Institution

<div>Meyera E. Oberndorf (February 10, 1941–March 13, 2015) began her career in public service when she became a member of the Virginia Beach Public Library Board during the 1960s. Despite opposition from male politicians, she became the first woman to win a seat on the city council in her second attempt at public office in 1976. She served as vice mayor from 1986 until 1988, when she became the first woman elected mayor of Virginia Beach as well as the city's first popularly elected mayor. During her twenty years in the position, Oberndorf was a tireless advocate for the city and its residents. She championed the city's public library system, promoted a family-friendly oceanfront, and fought for the Lake Gaston pipeline to ensure that Virginia Beach had a guaranteed water source. When the Defense Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) Commission recommended relocating the Oceana Naval Air Station, Oberndorf rallied local support and worked with members of the General Assembly and Virginia's congressional delegation to preserve the base, which was the city's largest employer.</div><div><br></div><div>Recognized by <i>Newsweek</i> in 1996 as one of the country's twenty-five most dynamic mayors, Oberndorf was candid and courageous in her personal life as well. During the 1990s she made public her breast cancer diagnosis. Near the end of her life she acknowledged that she was suffering from Alzheimer's disease and allowed the media to follow her story as the disease progressed. In 2008 the Virginia Beach City Council voted to rename the central library in Oberndorf's honor to recognize her many achievements.<br><br><span><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></span><br></div>

Mayoral portrait of Meyera E. Oberndorf, courtesy of William S. McIntosh.

The Library of Virginia honored Meyera Oberndorf as one of its Virginia Women in History in 2016.

The Virginia Women in History Digital Trail is made possible by the Library of Virginia and American Evolution: Virginia to America, 1619–2019.

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In 2008 the Virginia Beach City Council named the Meyera E. Oberndorf Central Library after the city's longest-serving mayor, who was also a tireless advocate for the city and its residents.

Meyera E. Oberndorf

A driving tour showcasing the Library of Virginia's Virginia Women in History honorees from the Hampton Roads region.

Virginia Women in History - Hampton Roads Region

A driving tour showcasing the Library of Virginia's Virginia Women in History honorees along Route 58 across southern Virginia.

Virginia Women in History - Route 58

<p>Throughout Virginia’s history, women have played important, but often overlooked, roles as educators, entrepreneurs, health care providers, religious leaders, farmers, artists, writers, reformers, pioneers, laborers, and community builders. This walking tour by the Library of Virginia utilizes Clio's ability to create walking tours and heritage trails in a single entry by placing biographical sketches of Virginia women at the location where they once lived and worked. This heritage trail celebrates women’s accomplishments and honors women of the past and present who developed new approaches to old problems, strove for excellence based on the courage of their convictions, and initiated changes in their communities, state, and nation.</p>

This heritage trail showcases the Library of Virginia's Virginia Women in History honorees from the Norfolk and the Hampton Roads region. The Virginia Foundation for Women started the Virginia Women in History educational program in 2000. In 2006, the foundation transferred the program to the Library of Virginia. In addition to heritage trails in Clio, resource materials for Virginia Women in History are available online and teachers may also request materials from the Library of Virginia.

Temperance Flowerdew (d. 1628) was born during the 1580s into a gentry family in Norfolk County, England. She may be the woman of that name who married Richard Barrow in London on April 29, 1609. She embarked for the Virginia colony in June and after surviving a hurricane, her ship and several others arrived at Jamestown in August. She endured the period known as the Starving Time during the winter of 1609–1610, when three-fourths of the colonists died at the fort, leaving only sixty survivors.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<br><br>During the 1610s she married George Yeardley, a leader in the colony who served as deputy governor (1616–1617). The couple returned to England, where he was named Virginia's governor and knighted in November 1618. They arrived back in Jamestown in April 1619 and he acquired 1,000 acres on the south side of the James River, which he named Flowerdew Hundred for his wife (hundred refers to a semi-autonomous subdivision of an English county). Lady Yeardley and her husband resided in Jamestown with their three children and approximately two dozen indentured and African laborers. She assisted with his business and financial matters before his death in November 1627. Named sole executor of Yeardley's estate, she took financial responsibility for his property, including exporting more than 300 hogsheads of tobacco to England. Prior to her March 1628 marriage to Francis West, who had succeeded her husband as governor, Temperance Yeardley negotiated an agreement to maintain her property separately in order to preserve Yeardley's wealth for herself and her children. She continued to manage her own business affairs until her death late in 1628.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <br><br><i>Nominated by Connie Lapallo, Mechanicsville, Hanover County.&nbsp; </i>&nbsp; &nbsp; <br><br><small>Reprinted by permission of the Library of Virginia.</small>

A prosperous woman during the earliest years of the Virginia colony and the wife of a governor at Jamestown, Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley took steps to maintain control of her financial affairs after her husband's death.

