Today's Sunshine for Women "Most Influential Women of the Millennium" award goes to a largely unrecognized and unheralded group of women: women in philanthropy. Given adequate resources, women have always been patrons of the arts, science, music, and literature as well as leaders in various reform movements. Both individually and collectively, the women together have changed the course of men's history.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) , a twelfth century abbess, writer, confidant of and advisor to kings and popes, theologian, and founder of convents, created a safe physical and intellectual space for women to develop and use their skills to the benefit of the larger community.

Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis (1813-1876): anti-slavery, temperance, woman's rights reformer during both of her marriages. The death of her first husband left her independently wealthy, and she toured the east with a mannequin, explaining to women their own anatomy and physiology. Her second marriage, to Thomas Davis, made her a powerful figure in Boston society. At a May 1850 Boston antislavery meeting, the women voted to hold the first National Woman's Rights Convention that October in Worcester and it was Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis who had the time, effort, inclination, and ability to organize the meeting, which was a resounding success. Thereafter she was active in a variety of woman's rights causes. In 1853 she began publishing at her own expense, a monthly periodical, The Una, which championed woman's rights. In 1868 she helped to found the New England Woman Suffrage Association, supporting the NWSA wing of the suffrage movement. (2, pp. 444-445)

Frank Leslie (Miriam Florence Folline, 1836-1914) Turning her deceased husband's highly mortgaged printing business into a financial success, Miriam changed her name to Frank Leslie after the name of her leading periodicals Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. She left almost $2 million to Carrie Chapman Catt for use by the NAWSA (National American Woman Suffrage Association) to obtain vote for women. (1, p. 210)

Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbuilt Belmont ("That Belmont Woman", 1853-1933) financier and activist for worker's and women's rights. Belmont financed both the NAWSA and Alice Paul's Congressional Union and National Woman's Party. After the vote for women was won in the US, Belmont turned her attention to international feminism, specifically to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance which helped national woman suffrage organizations throughout the world. (1, p. 34, 4, vol. 1, pp. 126-128)

Mary Eliza Church Terrell (1863-1954) Born into the Black elite of Memphis, Tenn just as the Civil War was coming to an end, Terrell's parents protected her from discrimination as much as possible. Nonetheless, encountering both racism and sexism when she attended Oberlin College, she decided to prove the abilities of African-Americans and women by excelling at the school. She graduated from Oberlin in 1884. She dedicated her life to struggling against both forms of discrimination.

      In 1896, Terrell formed the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), a self-help organization that "offered sisterly support for its members and created programs that addressed racial problems through the elevation of Black women." The NACW established kindergartens, day nurseries, homes for girls, the aged, and the infirm, and Mothers Clubs, where women could trade information on child rearing techniques, emerging as one of the most important woman's organizations.

      Her vision of a world in which all of humanity were given the same opportunities, rights, and responsibilities expanded, leading her to speak and write as an advocate for the Black race. She wrote articles and short stories on lynching, chain gangs, the peonage system, the defection of mulattos, and the disfranchisement of Blacks.

      In 1908, in response to a horrible race riot in Springfield, Illinois, Oswald Garrison Villard, grandson of famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, issued a call, "inviting those who believed in justice for all in a true democracy to attend a national meeting." Of the sixty men and women who signed the call, only two were Black women, Mary Church Terrell and Ida Bell Wells-Barnett. This national meeting lead directly to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). (3, vol. 2., pp. 838-840)

      Working in the increasingly racist woman's suffrage movement, Terrell created coalitions of Black men and women to work for the enfranchisement of all women, not just educated, middle-class, native-born, white women.

      Growing increasingly militant as she aged, after World War II, Terrell adopted such tactics as picketing, boycotting, and sit-ins. In 1950, Terrell was rejected service in a segregated public eating place in Washington, D. C., causing Terrell to begin the case of District of Columbia v. John Thompson, which became a symbol against segregation in the United States. Terrell lived to see the Supreme Court mandate desegregation of public schools in Brown v. Board of Education, dying two months later. Her lifelong crusade for equality of the sexes and the races helped to lay a foundation for the Civil Rights movement and the women's rights movement of the 1960s. (3, vol. 2, pp. 1157-1159)

Katherine Dexter McCormick Second woman to earn a degree (BS) in science (biology) from MIT (1904), Dexter married (1904) an heir to the International Harvester fortune, Stanley McCormick, youngest son of Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the mechanical harvester. Two years after their marriage, Stanley was afflicted by schizophrenia. Katharine built a story book castle, Riven Rock, in Santa Barabra, Ca where she took Stanley to live surrounded with peace, beauty, and harmony. Yet, he lapsed into and out of his schizophrenic episodes for the remainder of his life. Believing that his disease was genetic in origin, Katherine resolved never to bear children. By 1909, Stanley was declared legally incompetent and the lawyers for the Cyrus McCormick estate battled to restrain Katharine's power to spend the money in Stanley's trust fund without court approval.

      Katharine made small contributions to numerous causes, including the woman's suffrage movement and, later, Margaret Sanger's Planned Parenthood Federation. Most of her charitable spending went into neuroendocrine research. As long as her husband remained alive, her spending would be monitored by the probate court in Chicago and as long as she spent money on research into causes of and treatments for her husband's disease, her spending was easily approved. Only after his death (1947) would she gain complete control of his money (1952) and be permitted to spend that money the way she wanted to spend it.

      At age seventy-one, McCormick was wealthy in her own right and determined to develop a cheap, easy to use, safe, effective, artificial contraceptive pill. During her lifetime and in her will, she contributed $2 million to develop the birth control pill -- not a single cent of either the government's money or the money of pharmaceutical companies went into developing the most revolutionary pharmaceutical invention of the century. No corporation financed the development of a birth control pill: corporate executives refused to believe there was a market for a drug that prevents women from becoming pregnant. Without Katharine McCormick's funding, the birth control pill would probably not have been invented, tested, and marketed for a long time. (4)

      And, of course, I must mention 2 of our contemporaries.

Peg Yorkin, Feminist Majority Foundation founded to promote women's empowerment through research, education, and action

Wilhelmina Cole Holladay and Wallace F. Holladay, National Museum for Women in the Arts founded to collect, preserve, and promote works by women in the visual arts

      The next time you receive a solicitation for a cause, stop to ask yourself, "Are the people leading this organization donating their time and money to the cause or are they, like some of the TV religous ministries, growing rich from contributions of people like me?" I don't have a problem with some one earning an honest living heading a non-profit foundation, but I do have a problem with some one growing rich, very rich, by heading a non-profit foundation. And if you are fortunate enough to be financially able to contribute to social causes, choose to donate to women's organizations. Men have enough money and power to care for themselves and their organizations, they don't need women's money, too. There are thousands of organizations devoted to helping women: battered women's shelters, women's trade unions, scholarships for women, schools for women, health care for women and children, and organizations focusing on women in the arts, literature, science, sports, and history, to name just a few. Help to create a physically and intellectually safe place for women to be all that they can be.

References:

      (1) Doris Weatherford, American Women's History, An A to Z of People, Organizations, Issues, and Events, [New York: Prentise Hall,1994]

      (2) Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, Paul S. Boyer, Notable American Women, A Biographical Dictionary, [Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971]

      (3) Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, [Bloomington, Ind: Indiania University Press, 1993]

      (4) Bernard Asbell, The Pill: A Biography of the Drug that Changed the World, Random House, 1995

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