Its’ campus consisted of 16 small buildings in Miami Shores, Florida, with a student body of 1,750 when she became the president in 1981. By the time she retired in 2004, Barry University had become a 55-building multi-campus with 7,000 students and included a law school. That was the result of the phenomenal fundraising skills and academic vision of Sister Jeanne O’Laughlin, an Adrian Dominican Sister.

On May 4, 1929, just before the crash of the stock market, Jeanne Marie O’Laughlin was born to Mary Margaret and Thomas O’Laughlin in Detroit, Michigan. While still a child, she would learn what doctors had told her mother on the occasion of Jeanne’s birth. Mary Margaret would never survive another pregnancy.The doctors were right. Five years later Sister O’Laughlin and her three siblings lost their mother when she once again conceived. This memory and that of growing up without a mother would affect some of the views that sometimes caused her to be called into question by the Church.

A streetcar ride when she was thirteen years old would leave another vivid memory that would shape her life. A black woman boarded the car with four small children. As the streetcar lurched forward, one of the children fell into Jeanne’s lap. Jeanne gladly held the child for the remainder of the ride. Later, a man exiting the car spit on Jeanne. That evening when telling her father of the incident, she asked him, “Dad, what causes prejudice?” “Ignorance,” he said. “How do you get rid of it,” she asked. He looked at her and said, “ Only through education”. She knew then what she would do with her life.

In 1958 she earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and biology at Siena Heights University. Then earned her masters and doctorate at the University of Arizona. She joined the board at Barry in 1973 while still assistant dean at St. Louis University; assuming the role of Barry’s president in 1981.

Sister Jeanne was dedicated to providing higher education and worked for greater access for all students. To that end she also served as chair of the Council of Independent Colleges; chair of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities; president of the Florida Association of Colleges and Universities; and chair of the Independent Colleges and Universities of Florida.

Her involvement in the community went well beyond Barry University. Sister Jeanne held leadership roles in the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce and the Miami Coalition for a Drug-Free Community. She was the first woman to serve on the Orange Bowl Committee and the first woman to win the Chamber of Commerce’s Sand in My Shoes Award. She was deeply involved on behalf of the homeless and immigrant rights. As the first woman in the Non-Group, an influential behind-the-scenes group of community business men and civic leaders, she helped raise $7 million in private contributions for a fund to help small, black-owned businesses in riot-scarred Liberty City. After the devastation caused by Hurricane Andrew, she was a key figure in We Will Rebuild, the volunteer recovery committee.

After her retirement Sister Jeanne returned to Michigan to the Motherhouse of the Adrian Dominican Sisters. Despite the fact she was battling recurrent cancer, she did not stop her service to others. She helped start the Share the Warmth Center for the homeless and acted as advisor to the Adrian Sisters for their fundraising.

She was 90 when she passed away at the Motherhouse of the Adrian Dominican Sisters.

 In 1961 JERRIE COBB was the first of 13 women pilots who passed the same torturous tests as the six other Mercury astronauts (male).  In fact she scored in the top 2% of both the women and the men and had more hours as a pilot, and had set more records for speed and altitude than any of the others.

But then NASA changed the rules and stated only military pilots could qualify. Even John Glenn testified before Congress that women should not and could not be astronauts.  So Jerrie Cob and the other women had to wait 33 years to see the first woman, Sally Ride, go into space.

Born in Norman, Oklahoma, March 5, 1931, the daughter of Army Lt. Col. William “Harvey” Cobb and Helena Stone Cobb, Geraldine “Jerrie” M. Cobb started flying at 12.  She sat on a stack of pillows to see out and used blocks to reach the rudder pedals of her father’s open-cockpit Waco biplane. She was a natural.  She passed her private license test at age 16, earned her commercial pilot’s license at age 18, and received her flight and ground instructor certificates one year later.  She used money she earned playing professional softball to buy her first plane, a Fairchild PT-23.

Ms. Cobb went on to dust crops, deliver surplus military planes around the world, and work at the Oklahoma-based Aero Design and Engineering Co. in the 1950s, as one of the few female executives in aviation. “She found a way to work as a pilot, as a woman, at a time when all those jobs would have been listed in the newspaper under the title ‘Jobs for Men,’ ” said Margaret A. Weitekamp, a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and the author of “Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program.”

In 1957 Ms. Cobb set world records for distance and altitude; followed in 1959 by the world record for speed.  She was the first woman to fly in the Paris Air Show.  Other awards included the Amelia Earhart Gold Medal of Achievement, the Amelia Earhart Memorial Award and in 1959, the National Pilots Association Pilot of the Year. By then she had drawn the attention of William Randolph Lovelace II, an aerospace medicine scientist who had helped select the Mercury Seven.

Before any human being had gone into space, Lovelace was already thinking about huge orbiting space stations — Disney television-show-style things - with dozens of people aboard doing scientific research and reconnaissance. In Lovelace’s view, women were to function as an essential part of such space stations, working as secretaries or nurses. To determine whether they would be able to survive in space, he invited Ms. Cobb, then 28, to perform the same tests he had used on the Mercury astronaut candidates.

After Lovelace announced in a Stockholm news conference that Ms. Cobb had aced the testing program, scoring in the top 2 percent of pilots and bettering many of her male colleagues, public interest in a female astronaut program began to grow.

Ms. Cobb helped Lovelace and his collaborator, Air Force Brig. Gen. Don Flickinger, select additional pilots for their Woman in Space Program, poring over flight records to identify promising female aviators. With support and funding from Jacqueline Cochran , the first woman to break the sound barrier, 19 female pilots took the tests.  In addition to Ms. Cobb, twelve more passed with “no medical reservations,” forming a cohort that Ms. Cobb described as the First Lady Astronaut Trainees, or FLATs. But the program was disbanded in late summer of 1961, after a Navy aviation school in Pensacola, Fla., barred Lovelace from using its spaceflight testing facilities without official permission from NASA.

