10 Extraordinary Women, Part II Lives to Inspire Us All
August 2006 By Denny Hatch
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In the News
PepsiCo adds to list of women heading big firmsThe chief financial officer, Indra K. Nooyi, will succeed Steven Reinemund as CEO, the 11th in an exclusive club.
NEW YORK—The exclusive club of women running the nation’s largest public companies grew by one yesterday. PepsiCo Inc., maker of Pepsi, Gatorade and Frito-Lays snacks, named chief financial officer Indra K. Nooyi as chief executive officer, making her No. 2 among female CEOs at firms in the Fortune 500, which are ranked in size by revenue. She is to take over Oct. 1.
—Vinnee Tong, Associated Press, Aug. 15, 2006
Patricia Woertz, Archer Daniels Midland Co., No. 56, revenue: $35.94 billion.
Indra Nooyi (as of Oct. 1), PepsiCo Inc., No. 61, revenue: $32.56 billion
Brenda Barnes, Sara Lee Corp., No. 111, revenue: $19.73 billion
Mary Sammons, Rite Aid Corp., No. 129, revenue: $16.82 billion
Anne Mulcahy, Xerox Corp., No. 142, revenue: $15.7 billion
Patricia Russo, Lucent Technologies Inc., No. 255, revenue: $9.44 billion
Susan Ivey, Reynolds American Inc., No. 280, revenue: $8.26 billion
Andrea Jung, Avon Products Inc., No. 281, revenue: $8.15 billion
Marion Sandler, Golden West Financial Corp., No. 326, revenue: $6.66 billion
Paula Rosput Reynolds, Safeco Corp., No. 339, revenue: $6.35 billion
Meg Whitman, eBay Inc., No. 458, revenue: $4.55 billion
These women will have to wait for history’s judgment. For example, with great fanfare, Carly Fiornia took over as CEO of Hewlett-Packard in 1999, engineered the catastrophic merger with Compaq, behaved like a star in pubic and irritated the hell out of all her co-workers. She was forced out in 2005. During that time, HP stock plunged 50 percent.
Meanwhile, Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, is presiding over the greatest black market bazaar the world has ever seen, making it possible for counterfeiters, crooks, shoplifters, armed robbers, forgers and pirates to fence all manner of purloined and illegal art, artifacts, intellectual property and merchandise, thereby deeply wounding countless thousands of victims. If you disagree, enter “eBay AND fraud” in a Google search, and you can go through 24,900,000 entries.
What follows are short biographies of five additional great women (in alphabetical order).
6. Dorothy DeLay (1917-2002)
For years as a kid, I suffered through a succession of piano teachers foisted on me by my mother, and these teachers suffered from me. I had small hands that could not reach an octave and zero ability to read music. It turns out I’m a word guy, not a dots-on-the-page guy. But I have always been enthralled by musicians and all my life have gone to classical concerts—orchestral and chamber. In reading the biographies of violinists in concert programs, one phrase kept popping up: “ ... studied at Juilliard under Dorothy DeLay.”
DeLay was born in Medicine Lodge, Kansas, to musician parents who started her on the violin at age 4. When she was 16, DeLay entered Oberlin and a year later transferred to Michigan State. Following graduation at age 20, she moved to New York to study at Juilliard and paid the bills by baby sitting and playing in Broadway theater orchestras, restaurants and weddings. She also worked as a recitalist, played chamber music and in 1940 toured with the All-America Youth Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. DeLay decided that she preferred teaching to playing and signed on as assistant to her former Juilliard teacher, Ivan Galamian, and worked with him for 20 years. New York Times music critic Allan Koizinn wrote in DeLay’s obituary that “in the 1970s she became a sought-after teacher in her own right, and became the first woman—and the first American-born violinist—to be regarded as a master violin teacher in the tradition of Galamian and Leopold Auer.” Koizinn wrote:
Takeaway Points to Consider:
* ”Women have got to make the world safe for men since men have made it so darned unsafe for women.”—Nancy Astor
*”Because I am a woman, I must make unusual efforts to succeed. If I fail, no one will say, ‘She doesn’t have what it takes.’ They will say, ‘Women don’t have what it takes.’”
—Clare Boothe Luce
* ”Women must pay for everything. They do get more glory than men for comparable feats. But, they also get more notoriety when they crash.”
—Amelia Earhart
* ”Of my two ‘handicaps’ being female put more obstacles in my path than being black.”
—Shirley Chisholm was the first black woman to serve in the United States Congress.
* ”Remember no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt
* ”I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.”
—Rosa Parks
* ”I do the very best I can to look upon life with optimism and hope and looking forward to a better day, but I don’t think there is anything such as complete happiness. It pains me that there is still a lot of Klan activity and racism. I think when you say you’re happy, you have everything that you need and everything that you want, and nothing more to wish for. I haven’t reached that stage yet.”
—Rosa Parks
Web Sites Related to Today's Edition:
Seven Photos of Dorothy DeLayhttp://www.peterschaaf.com/delay/
“A Thousand Miles Up the Nile” by Amelia Edwards
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/edwards/nile/nile.html
“A Sudden Illness—How My Life Changed” by Laura Hillenbrand
http://www.cfids-cab.org/MESA/Hillenbrand.html
American Honored in the Capitol Rotunda
http://www.aoc.gov/cc/capitol/lain_in_state.cfm
Companies Mentioned:
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