Temperance Flowerdew Yeardley

<div>Frances Culpeper Stephens Berkeley Ludwell (baptized May 27, 1634-ca. 1695) married three colonial governors and certainly influenced each of them, but her leadership of the Green Spring faction, a prominent political group, was her greatest position of power. The group effectively controlled the Virginia government for about two years late in the 1670s.</div><div><br></div><div>As the widow of Samuel Stephens, governor of the Albemarle settlement in present-day North Carolina, Frances Culpeper Stephens inherited a Warwick County plantation, as stipulated in a premarital agreement. In an early show of independence, she managed the estate herself instead of turning it over to a male relative, as was the custom at that time. During her marriage to Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley, Lady Berkeley, as she was known for the rest of her life, was her husband's confidante and adviser. During Bacon's Rebellion, when colonists fearful of Indian attack rebelled against the governor, Lady Berkeley traveled to England and petitioned the king in Sir William Berkeley's behalf.</div><div><br></div><div>Remaining fiercely loyal to her husband and his policies, Berkeley rallied a group of the governor's supporters after his death in 1677. Meeting near Jamestown at the Green Spring manor, which Berkeley had inherited from her husband, the faction maneuvered against Governor Berkeley's replacement, Herbert Jeffreys, and the English attempts to curb colonial self-determination. After Governor Thomas Culpeper's arrival in Virginia in 1680, Berkeley slowly withdrew from overt politicking. About the same time, she married Philip Ludwell (later deputy governor of North Carolina and South Carolina). She retained her reputation as an intelligent and influential Virginian until her death about 1695.<br><br><div><div><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></div><div><small><br></small></div></div></div>

After the death of her second husband, Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley, Frances, Lady Berkeley inherited his Green Spring plantation (no longer standing), from where she continued to promote her own political interests. 

Frances Culpeper Stephens Berkeley Ludwell

<div>Christiana Burdett Campbell (ca. 1723–March 25, 1792) was the daughter of a Williamsburg innkeeper and the wife of an apothecary who died in Blandford, near Petersburg, early in the 1750s. Returning to Williamsburg, she began operating an inn, or tavern, about 1755. One of the most prominent taverns in the capital, it provided rooms and food for those who had business to conduct with government officials or in the General Court or who attended the regular meetings of the colony's chief merchants. When the General Assembly was in session, Campbell's tavern was one of the principal places where members of the House of Burgesses lodged. Among the legislators who stayed in Campbell's tavern were Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. Campbell advertised her tavern as providing "genteel Accommodations, and the very best Entertainment."</div><div><br></div><div>Several women operated taverns in colonial Virginia, some of them continuing a business after their tavern-keeping husbands had died. Campbell, however, began her own business and conducted it with success for more than thirty years. She owned as many as a dozen enslaved laborers who probably worked in the tavern. She allowed them to attend a local school for African Americans and assisted them in being baptized at Bruton Parish Church. Campbell finally closed her tavern in 1787, after the state's capital had moved to Richmond and all of the government offices had left Williamsburg. She retired to live with her daughter in Fredericksburg. Her Waller Street tavern burned about 1859, but in 1956 the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation opened a reconstructed Christiana Campbell's Tavern as a working restaurant and thus preserved her name and reputation.<br><br><span><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></span><br></div>

Christiana Campbell became one of Williamsburg's most prominent and successful tavern keepers during the Revolutionary era. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation reconstructed her tavern in 1954–1956.

