March is Women’s History Month, and Labor Solutions would like to take a moment to highlight the achievements of some outstanding women. We could never do justice to the entirety of women’s contributions to history in one blog post, so we’re going to focus on women from Florida.
Florida Women Who Made History
Florida has been home to many noteworthy women over the years, and Labor Solutions would like to honor a few of them.
- Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998) was a fervent defender of the Everglades and in 1947 published Everglades: River of Grass, a book that was instrumental in changing the public’s perception of the area from useless swampland to valuable ecosystem. Without her tireless advocacy, we may not have the Everglades National Park today.
- Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) was the daughter of former slaves. As a child, she picked hundreds of pounds of cotton a day, but also graduated from the Scotia Seminary boarding school in 1894. Bethune placed great emphasis on the value of education and founded the Daytona Beach Literary and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls, which eventually became Bethune-Cookman College in 1929.
- Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was raised in Eatonville, Florida. The author, anthropologist, and filmmaker is best remembered for recording and examining the life and folklore of African Americans in the South. She even traveled to Polk County in 1928, which provided her with much inspiration for her classic works, Their Eyes Were Watching God and Mules and Men.
- Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953) is another author who was deeply stirred by the culture of native Floridians and wrote novels with rural themes and settings, the most famous of which being The Yearling.
Plenty More to Come
History is still in the making, and Labor Solutions looks forward to the future to see what advancements and contributions Florida women will continue to make to society and culture.
