Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 15, 1995 TAG: 9510160097
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: SENECA FALLS, N.Y. LENGTH: Medium
Few of the women Ann Bancroft meets each year during her lecture tours share the polar explorer's passion for a wilderness of brutal, cold, unrelieved whiteness.
That's not to say her achievement in becoming the first woman to trek to the North Pole, as part of a mostly male expedition in 1986, and then to the South Pole in 1993, alongside three other women, are lost on them.
``Most of the people I talk to would never want to get cold, to feel what I felt,'' she said, laughing. ``But they do understand struggle, they do understand hardship, what it takes to have that collective strength to overcome the barriers that exist'' for women everywhere.
``There's a real similarity in our stories, even though they are sometimes worlds apart and feel very frightening to each other. And it's really empowering.''
Bancroft was one of 18 women, including Ella Fitzgerald and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who were inducted Saturday into the National Women's Hall of Fame. The ceremony takes place annually in this upstate New York town where the first women's rights convention was held, in 1848.
Only three of the seven living honorees attended: Bancroft, Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., and political scientist Nannerl Keohane, the first female president of Duke University.
Fitzgerald, whose legs were amputated last year because of diabetes, was too ill to travel, and Eileen Collins, the first American woman to pilot a spacecraft, during the shuttle Discovery's mission in February, is due to give birth this month.
O'Connor and Elizabeth Dole, the first female Secretary of Transportation who is now president of the American Red Cross, had other commitments.
Among those honored posthumously were anti-lynching crusader Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, an organizer of black women's organizations, and Mary Baker Eddy, the first American woman to found a worldwide religion - the Church of Christ, Scientist.
Bancroft, 40, said that when corporate America pulled back on sponsoring her all-women's expedition to the South Pole, she had to rely on individual contributions; the venture ended up mired in debt.
Some people had expressed ``this disbelief that, at 5-foot-31/2, I'm going to be able to do what I'm saying I'm going to do,'' she said. And so it goes with many endeavors ``where women have been told that they really don't belong.''
``We're still trying to push some of these boundaries, and that alone has slowed women's progress,'' she said.
Bancroft regards the Women's Hall of Fame as ``a vehicle for showing that the sky is the limit, a way of highlighting what women are doing all over this nation.''
Other women inducted include:
Virginia Apgar (1909-1974), physician who invented a life-saving health assessment test for newborns called the Apgar Scale.
Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894), founded and edited ``The Lily,'' the first newspaper devoted to reform and equality for women.
Mary Breckinridge (1881-1965), nurse-midwife and founder of the Frontier Nursing Service, created to provide health care in rural areas.
Anne Dallas Dudley (1876-1955), key leader in passage of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote.
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), author, feminist, transcendentalist leader and teacher.
Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898), suffrage leader and author.
Lillian Moller Gilbreth (1878-1972), industrial engineer and motion study expert whose ideas improved industry and the home.
Maggie Kuhn (1905-1995), founder of the Gray Panthers.
Hannah Greenebaum Solomon (1858-1942), founder of the National Council of Jewish Women.
Memo: NOTE: Shorter version ran in Metro edition.