Florida's Fierce Females

They say it’s a man’s world – but we beg to differ. 

The Sunshine State has a long history of smart, successful women with moxie who’ve made their mark on history. Some documented their observations of Florida life in award-winning short stories, novels and films. One fiercely defended the Everglades against draining and development. Another broke flying records and aided in the war effort against the Nazis. One woman’s stellar legal career took her to Washington to become the chief law enforcement officer of the Department of Justice, and yet another created a fashion empire that allowed anyone to capture the “Palm Beach look” for the cost of a drip-dry cotton dress. 

Meet six fierce female game-changers who called Florida home. 

Marjory Stoneman Douglas

Grandmother Of The Everglades

Marjory Stoneman Douglas was never content to be a shrinking violet – even in the face of fierce opposition.

She’s known as the woman who saved the Everglades, and we have her to thank for that vast national treasure being protected from developers. Her tenacity, fiery spirit and passion for the environment – right up until her death – will forever be her legacy. 

Born in Minnesota in 1890, Douglas moved to Miami in 1915 to write for her father, Miami Herald publisher Frank Stoneman. She became a freelance magazine writer, too, and was active in several causes, including civil rights and women’s suffrage. 

Her 1947 nonfiction book, “The Everglades: River of Grass,” was the first to call the Everglades, which most considered a worthless swamp, a “vast, flowing river.” This began to change the way the public viewed the sprawling wetlands, which are now a national park.

For the last 29 years of her life (she lived to 108!), Douglas, usually wearing her signature wide-brim hat and pearls, remained a relentless reporter and fearless crusader for the preservation and restoration of South Florida ecosystems.

Called the Grandmother of the Everglades, she racked up countless awards for her activism. President Bill Clinton (who called her Mother Nature) gave her the Medal of Freedom when she was 103, and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection named its Tallahassee headquarters after her. She was also inducted into the National Wildlife Federation Hall of Fame and the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame.

In a fitting tribute, her ashes were scattered in Everglades National Park. 

Zora Neale Hurston

Acclaimed African-American Author

Considered the most successful and significant African-American woman writer of the first half of the 20th century, Zora Neale Hurston had a charm few could resist. She could sashay into a roomful of strangers, tell a few stories and leave them beguiled. 

Born in Alabama in 1891, Hurston moved to Eatonville, Florida, as a toddler. She was the fifth of eight children of Baptist preacher John Hurston and schoolteacher Lucy Potts Hurston. She described Eatonville as a utopia where black Americans could live independent of the prejudices of white society. 

Over three decades, Hurston penned four novels; two folklore books; an autobiography; many short stories; and several essays, articles and plays. Her best known novel, 1937’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” was greeted with controversy but rescued from obscurity four decades later. 

“Eighty years after its introduction to the world, ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ continues to challenge readers to find themselves again and again,” notes PBS.org.

During the Great Depression, she sought relief work with the Federal Writers’ Project. After several years of anthropological research financed by grants and fellowships, Hurston’s first critically acclaimed novel, “Jonah’s Gourd Vine,” was released in 1934. 

While better known as a novelist, Hurston was also one of the first African-American female filmmakers. Plus, her award- winning one-act 1925 play, “Color Struck,” attracted the attention of Harlem Renaissance members.

While highly praised for her work, Hurston made little money. Her Fort Pierce neighbors took up a collection for her funeral in 1960 after she died at age 69.

Lilly Pulitzer

Palm Beach Fashion Queen

In the late 1950s, Palm Beach socialite Lilly Pulitzer hoped her little orange juice stand on Worth Avenue would attract customers. But she was dismayed by the juice stains on her clothes and asked her dressmaker to create a cotton shift to hide them. 

The print-heavy dresses sporting Florida hues – sunny yellows, floral pinks and lime greens – soon became more popular than the juice. When Jacqueline Kennedy was seen wearing one, demand propelled Pulitzer and her designs into the spotlight. The fashion label eventually grew into a sprawling lifestyle brand that sold for $60 million in 2010.

Born Lillian Lee McKim in 1931 in Roslyn, New York, she was the second of three daughters of Robert and Lillian McKim (her mother, an heiress to the Standard Oil fortune, left her husband for wealthy horse-racing enthusiast Ogden Phipps).

She created her stand after eloping with Palm Beach publishing heir Peter Pulitzer, who owned a citrus grove. The dress business lasted longer than the marriage; they divorced in 1969. (Lilly later married Cuban aristocrat Enrique Rousseau.)

She may not have been lucky in love, but everyone wanted “a Lilly.” 

