Have your students Google NPR and search for the Special Series entitled “Leading Ladies.” Have them listen to the Special Series Leading Ladies of March 2007. These two interviews were conducted by Tony Cox on “New and Notes.”

The first is an interview with Lillian Roberts, who was 79, when the interview was conducted (March 30, 2007) Roberts grew up in Chicago and worked as a nurses’ aide.  She got tired of the poor working conditions that she and others had to endure.  She intended to do something about it. She became a union organizer, something a young, black woman did not do at the time. Eventually she became a New York State Labor Commissioner, also a first.

The second is an interview with Mellody Hobson, one of six children raised by a single mother in Chicago.  Hobson went to Princeton and returned to Chicago to work for a black-owned investment banking firm, “Ariel Capital Management.”

Questions:

1. How did these two women accomplish what they did in these two different environments, different as they were, but both hostile to women and black women in particular?

2. What strategies did they use to accomplish what they did?

3. How would you describe the form of leadership used by each of these women?