In celebration of National Women’s Day/Week/Month, I’m continuing to celebrate some of the women I knew whose courage, tenacity, and hard work drove them to succeed despite the obstacles they faced.

My late mother-in-law Rosemary Witt Werner is a clear example of a woman who made her own way.  The first in her family to attend college, Rosemary rode the Erie Railroad from her hometown of Port Jervis up to Elmira College, where she graduated with a double major—biology and chemistry.  She worked for a professor’s wife to help offset costs until another professor discovered just how much housework and childcare she had been doing and saw to it that her workload lightened so her schoolwork could take precedence.

Rosemary came back to Port Jervis and was hired at Kolmar Labs where she ran her own laboratory. She worked on making red lipstick last longer! She worked there for some time before she met and married David Werner and they began their family.  At some point, she tried to return to her lab but was told that they wouldn’t be paying her what she had earned before since she was now married. (For my younger readers, please note that this happened all the time in the good old days.)

This was definitely not what Rosie wanted to hear, so she made a plan.  She would go back to college and get an education degree. Teachers had unions and in those unions, women could make the same salary as men. To finance her graduate degree, she began waitressing at the famous Flo-Jean restaurant by the bridge in Port Jervis.  So it went, waiting tables, taking classes, and caring for her children until she finally got her degree and was able to teach.  She loved teaching middle school science in Port Jervis, and her students loved her.  

Rosie hadn’t been teaching long when, in an episode that beggars description, a mother on the PJ School Board tried to bring her up on charges of incompetence… not as a teacher--as a mother! This person said there was no way that she could teach full time and be a good mother to five children. This accusation, thankfully, was laughed out of the room. 

Rosie kept taking classes until she earned her administrative degree, but the district didn’t offer her a job until she was making more as a teacher than a starting administrator would make. Again, she said, “No thanks.”  However, she did agree to serve as principal of the summer school for several years before her retirement.

And so, Rosie taught and taught and taught, and her students learned and learned and learned, and meanwhile her own five well-loved children all went to college and earned their own graduate degrees and went on to their own careers in finance, science, and teaching.

No one worked harder in this life than Rosemary. She was the classic example of a woman who was told it couldn’t be done but was too busy doing it to listen! All hail!