Mary Walker

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Lead: Brilliant, stubborn, and independent, Mary Walker led the way in more ways than simple fashion.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: “Why don’t you wear proper clothing? That toggery is neither one thing nor the other!” General William Tecumseh Sherman to Mary Walker, who was the first woman to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. In her long life Mary Charles Walker rarely bent to society’s demands. She became one of the first women physicians in the U.S., served as an army combat surgeon, and was a life-long participant in the fight for women’s rights. Women need two things, she thought, the right to vote and the right to wear any clothes they desire. She was almost always wore trousers.

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Rosie the Riveter

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Lead: During World War II, women entered the work place in unprecedented numbers. Magazines, newspapers, radio and movies gave them a symbol: Rosie the Riveter.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: For generations American women had been told their place was in the home. If a man’s wife or daughter brought home a paycheck it was thought the man was somehow a failure. That had to change if the allies were going to meet the threat of Japan and Germany. World War II more than any before it was a battle of production. The Axis powers had a ten-year head start on producing weaponry and had increased their advantage with allied losses at Dunkirk and Pearl Harbor. Victory would go to the side which produced the most airplanes, battleships, guns and ammunition.

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Battle of the Sexes (Tennis) II

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Lead: Drawn by rich prize money and the taunts of Bobby Riggs, Billie Jean King, the best woman’s tennis player at the time, agreed to a match, the so-called Battle of the Sexes.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: There was a record crowd, for tennis at least, in the Houston Astrodome on September 20, 1973. The television audience was said to exceed 48,000,000. His recent victory over tennis star, Margaret Court, and his arrogant confidence that he would emerge the victor over King, led Riggs and others who believed in him to place bets on the outcome. In part, King believed she could provoke a shift in attitudes toward women athletes if she were able to win. The event took on aspects of a publicity spectacle. King was carried to the court on a golden litter by four muscle-bound men. Riggs followed in a rickshaw pulled by Bobby’s Bosom Buddies, six amply endowed women in a grotesque display of misogyny.

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Battle of the Sexes (Tennis) I

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Lead: The 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs may have contributed significantly to the progress of women in sports and other parts of society.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: The 1960s and 1970s were decades of gains for women. The founding of the National Organization for Women, the steadily increasing influx of women into business and the professions, and the passage of Title VII in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title IX in 1972, demonstrated the incremental progress of women in the workforce, domestic life, and sports. Despite this evolution old sentiments die hard. These attitudes were especially strong in the arena of women’s sports. Many felt that women were inferior athletes, unable to compete at the level of their male counterparts.

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Mujeres Libres II

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Lead: During the Spanish Civil War, a women’s liberation movement, Mujeres Libres, free women of Spain, pushed for a far more radical social revolution for women than even their male allies on the left were willing to tolerate.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Even by contemporary standards, the condition of Spanish women in the 1930s was pitiful. Clearly oppressed, women’s wages were half that of men, daughters were handed over to husbands as property, divorce was illegal. Women could not be out at night without a chaperone. Until the War, women’s rights groups focused on minor adjustments such as legalizing divorce, but during the liberating early days of the civil conflict, women’s organizations, allied with anarchist political groups, began to press for serious social change.

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First Ladies: Mamie Doud Eisenhower

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Lead: Through the years of lonely separation and worry that are part of the life of a military spouse, Mamie Geneva Doud Eisenhower never liked it but loved her Kansas farm boy and was there for the long haul.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Dwight Eisenhower was a second lieutenant fresh from West Point when he first laid eyes on Mamie Geneva Doud, daughter of a wealthy Denver family who wintered in San Antonio. She was standing on the porch of the Officer’s Club at Fort Sam Houston when as Officer of the Day he walked by on his rounds. She thought he was the most handsome male she had ever seen; he was struck with her vivacious personality and attractive, saucy looks. They were married in the summer of 1916.

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Belle Huntington (Richest Woman in the World) II

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Lead: Born of humble circumstances in Richmond, Arabella Yarrington Huntington in 1900 was considered by many to be the richest woman in the world.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: After helping to build the first transcontinental railroad, Collis Potter Huntington went south to explore investment opportunities. During his stays at a Richmond, Virginia boardinghouse, he fell in love with the daughter of the owner who also served as barmaid, Arabella. She was thirty years his junior but a vivacious and beautiful woman. She moved to New York, became his mistress, and bore him a son in 1870.

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Belle Huntington (Richest Woman in the World) I

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Lead: One of America's foremost collectors of art as an adult expended great energy concealing her roots. Belle Huntington spent her youth as a barmaid in Shockoe Bottom.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Collis Potter Huntington was one of the founders of the Central Pacific, the West Coast link of the first Transcontinental Railroad. With the completion of that line in 1869, Huntington began to seek other outlets for his restless energy. One logical place to search was the South. Defeated and demoralized, Southerners were anxious to attract capital investment to help rebuild the region in the years following the Civil War. In 1868 Huntington came to Richmond, Virginia seeking to merge three ailing Virginia railroads into an effective southeastern network that could feed into his transcontinental lines. He secured an endorsement for the merger from Robert E. Lee and in 1870 he reorganized the Chesapeake and Ohio with himself as President.

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