One of the First Black Women Admitted to the New York Bar Graduated from Fordham Law

In 1921, Ruth Whitehead Whaley became the first black woman to enroll at Fordham Law School. She graduated at the top of her class in 1924 and, one year later, became one of the first black women admitted to practice law in New York.

Fordham Had the First Female Dean of Any U.S. Jesuit University

In 1939, Fordham chose Anna E. King, Ph.D., to be dean of the School of Social Service. King became not only Fordham’s first female dean but also the first female dean at any Jesuit university in the country. In 1945, she was elected president of the American Association of Schools of Social Service. That same year, she initiated the school’s first master’s degree program. She served as dean until 1954.

The First Black Woman in the Coast Guard Later Taught Psychology at Fordham

As a young girl in Oklahoma, Olivia Hooker, Ph.D., survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, hiding under her kitchen table as white men burned down her affluent black community. Twenty-four years later, she became the first black woman to enlist in the U.S. Coast Guard. She taught psychology at Fordham from 1963 to 1985. In 2015, shortly before celebrating her 100th birthday, she reminisced about her time at Fordham: “Everybody helped each other and thought highly of each other and loved to be there.”

The Geraldine Ferraro Rose Grows on Campus

In 1984, Walter Mondale, the Democratic nominee for president, selected New York Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro, LAW ’60, as his running mate—the first time a national party nominated a woman for vice president of the United States. “There are no doors we cannot unlock,” the Fordham Law alumna said during her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. The ticket lost, but Ferraro helped place a new generation of women on equal—and more secure—footing with their male counterparts.

In 2007, Fordham honored her by hosting the ceremony introducing the Geraldine Ferraro rose. Sales of the hybrid tea rose funded studies and treatment of multiple myeloma, which Ferraro lived with for more than a decade before her death in 2011. The University planted the rose on the Lincoln Center campus.

Women Had Their Own Undergraduate College for 10 Years

In fall 1964, the University opened Thomas More College, an undergraduate school for women. Though women had been earning Fordham degrees in law, education, and social service for decades, the Thomas More students initiated a profound cultural shift. “It was a man’s world when we got here, but I think we quickly changed that,” Margaret Bia, M.D., TMC ’68, a member of the school’s first graduating class, recalled in 2014. The college closed in 1974, after Fordham College at Rose Hill began accepting women.

The Pioneer of Psychometrics was a Fordham Professor

Anne Anastasi, Ph.D., received the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan in 1987. Prior to that, Anastasi taught psychology at Fordham from 1947 to 1985, and also chaired the department. Nicknamed the “test guru”, Anastasi wrote a textbook, Psychological Testing, in 1954 that is considered by many to be the definitive text in the field of testing. The book is in its 9th printing.

In 2008, Fordham created the Anne Anastasi Chair in Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology in her honor; David V. Budescu, Ph.D., is the holder of the chair.

Valentina Izmirlieva, Ph.D., chair of the department of Slavic languages at Columbia University, came across the history while conducting research on the phenomenon of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire who adopted and adapted their Muslim neighbors’ custom of undertaking a pilgrimage, or hajj. These Christian pilgrims traveled not to Mecca but to Jerusalem. Upon return to their homes, those who completed the trip were given the honorific title of hajji—one who has completed the hajj— which conferred respect and permitted them a privileged position within their own communities and among their Muslim neighbors, even as religious minorities.

Historians of the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire have long been familiar with the Christian hajjis, Izmirlieva said. But, like so many aspects of history, the Christian hajj has been understood as an exclusively male endeavor.

“You may ask: How come no one noticed these women before? It’s partly because the available hajji sources hide their women well,” said Izmirlieva, whose work focuses on religious and cultural exchange in the Ottoman Balkans. “In short, recovering these traces, and the experiences they stand for, is a laborious task of cultural archeology that requires much archival digging and then some creative detective work. But most of the problem lies elsewhere, in a disciplinary inertia: No one really expects these women to be there—so no one has been looking for them.”

