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Helen Keller, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara McClintock on Connecticut list of influential women

Connecticut became the 37th state to ratify the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote. Here are 10 females considered Women of the Century.

Katie Landeck
Gannett New England
Connecticut's Women of the Century

Connecticut native Helena Hill celebrated Independence Day 1917 by holding a sign outside the White House lawn emblazoned with the slogan "Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

By the end of the day, she would be in a jail cell, one of the first women jailed after protesting for women’s suffrage.

Hill is just one of a long line of Connecticut-based suffragettes, who spent decades fighting for women’s right to vote both locally, with meetings in New London and rallies in Hartford and Simsbury, and nationally, with direct telegrams to then-President Woodrow Wilson. Their fight paid off on Aug. 18, 1920, when Connecticut became the 37th state to ratify the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote.

The USA TODAY Network is naming 10 American women from all 50 states and the District of Columbia who have made significant contributions to their respective states and country as Women of the Century. You’ll find Connecticut's list below, but first, let’s talk about how we got there.

The women were expected to have a track record showing outstanding achievement in the areas of arts and literature; business; civil rights; education; entertainment; law; media; nonprofits and philanthropy; politics, science and medicine; and sports. They also had to have lived between 1920 and 2020.

The criteria knocked out some of Connecticut's most famous women, such as state heroine Prudence Crandall, who set up the first school for Black women, and famed author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who are certainly worthy of accolades but lived before the time period included.

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And because of the national scope of the project, some women like Marian Anderson, whose Easter opera performance in Washington, D.C., was a key moment of the civil rights movement, were claimed by other states even though they had Connecticut ties.

But even with the criteria to narrow the scope, there were still many accomplished women to consider, and 10 is such a finite number.

Clearly distilling this list down wasn’t an easy task. It involved many emails, a long discussion, two rounds of voting and still, after all that, difficult decisions had to be made. A lot of thought was given to diversity, whom readers had submitted and the impact people had extending beyond the state’s borders. Some, like Marilynn Malerba, the first female chief in the Mohegan tribe’s modern history, and Beatrice Fox Auerbach, former president of the department store G. Fox & Co., who changed what business as usual means, made the top 15 but missed the final 10 by one or two votes. But ultimately, we believe we put together a list that Connecticut residents, both women and men, can be proud of.

Who is your Woman of the Century? Did we miss a woman you think should be on our list? We’d like to hear from you.

Ella Grasso

First woman in the nation to be elected governor in her own right

(1919-1981)

Born in Windsor Locks to two Italian immigrants, Ella Grasso went on to wrack up a lot of firsts – first woman elected floor leader in the Connecticut General Assembly, first woman to chair the Democratic State Platform Committee and, most notably, first woman in the nation to be elected governor in her own right.

A pioneer for women in politics starting when she was first elected to the Connecticut General Assembly in 1952, Grasso never lost an election. She promised a government that would be responsive to the people, turning her office into the “people’s lobby” for citizens to come with concerns. One of the most notable moments of her time as governor was during the Blizzard of 1978, when she stayed at the State Armory to be available 24/7 to direct emergency operations and make regular television appearances to keep the public informed.

She won reelection in 1978 but had to resign in December 1980 after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She died Feb. 5, 1981, in Hartford.

Helen Keller

Advocate for the blind and deaf

(1880-1968)

An example of courage and tenacity in the face of overwhelming odds, Helen Keller’s story is one of the most frequently told.

After a childhood illness left her blind and deaf, Keller defied the odds to learn how to speak, a challenge that at one time was considered insurmountable. Her voice became one of the most powerful of her time, as an advocate for rights for people with disabilities, as a suffragette and as an outspoken critic of World War I. She was one of the founding members of the ACLU.

She was the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Harvard and was named one of the most influential people of the 20th century by Time magazine.

Constance Baker Motley

First African American woman to become a federal judge

(1921-2005)

Growing up in New Haven, Connecticut, in the 1920s, Constance Baker Motley first became aware of the disparity people of color faced in her Sunday school readings. In high school, the daughter of West Indian immigrants became president for the New Haven’s NAACP youth council and secretary of the New Haven Adult Community Council.

She would go on to become one of the principal trial attorneys for the NAACP, playing a role in all of the major school desegregation cases, including working on the brief in Brown v. Board of Education. She argued 10 civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, winning nine outright; the the 10th was overturned in her favor. Her work would later result in her becoming the first African American woman to become a federal judge.

“As the first Black and first woman, I am proving in everything I do that Blacks and women are as capable as anyone,” she said.

Barbara McClintock

Scientist and cytogeneticist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

(1902-1992)

When you think of what we know about genetics, likely you think about a high school biology class and Mendel’s pea experiment, but just as important to our understanding of how genes work is Barbara McClintock’s corn.

Born in Hartford, McClintock is the only woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine unshared. But her path to getting there wasn’t an easy one, as many struggled in the 1950s to believe a woman was capable of such work. In 1953, she stopped publishing her work because despite two decades of work on genetics that had resulted in numerous awards, she was experiencing heated backlash on her latest theory on mobile genetic elements.

That same theory would ultimately pave the way for modern genetics and our understanding of how genes turn themselves on and off. Notable achievements include first woman to become president of the Genetics Society of America, winner of the National Medal of Science in 1971 and first recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant in 1981.

