HOUSE RESOLUTION NO. 96-4728, by Representatives Keiser, Patterson, Poulsen, Linville, Morris, Quall, Jacobsen, Wolfe, Ogden, Mason, Valle, Dellwo, Cole, Cody, Scott, Murray, Basich, Tokuda, Veloria, Dickerson, Regala, Romero, Rust, Grant, Kessler, R. Fisher, D. Schmidt, Chopp, Hatfield, Conway and Costa

       WHEREAS, The state of Washington and the other states will join nations the world over in celebrating and recognizing March as Women's History Month; and

       WHEREAS, We reserve March 8, International Women's Day, as a special time to confirm and commend the historic contributions of women through the ages; and

       WHEREAS, It is in the diverse disciplines of science that women have made abundant and distinctive contributions to advance the health and knowledge of humankind; and

       WHEREAS, Indeed, the men and children of our state and nation are at last recognizing that women are responsible for some of the most extraordinary scientific discoveries and achievements the world has known; and

       WHEREAS, The author and humanitarian Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, publicized a smallpox-inoculation technique almost three hundred years ago that resulted in a recovery rate of nearly one hundred percent; and

       WHEREAS, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps wrote several science textbooks, including the classic "Botany" which sold two hundred seventy-five thousand copies almost two hundred years ago; and

       WHEREAS, Williamina Paton Stevens Fleming, a renowned astronomer of the 1800's, developed a catalogue of more than ten thousand stars; and

       WHEREAS, Florence Bascom, later a geologist of enormous reputation, became in the 1800's the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from an American university and the first woman elected a fellow of the Geological Society of America; and

       WHEREAS, Thomas Edison should have been dubbed "The Male Knight" because a woman named Margaret E. Knight (who was, in fact, called "The Female Edison") received numerous patents in the mid-19th century for everything from flat-bottomed paper bags to rotors; and

       WHEREAS, Rebecca J. Cole, born in 1846, became in 1867, the first African American woman to graduate from the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania and she went on to a prominent fifty-year career in medicine; and

       WHEREAS, The college-entrance examinations were officially opened to women in the 1870's because Charlotte Angus Scott, who later earned her doctorate of science at Cambridge and became the head of mathematics at Bryn Mawr College, scored too high on the examinations for women to be ignored any longer; and

       WHEREAS, Also in that time period, Sony Kovalevski, a mathematician of great prominence, made highly celebrated contributions to the theory of differential equations; and

       WHEREAS, The first female lecturer at the Sorbonne and the holder of degrees in mathematics and physics, Marie Sklodowska Curie, became early in the 20th century the first person to receive a second Nobel Prize; and

       WHEREAS, Also early in this century, the astrophysicist Charlotte Moore Sitterly was a major compiler of the standard tables of atomic-energy levels by optical spectra and she also discovered that the element technetium exists not just in the laboratory but also in nature; and

       WHEREAS, The discoveries of the bacteriologist Alice Evans upward of a century ago led to implementation of a  pasteurization process for milk, thus saving countless men and women from the ravages of a dreaded disease; and

       WHEREAS, Virginia Apgar in the early 1900's became the first woman to hold a full professorship at Columbia Medical School and she developed a system for diagnosing the health of new-born infants; and

WHEREAS, Chien-Shiung Wu, a prestigious Chinese American nuclear physicist who was born in 1912, masterminded the experiment in the 1950's that led to a unified theory explaining the electromagnetic and other forces responsible for several forms of radioactivity; and

       WHEREAS, Helen Brooke Taussig, the physician-pediatrician-cardiologist and professor emeritus of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins University, made the discoveries that allowed cyanotic infants ("blue babies") to live an almost normal life; and

       WHEREAS, Margaret Collins Strickland, an African American woman who was born in 1922, is an esteemed zoologist who became the head of the Biology Department at Florida A & M University; and

       WHEREAS, Jewell Plummer Cobb, born in 1924, a distinguished African American woman and third-generation physician, is a prominent and distinguished cancer researcher specializing in cell biology; and

       WHEREAS, In 1938, Dorothy H. Andersen delivered the results of her research to the American Pediatric Association and identified the disease cystic fibrosis; and