Christiana Burdett Campbell

<div>Growing up in West Virginia, Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson (b. 1918) was fascinated with numbers. A stellar student, she began college at age fifteen and was encouraged to study advanced math, including a course on the analytic geometry of space that was developed just for her. After graduating from West Virginia State College (later University) in 1937, she taught school, married, and had three daughters. When she learned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (later Langley Research Center) was hiring African American women to verify calculations needed by engineers, she and her family moved to the vicinity of Hampton, Virginia.</div><div><br></div><div>Johnson joined NACA in 1953 as a research mathematician and was part of a pool of women she has described as "computers who wore skirts," who read data, ran it through engineering equations, and turned it into usable information. Temporarily assigned to an all-male team in the Flight Research Division, Johnson demonstrated her knowledge of analytic geometry and was assigned to the Space Task Group of the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958. She calculated the landing trajectory for the first American in space—Alan Shepard's 1961 mission. For the first moon landing in 1969, she calculated how to propel space capsules into orbit around the moon and how to send landing units to and from the lunar surface. She retired from NASA in 1986, and for many years continued to speak with school groups, urging students to pursue opportunities in math and science. In 2015 she received a Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of her accomplishments. Johnson's story was also featured in the 2016 motion picture&nbsp;<i>Hidden Figures</i>.<br><br><div><div><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></div><div><small><br></small></div></div></div>

A talented mathematician, Katherine Johnson worked for NASA at the Langley Research Center for more than thirty years and calculated the trajectories for America's earliest manned space flights and the first moon landing.

Katherine Coleman Johnson

<div>Flora D. Crittenden was born in New York City and moved to Newport News as a teenager. After graduating from Virginia State College (later University) in 1945, she realized her lifelong dream to teach at George Washington Carver High School, one of Newport News’s segregated public schools. During her thirty-two year career there she served as a teacher, guidance counselor, and director of guidance. While raising three children, she earned a master’s degree from Indiana University and accepted a fellowship to study at the University of Louisville. An inspirational teacher and counselor, Crittenden helped African American students adjust to school desegregation and enabled hundreds of students to attend college, sometimes cosigning loans herself. She was also active in the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.</div><div><br></div><div>Urged by former students to run for office, Crittenden began her political career in 1986, when she was elected to a four-year term on the Newport News City Council. She won a special election to a vacant seat in the House of Delegates in January 1993. Later that year she was elected to the first of five two-year terms in the House of Delegates, where she advocated improvements in education, public transportation, and public health. She served on a number of influential committees—Education, Privileges and Elections, the Chesapeake and Its Tributaries, and Transportation—before retiring in 2003. In 1994 the Newport News School Board renamed Carver the Flora D. Crittenden Middle School, a magnet school for mathematics, science, and technology.</div><div><br></div><div><i>Nominated by Sabrina Carnesi, librarian at Flora D. Crittenden Middle School, Newport News.<br><br></i><div><div><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></div><div><small><br></small></div></div></div>

Flora D. Crittenden Middle School, in Newport News, is named for Crittenden, a teacher, school counselor, and member of the House of Delegates who exemplifies her belief that education is the key to success.

Flora Lonette Davis Crittenden

<div>Elizabeth Bray (ca. 1692–by February 22, 1774) grew up near Williamsburg and, unlike many young women at the time, learned to read and write. She married Arthur Allen in 1711 and after his death sixteen years later she managed his Surry County plantation and large brick home that later became known as Bacon's Castle. In order to secure the property that she had inherited for herself and her children, in 1729 she entered into a marriage contract with Arthur Smith. In 1753 she established a £140 trust fund to create a free school for six poor boys and girls in Smithfield. She named the trustees and gave directions for the construction of the building. She specified that boys would study reading, writing, and arithmetic for three years and that girls would study reading and writing for two years. After their schooling the boys would be apprenticed to learn a trade and the girls would learn about household matters from local women.</div><div><br></div><div>After her third marriage early in the 1760s, Elizabeth Stith continued her interest in the school. When she wrote her will, she provided for the education of a goddaughter and left £120 and the remainder of her estate to the Smithfield school, which continued to operate at least until the Revolutionary War. She was a wealthy woman with personal property valued at £350, including five enslaved laborers, when she died shortly before her will was proved in the Surry County Court on February, 22, 1774.<br><br><div><div><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></div><div><small><br></small></div></div></div>

During the 18th century, a time when married women had few rights, Elizabeth Bray Allen Smith Stith used her own funds to establish a free school for poor children. It was located in a building (no longer standing) located on the site of the current Smithfield Masonic lodge.