Margaret Morton

First African American woman elected to the state House and Senate

(1924-2012)

When a reporter asked Margaret Morton how her career in politics started, she talked about a fight for a stop sign. Her family was living in Father Panik Village, a housing project in Bridgeport, and the city refused to install a stop sign as an intersection where numerous traffic accidents had occurred. In response, the neighborhood residents – all Black – formed a political club, she told the Hartford Courant, and ran for every open political office.

She ran for state representative, and in 1972 she won, becoming the first African American woman to serve in the Connecticut General Assembly. In 1980, she challenged the party by running against the incumbent state senator and becoming the first African-American woman elected to the Connecticut State Senate. She became influential as the deputy president pro tempore until she retired in 1992.

In the General Assembly, Morton fought for the rights of the "ignored," including women, welfare recipients, tenants and the LGBTQ community. She sponsored a bill to outlaw discrimination against people with AIDS, which was personal for her: Her eldest son, Gerald, had died of AIDS.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon

Mohegan medicine woman, anthropologist

(1899-2005)

Credited with the preservation of the Mohegan tribal language and customs in Connecticut, at the time of her death in 2005, Gov. M. Jodi Rell said “(Gladys) Tantaquidgeon shared 106 years with Connecticut and its people, and all of us are the richer for it.”

Growing up steeped in the Mohegan tribe, she studied anthropology in college and was tapped by the U.S. government in 1934 to work with tribes in the West, where she became known as an expert in the restoration of cultural practices and preservation. This included helping to revive cultural practices, such as the Sundance and the Rain Dance, that had been prohibited, as well as working to reduce poverty on the reservations by helping the tribes to sell their art.

In Connecticut, she founded the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum, based on the belief “you can’t hate someone you know a lot about.”

Her personal records about Mohegan births, graduations, marriages and deaths were crucial to the Mohegan tribe’s case for recognition by the federal government in 1994. The museum she started still operates today.

Maria Colón Sanchez

First Latina elected to the Connecticut General Assembly

(1926-1989)

Maria Colón Sánchez brought Puerto Rican culture and history to the forefront in Hartford, after immigrating to Connecticut at age 28 with the equivalent of an eighth-grade education.

After working in the tobacco fields, she saved enough to open her own storefront, “Maria’s News Stand,” that became an important rallying point for the underserved Puerto Rican community. When the Comanchero riot erupted in 1969, Sanchez was a leader in quelling the rioting and making sure the voices of her neighbors were heard.

In 1988, she became the first Latina elected to the General Assembly. Known for her work advocating for bilingual education, she led the charge for children with limited proficiency in English to be taught in their native language, pushing people past fears that this would encourage “complacency” in immigrant communities.

She’s still remembered as “La Madrina,” which translates to “the Godmother.”

Estelle Griswold

Executive director of Connecticut Planned Parenthood

(1900-1981)

After traveling the world working on humanitarian aid efforts, Estelle Griswold ultimately moved back to her home state of Connecticut to join and later become the executive director of Planned Parenthood.

At the time, no woman – married or unmarried – was able to purchase contraceptives in the state of Connecticut or ask a pharmacist how to avoid an unplanned pregnancy. In response, under Griswold’s direction, Planned Parenthood started “border runs” to bring women to Rhode Island and New York where they could access family planning resources.

While the Connecticut courts had refused to take up a challenge to the contraceptive laws in place, Griswold forced the issue by opening a clinic that dispensed contraceptives. Only a few days after it opened, authorities, predictably, shut it down. The resulting legal challenges overturned the law, established a new constitutional right to privacy and paved the way for Roe vs. Wade.

Isabelle M. Kelley

Developed and directed the federal food assistance and nutrition programs

(1917-1997)

During her 33 years with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Isabelle M. Kelley became the architect of some of the department’s most enduring programs, including the National School Lunch Program and Food Stamps Act of 1964.

Taking a job with the USDA in 1940, she took an immediate interest in helping feed needy children and families. At the time, there was no federal system in place for getting food to families in need, who instead had to rely on donation programs, handouts and bread lines.

Her first big program was the Penny Milk program, which gave children a half-pint of milk for just a penny. Building on that, she created the national school lunch program and is credited with being one of the first to make the connection between nutrition and optimal learning.

When President John F. Kennedy wanted to establish the food stamp program, Kelley was one of four people appointed to the task force. When she was named first director of the Food Stamps Division of the USDA, she became the first woman to direct a national action program at the agency.

Katharine Hepburn

Oscar-winning actress

(1907-2003)

With four Oscars to her name and another eight nominations, Katharine Hepburn was one of the most accomplished actresses of the 20th century.

But a large part of what made her so notable wasn’t her screen presence but ceilings she broke through.

To put it in perspective, in the 1930s, women could still be arrested for wearing pants in public, and Hepburn’s preference for them – as well as a habit of not wearing makeup – was one of the things for which she was most well known.

She was also playing strong women on screen, bringing a strength to her characters that audiences weren’t accustomed to seeing from women. She had early success on Broadway and then in movies, followed by a period where audiences seemed to turn on her and she became known as “box office poison.” She returned to Broadway where she made a stunning return in “The Philadelphia Story” and then went on to have decades of success in the film industry, becoming known as the First Lady of Cinema.

Sources used in the Women of the Century list project include newspaper articles, state archives, historical websites, encyclopedias and other resources.

FIND THE WOMEN OF THE CENTURY NATIONAL PROJECT HERE.

Ella Grasso