In covering Kansas Day activities at a local school, a teacher told The Mercury her students hadn’t been able to find many famous Kansas women. We thought we’d help out with that, sharing with readers — and future students — some of the amazing women in the history of the Sunflower State.
These women have Oscars, Pulitzers, Grammy’s and Olympic gold medals. We’ve counted people who lived in Kansas, not strictly those born here.
We bet you’ll see some you already knew and some you didn’t!
Erin Brockovich
After a bad traffic accident in Reno, Nevada, Erin Brockovich began working as a file clerk for the law firm that had represented her, Masry & Vititoe. It was here that Brockovich stumbled upon medical records that would lead to the largest direct action lawsuit in U.S. history.
Brockovich was working on a pro bono real estate case when she discovered that the Pacific Gas & Electric company had been contaminating the water of Hinkley, California, for years, through the leaking of hexavalent chromium into the ground water. Pacific Gas & Electric were forced to pay $333 million in damages to Hinkley residents.
The 2000 movie “Erin Brockovich,” starring Julia Roberts, told a dramatic version of the case.
Brockovich became an activist working to help people harmed by environmental pollution. She is now the president of Brockovich Research and Consulting Firm. Brockovich has received many awards for her efforts including the Consumer Advocate of the Year awarded by Consumer Attorneys of California and the Julius B. Richmond Award from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Poet Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka. Her family moved to Chicago when she was young, and her parents supported her love of reading and writing.
She began publishing poems as a teenager.
Brooks attended junior college and worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She developed her craft in poetry workshops and began writing poems, focusing on urban Black experience, which made up her first collection, “A Street in Bronzeville.”
Her work was recognized nationally after its publication.
In 1950, Brooks became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize, for her book “Annie Allen.”
Langston Hughes, in a review of Annie Allen for Voices, remarked that “the people and poems in Gwendolyn Brooks’ book are alive, reaching, and very much of today.”
Brooks wrote many other books, including a novel, “Maud Martha” and “Report from Part One: An Autobiography.”
In 1968 she was named poet laureate for the state of Illinois. In 1985, she was the first black woman appointed as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a post now known as Poet Laureate. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Amelia Earhart
Here’s a name most everyone will recognize: Amelia Earhart set many records and became the first woman to fly over the Atlantic Ocean. Born in Atchison, she was just the 16th woman to obtain a pilot’s license.
As a child, Earhart loved to climb trees, hunt and use her imagination. One report says she built a rollercoaster on her roof.
In 1920, she took a plane ride at an airshow, and it changed the course of her life. She saved up for flying lessons, which she began in 1921. In 1922, Earhart flew to an altitude of 14,000 feet, setting a world record for female pilots.
Earhart became famous for being the first female passenger to fly across the Atlantic in 1928. In 1932 she became the first woman to make a solo, nonstop transatlantic flight. For that, she received the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross.
Earhart became a visiting faculty member at Purdue University as an adviser for aeronautical engineering. She also was an early supporter of women’s rights.
During an attempt at becoming the first woman to complete a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island. They were never found. She was declared dead in 1939.
Melissa Etheridge
Leavenworth native Melissa Etheridge became one of the biggest names in music in the 1990s.
She was born May 29, 1961, and attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston. She dropped out after a year to move to Los Angeles and work as a musician.
Etheridge got her break in 1986 when Island Records signed her to sing for movie soundtracks. Although she produced several albums, it was not until her third and fourth albums that Etheridge reached musical stardom.
She won a Grammy for best female rock vocal performance in 1992 and 1994 for her hits “Ain’t It Heavy” and “Come to My Window.” She was nominated for several other Grammys, as well.
In 2011 Etheridge produced her 11th album, Fearless Love.
Minnie Evans
Born in 1888 in Mayetta as Ke-waht-no-quah Wish-Ken-O, Minnie Evans was tribal chair of the Prairie Band of Potawatomi Nation when she successfully defeated termination of her tribe and filed for reparations with the Indian Claims Commission.
Evans attended Haskell Institute (now called Haskell Indian Nations University) in Lawrence, where she learned to speak English and write.
The U.S. government for many years had been trying to diminish and divide American Indian tribes. In 1887 Congress passed the Dawes Act, dividing tribal land into individual plots for the head of each Native family. The explicit goal was dividing American Indian tribes and getting Native people to farm and ranch like white settlers. Tribal lands not allotted would be sold to the U.S. government.
By the turn of the century, the Potawatomi’s tribal council was defunct and had stopped regular meetings.
