by Jill Tietjen | Oct 7, 2011 | Articles
Saturday we told you about the 23rd National Women’s Hall of Fame Induction ceremony held in Seneca Falls. Four of the eleven women inducted this year were nominated by one person. As YNN’s Erin Clarke tells us, Jill Tietjen makes it her mission to highlight the accomplishments of truly great women.
SENECA FALLS, N.Y. — Jill Tietjen said her mission is to tell the stories of great women. Her book titled ‘Her Story: A Timeline of the Women who Changed America’ chronicles the often unrecognized contributions of American women since the 1500s. Some of those women are now inductees in the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls.
“The women that I’ve learned about, I didn’t know about them. If I don’t know about them, no one else knows about them,” said Tietjen.
Tietjen is the Hall of Fame’s most successful nominator. She nominated twenty-one of the 247 inductees. Four of the 11 who entered the Hall of Fame Saturday were her picks.
‘They are St. Katharine Drexel, Dorothy Eustis, Billie Holiday, and Donna Shalala,” said Tietjen.
Tietjen, an electrical engineer by trade, started nominating scientific and technical women for the hall in the early 90s. While researching for her book, she came across women in other fields and branched out. Now Tietjen’s reputation as a successful nominator precedes her and people even bring her women to nominate.
“I got two names tonight, already of women to nominate in the next cycle,” said Tietjen.
Tietjen said she does this because these women inspire. When she was a girl, no one encouraged her to be an engineer and she thinks young women today should know that they can do anything.
“It’s very important for us to know about the accomplishments of these women, to celebrate them and then to have them as role models,” said Tietjen.
She plans to continue making nomination for the Hall of Fame in hopes of writing women back into history.
Seneca Falls is considered the birthplace of the American women’s Rights Movement. In 1848 it was the site of the first Women’s Rights Convention.
by Jill Tietjen | Oct 7, 2011 | Articles
Already canonized by the Roman Catholic Church, St. Katharine Drexel will be singled out Saturday for a more down-to-earth honor: induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, N.Y.
The Philadelphia-born nun, a leader in philanthropy and racial activism from the late 19th century until her death in 1955, will be added to the roll of nearly 250 women who have “made a significant national impact,” executive director Christine M. Moulton said.
St. Katharine was not, however, nominated by the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Or by the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, the order she founded in 1891. Or by a hometown admirer. Or even by a Catholic.
The saint’s nomination came from a 56-year-old Jewish electrical engineer and author in Denver who is the country’s most prolific submitter of names to the Women’s Hall of Fame. Counting her four successful candidates this year, Jill Tietjen is responsible for 21 of the hall’s 247 inductees.
Founded in 1969, the hall dovetails with Tietjen’s mission to raise the profile of women who have made important contributions to American life, “almost none of whom we learn about in school,” she said.
Tietjen, who cowrote Her Story: A Timeline of the Women Who Changed America, said she learned about St. Katharine on a 1995 trip to Santa Fe, N.M., where the nun was active in relief work among American Indians.
Since then, Tietjen said, “she was always on my mind.”
Tietjen added that she particularly admired Sister Katharine’s gumption in asking Pope Leo XIII to provide better educational opportunities to American Indians. He turned the question back at her and asked her what she was doing, inspiring her educational work. In addition to funding more than 60 missions and schools for Indians and African Americans, she founded the nation’s only historically black Catholic university, Xavier University in New Orleans.
Sister Patricia Suchalski, president of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, said she was surprised when the call came from the hall that St. Katharine was be to honored.
“We had absolutely nothing to do with that,” she said.
Nonetheless, she will lead a pilgrimage from the order’s shrine in Bensalem to Upstate New York for the ceremony Saturday – coincidentally, the 11th anniversary of her canonization by Pope John Paul II.
Each year, a panel of judges selects the new inductees. There are 11 for 2011. In addition to St. Katharine, Tietjen scored with nominations for the jazz singer Billie Holiday, also a Philadelphia native; Dorothy Harrison Eustis, founder of the nation’s first guide dog training school; and Donna E. Shalala, former secretary of health and human services and current president of the University of Miami.
by Jill Tietjen | Oct 1, 2011 | In The News, Kalon Women Magazine
Women diagnosed with breast cancer today have many options for treatment and the ability to have a female doctor 
to handle her care. In this month’s column, we feature pioneering women doctors and women who followed in the footsteps of those pioneers.
For full article click here.
by Jill Tietjen | Oct 1, 2011 | In The News, Newsletters
On October 1, 2011, the National Women’s Hall of Fame inducted eleven women in the Hall at its home in downtown Seneca Falls, New York – the “Birthplace of Women’s Rights”. Each year the Hall inducts both historical women and present day women who are role models who have made, or continue to make a difference in all of our lives.
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