At the Rome Olympics, runner Wilma Rudolph becomes the “fastest woman in the world” and the first American woman to win three gold medals at a single Olympics. Rudolph, who was the twentieth of twenty-two children, suffered from polio as a child and was told she would not be able to walk. But with physical therapy, the aid of her family, and strong determination, she becomes an outstanding athlete.
Broadcast journalist Nancy Dickerson Whitehead is named by CBS News as the first woman correspondent to cover the White House.
Women’s roles change dramatically during the 1960s; they are in the mainstream, in roles formerly male-only, as primary economic providers and in positions of public authority. Women constitute 38 percent of the workforce in 1960. They are doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, construction workers, and firefghters, among other professions.
The first birth control pill is approved for sale in the United States.
Mathematician Irmgard Flugge-Lotz becomes the first woman full professor at Stanford University. She had previously been denied a tenure-track position, being relegated to serving only as a lecturer, due to nepotism rules (prohibition on hiring scholars who are related to a current faculty member). She is recognized internationally for her contributions to aerodynamics and automatic theory control.
Writer and urban theorist Jane Jacobs publishes her classic book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which urges a revolutionary rethinking of the ways in which neighborhoods and urban development are conceived.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver helps establish a presidential committee on mental retardation.
In 1956, at the age of forty-four, writer Tillie Olsen publishes Tell Me a Riddle, a collection of short stories, the first of which wins the O. Henry Award.
Activist Esther Peterson influences President John F. Kennedy to establish the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. At that time, she is also head of the federal government’s Women’s Bureau. Her long career of public service spans more than fifty years, during which she is an advocate for women’s rights, labor concerns, and consumer issues such as truth in advertising and food purity.