Evans pushed for preserving tribal traditions and got involved with people seeking to reinstate tribal leadership. She became an appointed adviser in 1933 and then was elected to a lifetime position on the board of conciliators. In 1947 she became tribal chairwoman.
The U.S. government continued efforts to reduce or eliminate tribal sovereignty from the 1940s to 1960s.
Evans hired a law firm, which filed 19 cases for treaty breaches and under-valuation of lands.
In 1953 Congress passed a resolution calling for the termination of the Potawatomi and other tribes. Evans spearheaded the battle against termination, calling meetings and raising funds to send tribal leaders to congressional meetings in Washington, D.C. She herself went and testified before a joint committee on Indian Affairs.
The tribe successfully defeated the termination effort and won reparations related to several treaties under Evans’ leadership.
Hattie McDaniel
A singer, songwriter and actress, McDaniel became the first Black woman to win (and be nominated for) an Oscar. The Wichita native won Best Actress in a supporting role for playing Mammy in “Gone with the Wind” in 1939.
She has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame in 1975. In 2006 she was honored with a U.S. postage stamp.
McDaniel appeared in more than 300 films but was only credited for 83. She recorded 18 blues records and also worked as a radio and TV personality. Notably, she was the first black woman to sing on the radio in the United States.
Born in Wichita in 1893, she was the youngest of 13 kids. Her parents were formerly enslaved people. Her mother was a gospel singer, and her father fought in the Civil War with what the military called United States Colored Troops.
McDaniel encountered a lot of racism during the era of racial segregation. Notably, she wasn’t allowed to attend the premiere of “Gone with the Wind” in Atlanta, because it was held at a whites-only theater. At the Oscars ceremony, she sat at a segregated table.
Carry Nation
She might be considered more infamous than famous to some, but Carry Nation is an interesting and important Kansas figure.
Nation was born in Kentucky in 1846 and saw her first husband suffer and eventually die from alcohol addiction. In 1890 she joined the temperance movement after a U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of the importation and sale of liquor in “original packages” from other states weakened the prohibition laws of Kansas, where she lived.
Nation first tried to protest the operation of bars by writing letters, organizing marches and speaking to lawmakers, but she discovered that didn’t get her very far.
She decided that the illegality of saloons meant that someone could destroy them with impunity — or at least that when police came to stop her, they would be forced to address illegal alcohol sales also taking place.
Nation brought Wichita national attention when she destroyed the Eaton hotel bar with a hatchet in 1900. The bar was Wichita’s fanciest and most prominent at the time.
She was jailed many times and paid her fines with lecture fees and the sale of souvenir hatchets.
Nation was seen as a religious zealot and a bit of a nut, and not without reason. But we can see she was also a person with few rights at the time and no remaining options. She saw liquor sales as predatory and found that many officials she approached were involved in the corruption.
Nation’s “hatchetation” period was actually relatively short.
She also was an advocate of women’s suffrage, and she protested what she saw as other improprieties, such as tobacco, pornography and corsets.
Nation died June 9, 1911, in Leavenworth. Her own chosen epitaph reads, “she hath done what she could.”
Her home in Medicine Lodge is a National Historic Landmark.
Clementine Paddleford
She’s not as well known now, but Clementine Paddleford was sort of the Anthony Bourdain of her day.
The New York Times called her the Nellie Bly of culinary journalism.
“At a time when few people in Philadelphia knew what enchiladas were and few in Chicago knew what cioppino was, Ms. Paddleford described them both in loving detail,” the Times story said.
Born on a farm near Stockdale, Paddleford graduated from Manhattan High School and then earned a degree in industrial journalism from Kansas State Agricultural College (now Kansas State University) in 1921.
She moved to New York City, where she enrolled in the Columbia School of Journalism and attended night classes at New York University.
After a series of writing jobs, Paddleford joined the New York Herald Tribune in 1936, and she traveled more than 50,000 miles a year to share regional food stories with the nation in a regular column. She also wrote for the syndicated Sunday magazine supplement This Week and for Gourmet magazine, all of which made her a household name.
Her book “How America Eats,” published in 1960, was well ahead of its time.
Paddleford was a pilot, and flew a Piper Cub around the country for her assignments. She reportedly coined the term “hero” relating to a submarine sandwich in the 1930s, writing that one needed to be a hero to finish the gigantic Italian sandwich.
In 2008, Kelly Alexander and Cynthia Harris wrote a book about Paddleford, “Hometown Appetities,” mostly from Paddleford’s papers, which she left to K-State.