Elizabeth Bray Allen Smith Stith

<div>A native of New York, JoAnn Falletta (b. 1954) graduated from the Mannes College of Music, and earned a degree in orchestral conducting from The Julliard School. From 1986 until 1997, she was music director of the Women’s Philharmonic, in San Francisco, an orchestra founded to champion music composed by women. She is the music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra; principal conductor of the Ulster Orchestra, of Belfast, Northern Ireland; and the artistic director of the newly formed Hawai’i Symphony.</div><div><br></div><div>Since 1991 Falletta has also served as music director of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, in Norfolk. Under her direction it has become a leading regional orchestra and in 2010 it received an American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) award for adventurous programming in recognition of performances of contemporary works.</div><div><br></div><div>Falletta has conducted the premieres of more than 100 works by American composers. She is recognized for her innovative programming, and she has compiled an impressive discography of almost seventy titles. Falletta has long mentored student musicians and, through the League of American Orchestras, has led seminars for women conductors.</div><div><br></div><div>The winner of the Stokowski Conducting Competition in 1985, Falletta has received several prestigious conducting awards and has been honored several times by ASCAP. In addition to membership on the National Council for the Arts, Falletta has a star on Norfolk’s Legends of Music Walk of Fame and in 2011 she was named Norfolk’s Downtowner of the Year.<br><br><div><div><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></div><div><small><br></small></div></div></div>

A dynamic and compelling conductor and music director of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra (which perfoms at Chrysler Hall), JoAnn Falletta is an advocate for contemporary music.

JoAnn Falletta

After her mother showed her an article in the<i> Southern Churchman</i> describing the poor condition of Powhatan’s Chimney, a seventeenth century ruin in Gloucester County, Mary Jeffery Galt (September 26, 1844-June 30, 1922) determined to act to preserve Virginia’s architectural heritage. In June 1888 she met informally with Barton Myers, mayor of Norfolk, to organize a preservation society similar to the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. With encouragement from likeminded women, Galt and Cynthia Beverley Tucker Washington Coleman, of Williamsburg, formed the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities on January 4, 1889, "to restore and preserve the ancient historic buildings and tombs in the State of Virginia." Galt became a vice president of the organization.<br><br>Galt and the APVA’s Norfolk Branch, established in 1889, focused their efforts on preserving Jamestown Island, the site of the first permanent English settlement in North America. Beginning in 1894 Galt oversaw the first archaeological work at the Jamestown church, the tower of which survived, and the surrounding churchyard. These first excavations, with Galt occasionally digging with her own hands, uncovered several foundations and graves. Galt took a progressive approach that emphasized the need for extensive research and minimal interference with the historic site other than to stabilize the tower. In 1902 Galt moved to New York City, where she lived with the children of her brother, a naval officer. She remained an honorary vice president of the APVA until her death in Newport News on June 30, 1922.<br><br><span><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></span><br>

A resident of Norfolk at the time she helped organize the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (later Preservation Virginia), Mary Jeffrey Galt lived with her family in a house that had been located where the York Street parking garage now stands.

Mary Jeffrey Galt

<p>The formidable woman suffrage activist Pauline Forstall Colclough Adams (June 29, 1874–September 10, 1957) was born in Dublin, Ireland, and in 1898 settled in Norfolk, Virginia. She was an advocate of Esperanto, a constructed international auxiliary language.</p><p><br /></p><p>On November 18, 1910, the Norfolk Equal Suffrage League was organized during a meeting at her home. Adams served as the league's first president. Unlike her fellow Virginia suffragists, she advocated a militant approach to winning the vote for women. She shunned educational activities to speak in the city's streets and march in Washington, D.C., during President Woodrow Wilson's inaugural parade. Her actions prompted a rift in the conservative Norfolk league and a reprimand from state league headquarters in Richmond. She invented two popular suffrage games (now lost), Politics and Political Auction, which were sold in Virginia and Maryland in 1913 to raise funds for suffrage work.</p><p><br /></p><p>Adams joined the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage—a more militant group renamed the National Woman's Party in 1916—and served as president of the Norfolk branch from 1917 to 1920. She was one of thirteen picketers arrested for attempting to "flaunt their banners" in front of Woodrow Wilson's reviewing stand before a Selective Service parade on September 4, 1917. The suffragists chose prison over a $25 fine and were sent to the workhouse at Occoquan, in Fairfax County, where Adams spent time in solitary confinement deprived of her blanket, hairbrush, and toothbrush.</p><p><br /></p><p>After passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920, Adams looked for new challenges. She passed the bar examination in 1921 and became the second woman to practice law in Norfolk. Adams remained involved in the political arena where she had fought so hard to win a place. She ran unsuccessfully for the city council and worked for the campaign of Norfolk's Sarah Lee Fain, one of the first two women elected to the House of Delegates in 1923.</p><p><br /></p><p>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</p>