Through painstaking research, Izmirlieva uncovered the existence of dozens of women—grandmothers, wives, pregnant women, teenage girls—in the beginning of the 19th century alone, who traveled with their husbands and sons. By the later part of the century the arduous trip had been simplified by steam ships and reduced taxes, and the number of hajjis, male and female, skyrocketed. There is documentary evidence of women making the Christian hajj as early as 1682, but by the early-19^th century the family journeys had taken on a distinctly feminine cast, Izmirlieva said.

These women travelers visited many sites in Jerusalem pertaining to Mary, mother of Jesus, in the hopes of boosting fertility and solidifying a connection to the life of Christ. They became conduits of the sacredness of Jerusalem to their families and communities, Izmirlieva said. On the months- and years-long hajj, it fell to the mothers to enforce orthodoxy—to make sure their families prayed at the correct times and observed the appropriate rituals, even in foreign places. When they returned home, their social status had changed. Even a young wife, she said, generally a person of little respect and subject to the authority of her mother-in-law, was now addressed with deference, called hajji even by old men. By distributing to churches, monasteries, and extended family the relics and Holy Land mementos the family had spent most of its money to acquire, the mama hajji burnished the family’s reputation. She also positioned her sons to be respected members of the community, ready to step into positions of secular leadership when the Balkan nations gained independence from the Ottomans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Izmirlieva believes the “hajji mama” story is worth considering during the current moment of heightened nationalism and fraught interaction between Christians and Muslims because it offers a historical example of successful interaction and negotiation between cultures.

“We think of coexistance of groups in two polar opposite models: It’s either clash of civilizations or a ‘Kumbaya’ model of erasing difference. In reality it’s more complicated. It’s in the middle,” she said.

Fordham history professor Ebru Turan, Ph.D., offered a response focusing on the geopolitical antecedents and implications of the Christian hajj. She wondered how Balkan Muslims, watching their own empire fade as Christian European nations expanded their political and economic influence in Jerusalem, felt about their Christian neighbors appropriating the title of hajji. “To what extent were the new hajji part of the general European, Christian expansion into Jerusalem?” Turan asked. “What did the Muslim neighbors think, seeing Christian merchants usurp this title and come home with all this status?”

Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D., a Fordham theology professor, offered a response focusing on the biblical language used to describe Jerusalem as a woman, a mother, a grieving princess. She recounted the ancient queens who ruled the city and the female philanthropists—from St. Helen, mother of the Roman emperor Constantine and founder of the true cross, to early modern heiresses—who funded the preservation of historic sites. She argued the mama hajji story is but one in a history of Jerusalem as a city of women. Kattan Gribetz praised Izmirlieva for uncovering a piece of women’s history and providing a fuller and more accurate picture of a period and a society.

“The project of recovery is part of a larger historiographical effort to repopulate the histories we write, and the stories we tell, with those who were there, and who played important roles, but who were left out of the narrative,” Kattan Gribetz said.

–Eileen Markey

Held as part of the Institute’s Annual Women’s Symposia, in conjunction with International Women’s Day, the March 15 program drew 125 attendees. The conference aimed to explore impactful early childhood education global initiatives.

Rachelle Kammer, Ph.D, director of the institute and clinical associate professor at GSS, emphasized the interconnectedness of education and socioeconomic issues.

“Providing girls with an extra year of schooling beyond the average [schooling]can boost the eventual wages by 20 percent,” said Kammer.

On a broader scope, an additional year of primary schooling can also improve the average global economy 10 percent.

Maria Pia Belloni Mignatti, Ph.D., a member of New York University’s Global Women’s Initiative, said that countries with greater gender equality in education tend to have higher economic growth. Although there are many more girls in school internationally today than ever, those pockets in the world lacking childhood education have become a hidden crisis.

“Education does not expire when conflict occurs,” said Mignatti.

Young girls are also most at risk for the obstacles preventing education: “malnutrition, disabilities, parental illiteracy, poverty, violence, early pregnancy, and marriage,” she said.

Meeta Gandhi, board member for Children’s Lovecastle Trust (CLT), described her organization’s transition from one that delivered milk to the children of Indian laborers to an organization that provides resources for innovative methods of teaching, such as tailored online software and mentor-driven learning. Today, the non-governmental organization is a sustainable educational delivery service to India’s government-run schools.

