Famous Women: West Virginian, Asian, & African

Pearl S. Buck

Pearl S. Buck was born in 1892 in Hillsboro, West Virginia, and was an accomplished author. When she was 3 months old, she was taken to China (where her parents were Southern Presbyterian missionaries) and spent most of her life there. Pearl spoke both English and Chinese from childhood. Her family returned to the US during the Boxer Uprising. In 1910, she attended Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Virginia, and in 1917 married a Cornell graduate (John Lossing Buck). They moved to Nanhsuchou in rural Anhwei province, where Pearl gathered much of the material she used in The Good Earth and other stories about China.

Pearl published stories and essays in magazines such as Nation, The Chinese Recorder, Asia, and Atlantic Monthly. Her first novel was East Wind, West Wind. Her book The Good Earth became the best-selling book of both 1931 and 1932 and won the Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal in 1935, and became a major MGM film in 1937. In 1938, Pearl won the Nobel Prize in literature, and was the first American woman to do so. By her death in 1973, she had published over seventy books including novels, collections of stories, biography and autobiography, poetry, drama, children's literature, and translations from the Chinese.

Pearl was also active in the American civil rights and women's rights activities. She wrote essays for Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, and Opportunity, the magazine of the Urban League. She and her husband founded the East and West Association, an organization dedicated to cultural exchange and understanding between Asia and the West. In 1949, Pearl established Welcome House, the first international, inter-racial adoption agency (in outrage to the existing adoption services considering Asian and mixed-race children unadoptable) and the organization has assisted in the placement of over 5000 children. She also established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation in 1964 to provide support for Amerasian children who were not eligible for adoption.

http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/Buck/biography.html

Famous Asian Woman

Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-Shiung was born in 1912 in Liuhe, a small town near Shanghai. At this time, the Western educational system did not exist in China and girls were taught at home. At the encouragement of her father, she was taught by Dr. Hu Shi, who revolutionized the Chinese language to its present form. He recognized Chien-Shiung's talent and told her to enter the National Central University in Nanjing.

She came to the US in 1936 and got her PhD from the University of California, then taught at Smith College and Princeton University before joining Columbia in 1944, where she spent 37 years of her life teaching and doing research. In 1949, Chien-Shiung and her colleagues established Fermi's theory of beta decay. She did so through a series of experiments, correcting previous mistakes and disproving the alternative Konopinski-Uhlenbeck formulation. Her Cobalt-60 experiment was a turning point in the world of physics. It established the violation of parity and charge conjugation symmetry, and also started many tests for other kinds of symmetry violations.

She was the first female instructor in the physics department of Princeton University, the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Princeton University, and the first woman to be elected President of The American Physical Society (1975). Other honors include: member of National Academy of Sciences; Research Corporation Award 1958; Achievement Award, American Association of University Women 1960, Comstock Award, National Academy of Sciences 1964; Chi-Tsin Achievement Award, Chi-Tsin Culture Foundation, Taiwan 1965; Scientist of the Year Award, Industrial Research Magazine 1974; Tom Bonner Prize, American Physical Society 1975; National Medal of Science (U.S.) 1975; Wolf Prize in Physics, Israel 1978; Honorary Fellow Royal Society of Edinburgh; Fellow American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Fellow American Association of the Advancement of Science; and Fellow American Physical Society.

http://www.engr.psu.edu/wep/EngCompSp98/Clee/Index3.html

Famous African Woman

Harriet Tubman

Harriet was born a slave in Maryland who later escaped to freedom and led more than 300 other slaves to the North and to Canada to freedom. She was the well-known conductor of the Underground Railroad, acquainted with many social reformers and abolitionists. She spoke against slavery and for women's rights.

During the Civil War, she served in the U.S. Army as a nurse, scout, spy and soldier. She led the Combahee River expedition to blow up Southern supply lines and free hundreds of slaves. After the war, she helped a biographer publish her life story, spoke for the rights of women and African Americans, helped organize the AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church, and set up a home for indigent aged African Americans.

http://afroamhistory.about.com/library/weekly/aa021901a.htm