Highlighting Maiden's with Moxie--Reclaiming Pansy

From Joan Ganz Cooney's Biography.com Entry:

Television producer and executive. Born Joan Ganz on November 30, 1929, in Phoenix, Arizona. A pioneer in children’s television programming, she began her career in media as a newspaper reporter. In the mid-1950s, she moved to New York City and worked as a publicist for several years. She got her first opportunity to create television programming as a documentary producer for public television in 1962. Cooney won an Emmy Award for a show entitled Poverty, Anti-Poverty, and the Poor.

While she enjoyed her work, Cooney wanted to be able to make more of a difference in people’s lives. With a degree in education from the University of Arizona, she began to think about television as a teaching medium. Cooney conducted a formal study on the subject. She used her findings to help convince others of television’s potential for children. To this end, she founded the Children’s Television Workshop (CTW) in 1968.
Cooney saw the CTW’s first television series, Sesame Street, as a learning opportunity for all preschool children. Taking inspiration from the style of commercial television, the show has a quick pace, showing a variety of educational segments in each episode. Along with its multiracial cast of actors, the series features a number of puppet characters, known as the Muppets, which were created by the late Jim Henson. Sesame Street began in November 1969 and has remained on the air for nearly forty years. During its run, Cooney and the CTW have won numerous awards for the series, including more than 60 Emmy Awards.

Highlighting Maiden's with Moxie--Reclaiming Pansy

From Nellie Bly's Wikipedia Entry:

Nellie Bly (May 5, 1864  – January 27, 1922) was the pen name of pioneer female journalist Elizabeth Jane Cochran. She remains notable for two feats: a record-breaking trip around the world in emulation of Jules Verne's character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within. In addition to her writing, she was also an industrialist and charity worker.

Nellie Bly focused her early work for the Dispatch on the plight of working women, writing a series of investigative articles on female factory workers. But editorial pressure pushed her to the women's pages to cover fashion, society, and gardening, the usual role for female journalists of the day. Dissatisfied with these duties, she took the initiative and traveled to Mexico to serve as a foreign correspondent. Still only 21, she spent nearly half a year reporting the lives and customs of the Mexican people.

Burdened again with theater and arts reporting, Bly left the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1887 for New York City. Penniless after four months, she talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, the New York World, and took an undercover assignment for which she agreed to feign insanity to investigate reports of brutality and neglect at the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's Island.

In 1888, Nellie suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days into fact for the first time. A year later, at 9:40 a.m. on November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice, she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the White Star Line, and began her 24,899-mile journey.

"Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her Hoboken departure" Bly was back in New York. She had circumnavigated the globe almost unchaperoned. At the time, Bisland was still going around the world. Like Bly, she had missed a connection and had to board a slow, old ship called the "Bothina" in the place of a fast ship called the "Etruria". Bly's journey, at the time, was a world record, though it was bettered a few months later by George Francis Train, who completed the journey in 62 days. By 1913, Andre Jaeger-Schmidt, Henry Frederick and John Henry Mears had improved on the record, the latter completing the journey in less than 36 days.

In 1895 Nellie Bly married millionaire manufacturer Robert Seaman, who was 40 years her senior. She retired from journalism, and became the president of the Iron Clad Manufacturing Co., which made steel containers such as milk cans and boilers. In 1904 she invented and patented the steel barrel that was the model for the 55-gallon oil drum still in widespread use in the United States. Her husband died that year. For a time she was one of the leading female industrialists in the United States, but embezzlement by employees forced her into bankruptcy. Forced back into reporting, she covered such events as the women's suffrage convention in 1913, and stories on Europe's Eastern Front during World War I.