Dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, and writer Katherine Dunham is a Kennedy Center honoree. She takes dance in new directions by combining modern and ballet techniques.
Esther Dyson is the chair of EDventure Holdings, a company focusing on information technology worldwide. Dyson is well respected for her insights into industry trends. She writes frequent articles on emerging digital technology and insightful analyses of such issues as the impact of the Internet on the U.S. education system.
Connie Chung is the first Asian American to anchor a national newscast at a major network. She says: “I don’t know what all of us can do to continue to press for more women, more minorities, but it’s just something that we all have to work on.”
Broadcast journalist Lesley Stahl begins hosting the television news program Face the Nation.
Elizabeth Hanford Dole is appointed Secretary of Transportation; she later serves in a second administration as Secretary of Labor. After heading the Red Cross, she is elected to the Senate. On her career aspirations, Dole says: “Women share with men the need for personal success, even the taste for power, and no longer are we willing to satisfy those needs through the achievements of surrogates, whether husbands, children or merely role models.”
In 1983, photographer Marion Ettlinger refocuses her career to concentrate on taking pictures of book authors, a very specialized niche. Ettlinger’s work appears in more than six hundred books. In 2003, she collects two hundred portraits of contemporary writers for a coffee table book, Author Photo.
Geneticist Barbara McClintock is the first woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for her discovery of the ability of genes to change positions on the chromosome (jumping genes).
Sally Ride is in the first group of American women astronauts; she is the first American woman to orbit the earth while aboard the space shuttle Challenger.