Even so, Ghandi stressed that “people can’t learn unless they are fed. We must alleviate psychosocial stressors before we can teach.”

The deeply ingrained belief system in Nicaragua called machismo—a strong traditional sense of masculine pride—limits Nicaraguan women from numerous rights, said GSS student Regina Sarabia, who observed girls’ limited access to education in Nicaragua on a trip with Fordham’s Global Outreach program. To compensate, Sarabia said one group of women in a small village formed a primary school, available to girls, with very little funding from the government.

“The teachers are local women and they put their tiny paychecks back into the school,” said Sarabia of the local initiative, which also provides a meal for the students at school. “It is the truest sense of community.”

Panelist Stacey Radin, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Unleashed, Inc., a group supporting low-income New York city communities, said the education of girls needs to “start younger.”

Radin’s organization offers a 12-week program that dovetails societal issues and animal welfare, giving middleschool girls the opportunity to be involved in animal rescue. In caring for animals, the girls learn about their needs and how to advocate for those with no voices, said Radin.

“Early influence shapes the perception of power, and how women embrace and use it,” said Radin.

– Angie Chen

Author’s Note: The women’s movement has an unjustly bad reputation when it comes to the problems of work and family. Many see feminists advancing women in the workplace, but at the expense of family and home responsibilities. In honor of International Women’s Day (March 8)this column lists feminists who have fought to change society so that work and family could be balanced. These women are champions for working families we should remember:

Betty Friedan, a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the archetypal feminist, is often blamed for feminism’s supposed interest in the workplace alone. Yet, from the late 1970s on, Friedan explored the “agonizing conflicts” of young women seeking families and careers. Calling the family the new feminist frontier in her book The Second Stage (Simon & Schuster, 1981), Friedan challenged society to create a world where work and family could be balanced and true equality achieved.

Addie Wyatt is also a founder of NOW. Wyatt based her women’s and civil rights activism in unions once she discovered that her union contract in the late 1940s protected her job for a year after giving birth. Her integrated women’s, labor, and civil rights activism made her one of the first African-American women named person of the year by Time magazine in 1975.

Patricia Schroeder is an unsung heroine. U.S. Rep. Schroeder championed the needs of working mothers in Congress from 1973-1997. She helped secure the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978) and shepherded the Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) to its eventual approval. When she arrived in Congress, a colleague asked Schroeder how she could possibly simultaneously raise two small children and serve. Her reply, “I have a brain and a uterus and I use both.”

Heather Booth, a lifelong progressive activist who most famously helped found Jane, a 1960s women’s reproductive services collective. Less well known: her formation of the Action Committee for Decent Childcare (ACDC) in Chicago. ACDC is emblematic of the literally hundreds of feminist day-care advocacy groups in the 1960s and 1970s that fought for parent-controlled, affordable child care.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, eminent Supreme Court Justice, is an architect of modern women’s legal rights. Throughout, she has defended the principle that men and women share responsibility for supporting families and raising children, and that law should uphold that shared duty. In Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), for example, Justice Ginsburg persuaded the Court that widowers—and not just widows—should be entitled to Social Security benefits for dependent children.

Joyce Miller set up what the U.S. Department of Labor declared “the Rolls Royce of day care” programs for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in the 1960s. She then broke the glass ceiling, becoming the first woman to serve on the executive committee of the AFL-CIO. From her platform there and as president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women she launched campaigns for child care, parental leave, and the rights of pregnant workers.

Judith Lichtman & Donna Lenhoff were scrappy feminist lawyers leading the Women’s Legal Defense Fund in its early years in the 1970s. They helped write the Family and Medical Leave Act, which remains the only federal law providing job-protected leave for family care responsibilities or illness. Lichtman and Lenhoff led the 200-member coalition that secured its passage after a nearly decade-long battle.

Ellen Galinsky founded the Families and Work Institute in 1989. FWI reports guide best practices in business and routinely influence congressional debate on work and family. Galinsky now directs the When Work Works project, showing business how workplace effectiveness and flexibility can be complementary, not contradictory.