Ms. Cobb became the country’s most prominent supporter of female astronauts, seeking to overturn a NASA provision that required all astronaut candidates to have experience flying military jets — an opportunity that was closed to women.

Working with Jane B. Hart, a fellow FLAT and the wife of Sen. Philip Hart (D-Mich.), she attended a House subcommittee hearing, where she testified that female pilots were “not trying to join a battle of the sexes”.  “We seek only a place in our nation’s space future without discrimination,” she said, two years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed sex discrimination.

 

Ms. Cobb’s testimony was followed by that of astronauts such as Glenn, who had recently become the first American to orbit the Earth. “The men go off and fight the wars and design the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them,” he said. “The fact that women are not in this field is a matter of our social order. It may be undesirable.”

By that time, NASA’s focus had shifted entirely to putting a man on the moon, and agency officials said that redesigning flight suits for female astronauts would be costly and time-consuming in the midst of the Space Race. The milestone of sending the first woman to space was left to the Soviet Union, which launched Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. The first American woman in space, Sally Ride, followed suit in 1983.

By then Ms. Cobb had established herself as a missionary and humanitarian  in South America, where she had once delivered military planes to Peru and spent days in an Ecuadoran prison, accused of being a spy for Peru. She flew solo with the aid of hand-drawn maps and for her work she was honored by the governments of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.

“The only thing that would take her away from her work”, she said, “was another chance to go into space” — an opportunity that presented itself in 1998, when Glenn, then 77 and a U.S. senator, became the oldest person to fly in space.

A grass-roots campaign to “Send Jerrie Into Space” was launched on behalf of Ms. Cobb, who was then 67 and received support from groups including the National Organization for Women. Traveling to Washington, she met with Glenn and later with NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin, calling for more female astronauts regardless of whether she made it into space. “If they think it’s important to study an older man,” said the 67-year-old Cobb, “I can’t see why it’s not important to study an older woman.”

Her mission never came to pass. But Ms. Cobb was there at the launchpad in July 1999, watching alongside other surviving FLATs as Eileen Collins became NASA’s first female shuttle commander. Four years earlier, when Collins became the first female pilot of a shuttle, she launched into space carrying a token from Ms. Cobb: a gold pin in the shape of a Colombian bird, a symbol of the plane she flew in South America.

Geraldyn “Jerrie”M. Cobb is enshrined in the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

(photo by William P. Straeter AP)

This video was the introduction to twelve (12) years of HerStory public access TV broadcasts and the beginning of Women's Voices Media.

Gladys Mae West (née Brown) (born 1930) is an American mathematician known for her contributions to the mathematical modelling of the shape of the Earth, and her work on the development of the satellite geodesy models that were eventually incorporated into the Global Positioning System (GPS). West was inducted into the United States Air Force Hall of Fame in 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_West

María Rebecca Latigo de Hernández was born July 29, 1896 in Garza García, outside of Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, to Eduardo Frausto and Franscica (Medrano) Latigo.  She taught elementary school in Monterrey before immigrating to Texas as part of the flood of people leaving Mexico during the Mexican Revolution.

In 1915 she married Pedro Hernandez Barrera in Hebbronville, Texas.  They moved to San Antonio in 1918, where they opened a grocery store and bakery.  Their family would eventually grow to include 10 children.  They began their political activism in 1924 but did not become permanent residents until February 2, 1928. 

On January 10, 1929, they helped found the Orden Caballeros de America (the Order of Knights of America), an organization dedicated to activities for the benefit of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants.  Under the auspices of the order, Maria Hernandez helped organize the Associacion Protectora de Madres, which provided financial assistance to expectant mothers.  The association operated until 1939 with the help of Dr. A.I. Mena.

Despite the pressures of the tumultuous 1930’s, Maria L. de Hernandez was fearless in her fight for civil rights.  Although Mexican Americans served as a convenient scapegoat during this period, Hernandez stood up and fought back.  In 1932 Hernandez became San Antonio’s first Mexican female radio announcer.  She was the only female speaker at the first meeting of the League of United Latin American Citizens in 1934.  She supported its work of promoting equality for Mexican Americans until 1940 and again in 1947 when it was reorganized.  In 1934 she helped organize La Liga de Defensa Pro-Escalar, an organization working for better facilities and better education for the West Side Mexican community.  When, in 1938, women workers demanded better pay and working conditions in the Pecan-Shellers’ Strike, Hernandez took up their cause.  She was one of the group of women who, in 1939, visited Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas to express goodwill between Mexico and Mexicans in the United States.

Hernandez’ essay “Mexico y Los Cuatro Poders Que Dirigen al Pueblo”, published in 1945, asserted that the domestic sphere was the foundation of society and mothers were the authority figures who molded nations.  Then she organized Club Liberal Pro-Cultura de la Mujer to build upon these ideas.

Through the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s and even into the 70’s, Hernendez made hundreds of speeches in support of civil rights for Mexican Americans and African Americans.  She and her husband were invited to a hearing before the United States Commission on Civil Rights in 1968.  Continuing their political activism, they joined the Raza Unida party and toured much of Texas campaigning for gubernatorial candidate Ramsey Muniz and candidate for the State Board of Education Marta Cotera in 1972.

Maria Hernandez died of pneumonia on January 8,1986.  As a tribute to the respect and prestige she had earned through her life’s work she was buried in the plot of the Orden Caballeros de America outside Elmendorf.