The saying goes, Behind every great man there’s a great woman.
It’s not clear who came up with that, though we certainly hear it all the time and in many variations. (My personal favorite variation is A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.) On Presidents’ Day, we wanted to honor the women who have supported the man in the Oval Office – while these First Ladies were not elected to their positions, without them, their husbands’ presidencies would have been very different. Let’s hear it for the women behind the Presidents.
“It is one of my sources of happiness never to desire a knowledge of other people’s business.”
-Dolley Madison
“It’s always been my feeling that God lends you your children until they’re about eighteen years old. If you haven’t made your points with them by then, it’s too late.”
-Betty Ford
“If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.”
-Abigail Adams
“The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.”
-Lady Bird Johnson
“You must accept that you might fail; then, if you do your best and still don’t win, at least you can be satisfied that you’ve tried. If you don’t accept failure as a possibility, you don’t set high goals, you don’t branch out, you don’t try – you don’t take the risk.”
-Rosalynn Carter
“You must do the things you think you cannot do.”
-Eleanor Roosevelt
“Choose people who will lift you up. Find people who will make you better.”
-Michelle Obama
We asked Mr. Schu to finish some of our sentences — here’s what he had to say:
Today’s Quotable Nerdy Chick is someone I have admired for a long time. Michelle Rhee is the daughter of Korean immigrants who has become a force on the American education stage. Not everyone agrees with her positions — I can’t say that I always do, either — but it is impossible to deny her passion for school reform and her commitment to every child’s right to a quality education.
“My job is to hear all the input, and then as the leader, then decide which are the things that I think are going to move student achievement forward in this district. And I have to make those decisions. That doesn’t mean that I’m not listening. It just means I have to choose to take into consideration all of that input.”
In 1933, Franklin Delano Roosevelt appointed a woman named Frances Perkins as Secretary of the Department of Labor. This was the first time a woman held a cabinet position in the United States. She held this position for twelve years, the longest tenure of any Secretary of Labor. That means Frances was not only the first time a woman to enter the presidential line of succession, but that she was in line for the job for over a decade. As astonishing as this is, Frances was probably so used to breaking convention by that point that it hardly shortened her stride. After all, she went to court to defend her right to keep her own name after she got married (in a time when women were really only known by their association with men) and she was sole wage earner in her family. As Secretary of Labor through the New Deal, Frances put a lasting mark on American life and culture. We can thank her for things like social security, unemployment insurance, federal child labor laws, and the federal minimum wage. Find out more about this amazing Nerdy Chick 
On August 14, 1969, Dr. Dorothy Hodgkin used a science she had pioneered — X-ray crystallography — to decipher the three-dimensional structure of insulin, a protein that plays an important role in diabetes. This discovery helped scientists understand how to treat the symptoms of diabetes. What is remarkable is that this momentious discovery was made after Dorothy had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964, only the third woman to ever win this Nobel Prize (the other two were 
“The glory of each generation is to make its own precedents.”
Nerdy Chicks Rule 