Nancy Folbre was awarded a MacArthur “genius” award for her innovative work on the economics of care in 1998. The “invisible heart,” as she calls it, adds value that conventional economics fails to recognize. A professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Folbre shows that in failing to value the work of care, support for caregiving is squeezed and discrimination against women is perpetuated.

Joan Williams has been at the forefront of tracking the “maternal wall” for nearly a decade. Bias against mothers, who are assumed to lack competence and commitment, is today the strongest and most open type of gender bias. A Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, she founded the WorkLife Law center, which has filed pioneering suits in family responsibilities discrimination.

By Kirsten Swinth

Author’s Note: The women’s movement has an unjustly bad reputation when it comes to the problems of work and family. Many see feminists advancing women in the workplace, but at the expense of family and home responsibilities. In honor of International Women’s Day (March 8)this column lists feminists who have fought to change society so that work and family could be balanced. These women are champions for working families we should remember:

Betty Friedan, a founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and the archetypal feminist, is often blamed for feminism’s supposed interest in the workplace alone. Yet, from the late 1970s on, Friedan explored the “agonizing conflicts” of young women seeking families and careers. Calling the family the new feminist frontier in her book The Second Stage (Simon & Schuster, 1981), Friedan challenged society to create a world where work and family could be balanced and true equality achieved.

Addie Wyatt is also a founder of NOW. Wyatt based her women’s and civil rights activism in unions once she discovered that her union contract in the late 1940s protected her job for a year after giving birth. Her integrated women’s, labor, and civil rights activism made her one of the first African-American women named person of the year by Time magazine in 1975.

Patricia Schroeder is an unsung heroine. U.S. Rep. Schroeder championed the needs of working mothers in Congress from 1973-1997. She helped secure the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (1978) and shepherded the Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) to its eventual approval. When she arrived in Congress, a colleague asked Schroeder how she could possibly simultaneously raise two small children and serve. Her reply, “I have a brain and a uterus and I use both.”

Heather Booth, a lifelong progressive activist who most famously helped found Jane, a 1960s women’s reproductive services collective. Less well known: her formation of the Action Committee for Decent Childcare (ACDC) in Chicago. ACDC is emblematic of the literally hundreds of feminist day-care advocacy groups in the 1960s and 1970s that fought for parent-controlled, affordable child care.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, eminent Supreme Court Justice, is an architect of modern women’s legal rights. Throughout, she has defended the principle that men and women share responsibility for supporting families and raising children, and that law should uphold that shared duty. In Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), for example, Justice Ginsburg persuaded the Court that widowers—and not just widows—should be entitled to Social Security benefits for dependent children.

Joyce Miller set up what the U.S. Department of Labor declared “the Rolls Royce of day care” programs for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in the 1960s. She then broke the glass ceiling, becoming the first woman to serve on the executive committee of the AFL-CIO. From her platform there and as president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women she launched campaigns for child care, parental leave, and the rights of pregnant workers.

Judith Lichtman & Donna Lenhoff were scrappy feminist lawyers leading the Women’s Legal Defense Fund in its early years in the 1970s. They helped write the Family and Medical Leave Act, which remains the only federal law providing job-protected leave for family care responsibilities or illness. Lichtman and Lenhoff led the 200-member coalition that secured its passage after a nearly decade-long battle.

Ellen Galinsky founded the Families and Work Institute in 1989. FWI reports guide best practices in business and routinely influence congressional debate on work and family. Galinsky now directs the When Work Works project, showing business how workplace effectiveness and flexibility can be complementary, not contradictory.

Nancy Folbre was awarded a MacArthur “genius” award for her innovative work on the economics of care in 1998. The “invisible heart,” as she calls it, adds value that conventional economics fails to recognize. A professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Folbre shows that in failing to value the work of care, support for caregiving is squeezed and discrimination against women is perpetuated.

Joan Williams has been at the forefront of tracking the “maternal wall” for nearly a decade. Bias against mothers, who are assumed to lack competence and commitment, is today the strongest and most open type of gender bias. A Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, she founded the WorkLife Law center, which has filed pioneering suits in family responsibilities discrimination.

Kirsten Swinth, Ph.D., associate professor of history and chair of the department, is currently at work on a book on the rise of the American working family since World War II, Care & Competition in Postindustrial America: The Making of the Working Family.