“Lilly’s dresses follow the sun,” designer and author Steven Stolman, who helped revive the brand in 1993, told The Palm Beach Post. “They did for Palm Beach what Hawaiian shirts did for Honolulu.”

Pulitzer also raised money and awareness for causes she was passionate about, such as education and animal conservation. She was 81 when she died in 2013. 

A Facebook tribute read: “Lilly was a true original who has brought together generations through her bright and happy mark on the world.”

Jackie Cochran

First Female Pilot To Break The Sound Barrier

A female aviation pioneer and one of the most prominent racing pilots of her generation, Jacqueline “Jackie” Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier in 1953. 

Born in Panama City in 1906 and raised in nearby DeFuniak Springs, Cochran was the youngest of five children. By the time she died in 1980, she had set many flying records and was one of the most decorated women of her generation.

Learning to fly came easy – it only took her three weeks. She was the first woman to make a blind instrument landing, and she set new transcontinental speed and altitude records. 

“Today, she still holds more speed and distance records than any pilot – male or female; dead or alive,” notes the Smithsonian. 

When U.S. Gen. Hap Arnold refused her offer to rally female pilots to fight the Nazis in 1939, Cochran volunteered with the Royal Air Force. She returned to the U.S. to train female pilots at Arnold’s request in 1942 when there was a shortage of male pilots.

Cochran eventually was appointed to the general staff of the U.S. Army Air Forces to direct the Women Airforce Service Pilots program nationwide.

In the 1930s, she founded an eponymous cosmetics company and flew around the country delivering test products, some of which were inspired by her occupation. (For example, she formulated a moisturizer to combat dry skin resulting from high altitude flying.) After a flight, she always took time to fix her makeup and comb her hair, aware of the public perception of female pilots as non-feminine.

Janet Reno

First Female U.S. Attorney General

Stand for honesty and strive for excellence – that’s the lesson the parents (two journalists) of Miami-born lawyer Janet Reno instilled in her at a young age. She did both throughout her trailblazing career.

Voted “most intelligent” her senior year at Coral Gables Senior High School, it was no surprise she was one of only 16 women in a class of 500 to graduate from Harvard Law School in 1963. And she further cemented her reputation when she became a partner in a law firm that once refused her a job because she was a woman. 

While many know her as the country’s first female attorney general, a post she was appointed to in 1993, she was making an impact decades prior. In the 1970s, Reno became staff director of the judiciary committee of the Florida House of Representatives, where she helped revise the state court system.

Later, she became the first woman to lead a county prosecutor’s office. As Miami-Dade County’s state attorney, she was the first prosecutor to assign lawyers to collect child support from deadbeat dads.

In her role as attorney general, she focused on reducing crime and beefing up prevention and early intervention programs to keep children away from drugs, gangs and violence.

But her tenure wasn’t without controversy: She was criticized for her handling of the 1993 Waco siege of the Branch Davidians and the return of young Elián González to Cuba in 2000.

After leaving Washington, D.C., in 2001, Reno returned to Florida and made an unsuccessful run for governor in 2002. She died in 2016 at age 78 from complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author

Best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Yearling” – about a boy who adopts an orphaned fawn and the hard choices that follow – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings started selling stories at age 11. 

But writing was agony for her, she told an interviewer decades later: “I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.”

Born in 1896 in Washington, D.C., where her father, Arthur Frank Kinnan, was a patent attorney for the government, she learned about rural life by spending her holidays on the family farm in Maryland.

After college, Rawlings was a reporter in Kentucky and New York and wrote syndicated verse for United Features. At the same time, she hammered out short stories, but they didn’t sell.

Once she retired to a 72-acre orange farm in Florida’s Cross Creek, southeast of Gainesville, her work began to garner critical acclaim. 

Fascinated by the local people and culture, Rawlings turned her observations into a memoir, “Cross Creek,” and a compilation of recipes, “Cross Creek Cookery.” Another short story written in Florida, “Gal Young Un,” won an O. Henry Memorial Prize in 1933. Then, of course, came “The Yearling,” which secured the Pulitzer in 1939. The book became a hit movie in 1946. 

In 1953, Rawlings died at age 57 in St. Augustine, but her beloved cracker-style home and farm in Cross Creek are preserved in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Historic State Park. They remain as she left them so visitors can catch a glimpse of the Old Florida lifestyle that Rawlings knew, loved and memorialized in her work. O

Beach photo by Pierce Gainey (Instagram @piercegainey); Janet Reno photo by St Petersburg Times/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom