sad this time too, because I was reminded that ultimately, we will be separated by death.

On Monday, I also read the New York Times obituary of handbag designer Judith Leiber. Her unique handbags are favored by first ladies and celebrities and are in the permanent collections of the Chicago Historical Society, Smithsonian Institution, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Judith was born in Hungary. During World War II, her family narrowly survived the Nazi occupation of Budapest. Part of this was due to her non-Jewish father, who obtained a pass for himself and added the words “and family,” on the same typewriter used to issue the pass.

In Budapest Judith met Gus, an U.S. Army Signal Corps sergeant. They married in 1946 and moved to New York City. While Judith worked on her handbag business, Gus became a painter and sculptor.

Their marriage spanned 72 years.

Gus, aged 96, died this past Saturday of a heart attack. Just hours after his death, Judith, aged 97, also died of a heart attack.

They were buried together this past Monday.

Olympic Athlete Fanny Blankers-Koen (1918 -2004) Wasn’t Perfect

I’ve made a mistake. I’m talking on the phone, and we only had a few minutes. Under pressure, I talk fast, and despite how I try to curb it, I’m curt. I sound like a jerk.

Everyone who knows me well can name a few of my character flaws. Hopefully, over time, all will be forgotten or forgiven. I’m human.

So why do we demand that our historical figures be perfect?

Dutch athlete Fanny Blankers-Koen was married with two children when she competed in the 1948 Olympics in track and field. She received many letters from people saying she should be staying home with her children. They also said, since she was 30 years old, she was “too old to make the grade.”

She showed them. She won four gold medals, the only female athlete to have won that many medals in a single Olympic Games. She accomplished this despite training only twice a week before the competition because she was again pregnant.

Comments about her being a mother and wife were rampart. She was called the “Flying Housewife.” A reporter wrote she ran “like she was chasing the kids out of the pantry.”

Afterwards, she didn’t get many endorsements, but the city of Amsterdam did give her a new bicycle.

She faded from history books, although a 2003 biography was published in the Netherlands. Her children told the author that she was a cold, driven woman.

I don’t really know what type of person she was, but if what her children say was true, I wonder about the circumstances of her life. How did she grow up? Was her mother cold?

To me, this report about her character doesn’t take away from her enormous accomplishment.

It makes her a flawed human being. Just like me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Y_G0H-b3QE

Photo by Noske, J.D. / Anefo [CC BY-SA 3.0 nl (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852) and the Extra Effort

My voice sounds gravelly and my elbows are drawn into my body. The key presenter of the weeklong writing workshop is telling me that my novel needs much more work. He’s right–I know it–but it’s still hard to hear. I thank him for his time and immediately go to the bar for a glass of wine.

Writers don’t always start with the perfect novel. It takes a lot of hard work, frequently much more than we know.

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of poet Lord Bryon, but her mother wanted her to study math and science, not poetry. At a party when she was 17, Lovelace met Charles Babbage, a renowned mathematician. Babbage then invented the “Analytical Machine,” which was to calculate numbers with the aid of thousands of cogwheels.

Babbage asked Lovelace to translate an 8,000-word academic article about the Analytical Machine into French. She added 20,000 words of her own analysis in a set of notes.

Lovelace’s 1843 Notes were about two and a half times the original article. Babbage later wrote that the author of the Notes has “entered fully into almost all the very difficult and abstract questions connected with the subject.”

These Notes contained what many consider to be the first computer program. A later computer language created for the U. S. Department of Defense was called Ada after Lovelace.

She also had a greater vision than Babbage about what computers could do for us, which was not realized until the last century.

How did Lovelace become such a visionary? I can’t imagine how much extra effort in understanding math and science it took her. But I’ll bet, just like novel writing, she thought it was worth it.

Kitchen Maid Mollie Moran (1916-2014) and Everyday Courage

Staring at the ceiling, my mind’s churning as I’m lying on the hospital bed. The ultrasound technologist is eerily silent, staring into her monitor while she moves her equipment up and down and round and round my breast.

I’m frightened. I’ve been down this road before several times, always with a negative. But how many times do I have until the answer changes to the affirmative?

Thousands and thousands of women face this same experience every day. It takes courage: courage to show up, courage to lie there, courage to face the possibility of a bad outcome.

Sometimes we focus so much on stories of great courage that we discount everyday courage.

Mollie Moran was raised in the Norfolk area of England and was sent to London as a scullery maid at the age of fourteen.

Her father had been gassed in the trenches of World War I and was a stranger to young Mollie when he returned from the war. She was under strict instructions not to bother him, and yet she heard muttered whispers between her mother and grandmother about her father’s condition. When Mollie was older, she read accounts of soldiers being gassed and it “turned the blood in my veins to ice,” as she wrote in her book, Minding the Manor.

Her father never recovered. He suffered coughing fits that made “my mother’s face as white as flour.” His coughing fits made his face turn purple and white rags turn red with his blood.

At Mollie’s wedding reception, she saw her father’s face become grey and knew he would soon have a coughing fit. She rushed to his side, and his mouth opened, spraying a fountain of blood over her cream wedding gown.

There she was, one of the most important events in her life, with blood all over her gown. It didn’t matter. All she could think about was her father.

It took courage for her to think only of her father. No, this isn’t the kind of momentous courage that’s written in history books. It’s everyday courage.

The kind of courage that you and I have.

Photo: DancingLedge blog by writer Jeremy Miles

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