The Norfolk branch of the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia was established in November 1910 at the Olney Road home (no longer standing) of Pauline Adams, its organizing president and a militant suffragist who chose to go to prison for her political beliefs.

Pauline Forstall Colclough Adams

<div>Edythe Colton Harrison was born in Detroit, Michigan, on September 17, 1934. Her mother, a concert pianist, and her father, an opera devotee, instilled in her a love of music. Following her marriage to Stanley L. Harrison, a real estate executive, she moved in 1957 to Norfolk, where she raised two daughters and a son. Harrison became active in the arts community and in numerous civic causes, including advocacy for day care to aid working mothers, membership in the National Conference on Christians and Jews, and support for women's reproductive rights and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. From 1980 to 1982 she served in the House of Delegates. In 1984 Harrison won the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate but lost in a Republican landslide. She taught a class entitled Women in Leadership at Old Dominion University.</div><div><br></div><div>A formidable leader who described herself as a professional volunteer, Harrison was the principal founder in 1974 of the Virginia Opera Association, which rapidly grew into a well-recognized regional company that stages four operas each performance season in Norfolk, Richmond, and Fairfax County. She directed the campaign to raise $10 million to convert an old Norfolk auditorium into a modern opera house that opened in 1993 and was named the Edythe C. and Stanley L. Harrison Opera House. In 1979 President Jimmy Carter appointed Harrison to the Advisory Committee on the Arts at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, D.C.<br><br><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small><br></div>

Edythe Colton Harrison's love of music led her to help establish the Virginia Opera Association and raised money to convert an auditorium into Norfolk's opera house, which is named for her.

Edythe Colton Harrison

<div>Portsmouth native Elizabeth Duke (b. 1952) majored in dramatic arts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but when she needed a job after graduation she began working as a part-time bank teller. As she gained experience, Duke took on more responsibilities and eventually became chief financial officer of the Bank of Virginia Beach. While working, she also earned an MBA at Old Dominion University in 1983. Two years later she helped establish the new Bank of Tidewater, becoming its president in 1987 and chief executive officer in 1991. She was named chief operating officer of TowneBank in 2005.</div><div><br></div><div>Duke has taught bank management at banking schools around the country and is active in banking associations. From 1998 to 2000 she sat on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. In 1999, the Virginia Bankers Association elected her the organization's first female president. Duke achieved another first in 2004 when she became the first woman to chair the American Bankers Association.</div><div><br></div><div>President George W. Bush nominated Duke to fill an unexpired seat on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in May 2007 and she took her oath of office in August 2008. During the subsequent economic crisis, she focused on issues related to housing and mortgage markets, foreclosures, and neighborhood stability, working to balance new regulations and continued access to homeownership. She also promoted community banks as vital contributors to the nation's banking system. Her term ended in 2012, although Duke continued to serve through August 2013.</div><div><br></div><div>Duke was the recipient of the VABPW Foundation Business Leadership Award in 2014.<br><br><small>Reprinted with permission of the Library of Virginia.</small></div>

Early in Elizabeth Duke's banking career, she became chief financial officer of the Bank of Virginia Beach (now inactive), which was headquartered at this location. As a member of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors, Duke helped implement the Federal Reserve System's response to the financial panic of 2008.

Virginia Women in History Heritage Trail - Hampton Roads Region

Meyera E. Oberndorf

Introduction

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Backstory and Context

Additional Information