Sally Ride - Role Model in Science and Pioneer Who Inspired
Generations of Women (3 articles)

* Amelia Earhart and Sally Ride: pioneers who inspired
  generations of women (Ruth Spencer in the Guardian)
* Let's Not Make Sally Ride a Gay Icon (Clare Malone in The
  American Prospect)
* Sally Ride, first US woman in space, dies at 61 (Seth 
  Borenstein and Alicia Chang in the Boston Globe)

===

Amelia Earhart and Sally Ride: pioneers who inspired
generations of women

Their flights gave millions something to look up to, including
these modern adventurers. Who are the women you look up to?

by Ruth Spencer

Guardian (UK)
July 24, 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/24/amelia-earhart-sally-ride-pioneers

Two legendary female explorers are in the news this week:
Sally Ride and Amelia Earhart. Ride, the first American woman
in space, died on Monday following a 17-month battle with
pancreatic cancer, while the $2.2m investigation into the
disappearance of Amelia Earhart stopped short Tuesday, on what
would have been Earhart's 115th birthday, due to the
challenges of exploring a steep, underwater coral cliff.

Female pioneers like Earhart and Ride have a powerful hold on
our imaginations. They're icons of courage and perseverance.
They're role models for young people, especially women.

Earhart and Ride are part of a tradition of women who
discovered parts of the world that no man (or woman) had gone
before, including Alison Hargreaves, who climbed Everest
without oxygen (and several other mountains while heavily
pregnant); Helen Thayer, who lived for a year with a wolf pack
in the Arctic Circle; and Nellie Bly, who took a record-
breaking trip around the world 72 days and wrote a ground
breaking exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental
institution from the inside. Their achievements are
celebrated, rightly recorded and commemorated - albeit
difficult to find. As they say, history was written by a man,
and the accomplishments of many women are often looked over.

Today's challenge, then, is to look forward and find the women
who continue to push the boundaries of knowledge. We've
started the list with five but we need your help. Who have we
missed? Help us build up this list and make your own
recommendations in the thread below

Kira Salak

Kira is the first woman to traverse Papua New Guinea and the
first person to kayak 600 miles down Africa's Niger River to
Timbuktu. According to National Geographic Kira Salak is "the
gutsiest - and some say craziest - woman adventurer of our
day."

Nalini Nadkarni

Using what she calls her "master caster" Nadkarni flings ropes
high into the incredibly diverse world of treetops in tropical
forests to study what she calls "last biotic frontier". She
spends most of her time in the Monteverde Cloud Forest in
Costa Rica where global warming is threatening to bring many
species into extinction

Louise and Meave Leakey

The Leakey lineage is legendary. Louis and Mary Leakey's
discoveries proved that Africa was the birthplace of human
kind. Meave Leakey is one of the world's leading
paleoanthropologist ,and Louise Leakey is following in her
family's footsteps as a "bone hunter".

Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner

Kaltenbrunner set herself a goal at a very young age: to climb
every Himalayan mountain over 8,000 meters high. One after
another this trained nurse scaled such legendary peaks as
Everest and K2 until she became the first woman to summit all
14 of them without relying on supplemental oxygen.

Reader additions:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/24/amelia-earhart-sally-ride-pioneers

==========

Let's Not Make Sally Ride a Gay Icon

Let's remember her for what she cared about most--women in the
sciences.

by Clare Malone

The American Prospect
July 24, 2012

http://prospect.org/article/lets-not-make-sally-ride-gay-icon

A single line in Sally Ride's obituary has caused a lot of
fuss over the last day - the fact that she spent the last 27
years of her life with another woman. It's a bit of a shame
that the buzz of the public revelation has taken away from
what it seems Dr. Ride would have preferred her legacy to be:
pushing young women into careers in math and science.

It doesn't appear that Ride's sexuality was a secret to those
who knew her, just to the rest of us, the ones who knew her
only as the trim woman in a NASA jumpsuit, sporting a soft
halo of '80s hair. That's exactly what she was to me as a
little girl, a name and a picture in a history book: the first
American woman in space. Firm evidence that we had been there,
done that. Ride embraced that legacy, starting a company later
in life that provided materials to make the teaching of
science more accessible to young students.

She also spoke out about the problem of peer pressure and
norms of socialization that led girls away from studying math
and science at a young age. In a 2003 interview in The New
York Times, Ride said, "It's no secret that I've been
reluctant to use my name for things. I haven't written my
memoirs or let the television movie be made about my life. But
this is something I'm very willing to put my name behind."

Ride's obituary is a litany of accomplishments - two PhDs,
being accepted into NASA on a virtual cold call, a
professional- level ability in tennis (at least according to
Billie Jean King, no slouch herself). Hers was a life of
professional excellence, and her resume attracted national
attention, but she remained a private person. It doesn't seem
as though Ride was ashamed of being gay, she just seemed not
to think that it mattered all that much. One has to imagine
that she probably expected all kinds of irritating hoopla over
the matter, and didn't want to talk about her personal life
when she had so many other things to say and issues of her own
choosing about which to advocate.

That she was gay seems that it should be an incidental portion
of her legacy, and I have to think that we should try to honor
her in death as she was in life: a damn smart lady who, in
private, was in love with a woman. What Ride said in 1984,
talking about her historic flight, probably sums it up best:
"It's too bad this is such a big deal. It's too bad our
society isn't further along."

[Clare Malone is the editorial assistant at The American
Prospect.]

==========

Sally Ride, first US woman in space, dies at 61

By Seth Borenstein and Alicia Chang
AP Science Writers 

Boston Globe
July 23, 2012 

http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2012/07/23/sally_ride_first_us_woman_in_space_dies_at_61/

LOS ANGELES - Space used to be a man's world. Then came Sally
Ride, who blazed a cosmic trail into orbit for U.S. women.
With a pitch perfect name out of a pop song refrain, she
joined the select club of American space heroes the public
knew by heart: Shepard, Glenn, Armstrong and Aldrin.

Ride, the first American woman in orbit, died Monday at her
home in the San Diego community of La Jolla at age 61 of
pancreatic cancer, according to her company, Sally Ride
Science.

Ride flew into space on the space shuttle Challenger on June
18, 1983, when she was 32. Since then, 42 other American women
followed her into space.

"Sally was a national hero and a powerful role model. She
inspired generations of young girls to reach for the stars,"
President Barack Obama said in a statement.

When shuttles started flying frequently with crews of six or
seven, astronauts became plentiful and anonymous. Not Ride.

"People around the world still recognize her name as the first
American woman in space, and she took that title seriously
even after departing NASA," Eileen Collins, the first female
space shuttle commander, said in a statement. "She never
sought media attention for herself, but rather focused on
doing her normally outstanding job."

When Ride first launched into space, feminist icons such as
Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda were at Kennedy Space Center and
many wore T-shirts alluding to the pop song with the refrain
of the same name: "Ride, Sally Ride."

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, a former astronaut, said
Ride "broke barriers with grace and professionalism -- and
literally changed the face of America's space program."

...Ride was a physicist, writer of five science books for
children and president of her own company, which motivates
youngsters to pursue careers in science, technology,
engineering and math. She had also been a professor of physics
at the University of California, San Diego...

One of Ride's last legacies was allowing middle school
students to take their own pictures of the moon using cameras
aboard NASA's twin Grail spacecraft in a project spearheaded
by her company.

Read more:
http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2012/07/23/sally_r
ide_first_us_woman_in_space_dies_at_61/

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