       WHEREAS, That same year 1938 saw the birth of Janet Guthrie, who was one of the first women to qualify for NASA's scientist-astronaut program and who also became the first woman to race in the Indianapolis 500; and

       WHEREAS, Angelita Albano Castro Kelly, a prominent Filipino American woman born in 1942, directs the Space Shuttle astronauts as NASA's Mission Operations Manager for the Earth Observing System Project at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland; and

       WHEREAS, All of the first twelve women admitted to Harvard Medical School were graduated in 1949, none flunked out as had been predicted; and

       WHEREAS, Also in 1951, Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, was born; and

       WHEREAS, Mae Jemison, born in 1956, became the world's first African American woman astronaut and first African American woman in space in 1992; and

       WHEREAS, Amalia Vazques, also born in 1956, an Hispanic American professor of science, wrote the groundbreaking treatise "Presence and Significance of Yeast-like Cells on Immunocompromised Patients" in 1986; and

       WHEREAS, Rita Levi-Montalcini, a neurobiologist who made remarkable discoveries in the early 1950's that enhanced our understanding of cancer, birth defects, and Alzheimer's disease, received a Nobel Prize; and

       WHEREAS, The first Hispanic woman astronaut, Ellen Ochoa, who was born in 1959, was the Chief of the Intelligent System Technology Branch at the NASA/AMES Research Center before she was selected to participate in our nation's space program; and

       WHEREAS, Maria Goeppert Mayer, a nuclear physicist noted as a world authority on the structure of the atomic nucleus, and on quantum electrodynamics and spectroscopy, received a Nobel Prize in 1963; and

       WHEREAS, The 1964 Nobel Prize in chemistry went to Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin, professor emeritus at Oxford, who identified the structure of vitamin B-12; and

       WHEREAS, Women, to be sure, have made enormous contributions to the exceptional scientific history and development of our Pacific Northwest, not just since territorial days and statehood, but certainly, too, in the time before the arrival of the non-Native American settlers; and

       WHEREAS, In the decades before their region became a territory and eventually a state of the United States, Native American women shared knowledge of the various life sciences to help the non-Native American settlers survive; and

       WHEREAS, Clara McCarty Wilts in 1876 became the first woman graduate of the University of Washington when she earned her bachelor of science degree; and

       WHEREAS, Fannie Paddock was excited about her move to the Washington Territory in 1881 and, upon hearing that her destination, Tacoma, had no hospital, she raised funds for the hospital that Tacoma citizens today know as Tacoma General Hospital; and

       WHEREAS, Mary Perkins, who came to Steilacoom in 1902 to practice family medicine, attended to the people of her community until she was 79; and

       WHEREAS, In 1906, Addie Cooper became the University of Washington's first woman to graduate with a degree in engineering and she worked in her profession until 1952; and

       WHEREAS, The first nonstop flight from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Tijuana, Mexico, was accomplished in 1941 by Evelyn Burleson, a Tacoma free-lance pilot; and

       WHEREAS, Lillian Butler was a research chemist with the United States Department of Agriculture in Yakima and in 1968 she was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and

       WHEREAS, Betsy Ancker-Johnson was a physicist at Boeing and a professor at the University of Washington and she became the assistant secretary for the Office of Science and Technology in the Department of Commerce in 1973; and

       WHEREAS, Born in the town of Outlook near Sunnyside in Yakima County, Bonnie Dunbar, a United States astronaut, was involved last year in a joint mission with Russian cosmonauts and participated in only the second "handshake across the hatch" with the cosmonauts;

       NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, That the House of Representatives recognize and celebrate Women's History Month in March and International Women's Day on March 8; and

       BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, That copies of this resolution be immediately transmitted by the Chief Clerk of the House of Representatives to the Office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction for effective distribution among the schools of the state of Washington so that young women and men will come to possess an innate knowledge about the historic scientific contributions that women have made for our state, our nation, and our world.

          I hereby certify this to be a true and correct copy of

         Resolution 4728 adopted by the House of Representatives

                              March 1, 1996.

                     ________________________________

                      Timothy A. Martin, Chief Clerk