Lucinda Todd
Born in Topeka, Lucinda Todd was a pioneer in quality education for Kansas students and a champion for increased educational opportunities for Black students.
Todd was a teacher from 1928 until 1935 when she was forced to give up her career after marriage. (Married women were not allowed to teach at the time.)
She then turned her focus to advocacy, volunteering with the Topeka chapter of the NAACP. As her daughter entered grade school, Lucinda realized that music was not taught at the Black schools in Topeka. When pressed about the issue, the school board told Todd that “colored children weren’t interested in learning music and could not afford instruments.” Todd spoke out about the policy, and the district included music in Black schools the next year.
Todd became more outspoken about the conditions of the schools for Black children in Topeka. In August 1950, Lucinda made a request to the national NAACP requesting legal support to “test the permissible law which we have here in Kansas.”
After reviewing the request, the NAACP legal team and several Topeka attorneys outlined strategies that would push for desegregation in Topeka schools. The decision to proceed with the lawsuit was made around the Todd family’s dining room table, an artifact now preserved at the Smithsonian. Lucinda Todd, and 13 other Black parents, became the petitioners in the class action suit to end segregation in the Topeka school district, Brown v. Board of Education.
The landmark case effectively ended racial segregation in American schools.
(Note: That case is named for Oliver Brown, the father of Linda Brown Thompson, one of the students, who later became a prominent activist herself.)
Susanna Salter
Susanna Salter became the first female elected mayor in the United States.
Soon after women gained the right to vote in municipal elections, a group of men who opposed women in politics placed Salter’s name on the 1887 ballot for the mayor of Argonia as a joke.
Their goal was to secure a loss that would discourage other local women from participating in the future. Susanna didn’t even know about the nomination, as candidates did not have to be made public before election day at that time, but she accepted the nomination and agreed to hold the office if elected. The prank backfired and Salter received a two-thirds majority win, thanks in part to the local Women’s Christian Temperance Union, whose members voted for Salter.
While her term was largely uneventful, her success as a mayor brought international interest from the press. One journalist from the New York Sun reported that Salter presided with “great decorum” and demonstrated her parliamentary prowess by checking irrelevant discussion by council members. The Salter House Museum in Argonia was established in her honor. The site has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1971.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Born Feb. 7, 1867, near Pepin, Wisconsin, Laura Ingalls Wilder was inspired to write stories about her family’s life on the frontier, which included living in a cabin in southeast Kansas. Her stories became the popular “Little House” book series.
At first the Ingalls family lived in a log cabin in the “big woods” of Wisconsin and then briefly in Chariton County, Missouri, in 1868.
The Ingalls family in 1869 moved to Montgomery County, Kansas.
Wilder would write about the cold weather the family experienced that winter. The Ingalls’ cabin was on the 4.8 million acre-tract called Osage Diminished Reserve, which was not open to white settlement. Tensions between the Osages and settlers were strained at that time. The Ingalls family decided to leave their cabin in spring 1871 and return to Wisconsin.
The Ingalls lived in Wisconsin until 1874, when Laura was 7, and they moved near Plum Creek in Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and lived in a few other places in her life. Laura became a school teacher just before her 16th birthday.
“Little House on the Prairie,” published in 1935, was about the family’s experience in Kansas. The setting for the book is about 15 miles southwest of Independence.
The Little House on the Prairie Museum in Independence has preserved her family’s homestead there. Wilder also published several other books.
A network TV series, “Little House on the Prairie,” aired for 10 years and brought more fans to the Little House books.
Lynette Woodard
Professional basketball player and Olympic gold medalist Lynette Woodard was the first woman in history to play for the Harlem Globetrotters.
Woodard was born Aug. 12, 1959, in Wichita.
She started playing basketball as a child, and in her sophomore year at Wichita North High School, she led her team to win the 5A state championship in 1975.
Woodard began playing for the University of Kansas in 1977. The Jayhawks won three straight Big Eight Championships during Woodard’s time there, and Woodard scored a total of 3,649 points in four years.
Woodard led the U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team to victory and to a gold medal in 1984.
In 1985 Woodard was signed as the first woman on the world famous Harlem Globetrotters. She played as a Globetrotter for two years before competing professionally on Japanese and Italian teams. In 1990 she was inducted into the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame. The Cleveland Rockers signed her in 1997 to play in the new Women’s National Basketball Association.
Woodard served as the first athletics director for the Kansas City, Missouri, school district and as vice president of marketing for Magna Securities Corporation in New York City. She also has worked as a special assistant in the KU athletics department. She currently works as a financial consultant in her hometown of Wichita.