Cover Story: Legacy of Distinction

Celebrating 100 Years of Carnegie Mellon Women

Celebrating 100 Years of Carnegie Mellon Women

The year is 1906. Theodore Roosevelt is President. A great earthquake destroys San Francisco. A new Ford costs $600. And, in Pittsburgh, 224 women enroll in the Carnegie Technical Schools’ new Margaret Morrison Carnegie School for Women.

In retrospect, the era seems quaint. “Bifurcate garments” (slacks!) were forbidden, and too-thin girls were required to drink a glass of milk each morning. But the studies were rigorous: minds were challenged, and knowledge and opinions developed.

Jump ahead 100 years—and thousands of women. The “Maggie Murphs” and their sister alumnae achieved, and continue to achieve, remarkable things. In their communities and their workplaces, from the hush of a library to the roar of a combat jet, these women have had a dramatic effect on daily life.

There are, of course, too many accomplished alumnae to note all of them. The women briefly profiled here represent all their sisters whose hearts, like Andrew Carnegie’s, are “in the work”—and whose work has high impact.

RIGHT BRAIN, LEFT BRAIN

From chemistry to best-selling children’s books

Researchers say that most people favor one side of their brains—either the logical left or the creative right. Elaine Lobl Konigsburg is an exception. She is a scientist-turned-author, with nearly two-dozen children’s books to her credit.

A 1952 Margaret Morrison chemistry major, she says that at Carnegie Tech “I learned the discipline of shaping ideas into a form that communicates them to others.” (She also, of course, learned chemistry, but that didn’t prevent her from blowing up a chem lab sink—twice—during graduate work at the University of Pittsburgh.)

While teaching chemistry at a private girls’ school, she discovered that she was “more interested in what was going on inside my students than inside the test tubes.” That interest grew even stronger as she raised her own three children—and when the youngest was in kindergarten, she began to write.

Konigsburg’s books fly off the shelves. “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” “The View From Saturday,” and her other works challenge and delight young readers with timeless plots, believable characters, and authentic settings. They also win awards—plenty of them; she’s the only author ever to have won the American Library Association’s prestigious Newbery Medal and its second-place “honor book” designation in the same year.

Accepting a 1999 Carnegie Mellon Alumni Distinguished Achievement Award, Konigsburg said: “The only course in writing I have ever had was Freshman Composition, taught by Dr. A. Fred Sochatoff. One of my books is dedicated to him. It says: For Fred Sochatoff —who was there at the beginning, before either of us knew it was a beginning.”

Today, Konigsburg lives near Jacksonville, Fl; she is working on a book to be published next year. She dismisses the notion of a “great divide” between left and right brains, saying “The quality of creativity is the same in the sciences as it is in the arts; it just curves left instead of right.”

Does she have advice for novice writers? Absolutely: “FINISH. That says a lot. It says that the difference between being a person with talent and being a writer is the ability to apply the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair—and finish. It says that even when the next word, the next thought won’t seem to come, you stay until it does.”

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Related Links:
Meet the Author
Biographical Essay
E.L. Konigsburg Titles

SPECIAL DELIVERIES

Life as a small-town OB-GYN

Picture New York’s Carnegie Hall filled to the rafters with an applauding audience. Now picture it again. And again. That’s about 10,000 people—and that’s how many babies Margaret Carver, M.D. (MM ’43) delivered in her career as an obstetrician-gynecologist.

After attending medical school in the late 1940s, where she was one of only seven women in a class of 87, Carver interned in Harrisburg for the princely sum of $100 per month, plus six white uniforms. Then she opened a general practice in Uniontown, Pa., where her patients included women who hadn’t seen a doctor in 20 years—when the last female physician had practiced there.

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