For now over 75 years, The Baylor Line has been publishing vivid storytelling from across the Baylor Family. I don’t think our archives full of deep, inspirational features should live solely on shelves, so we are bringing them back to life in BL Classics. In this 1963 Classic article, readers learn of three women excelling in their professions, particularly in male-dominated career fields — blazing a trail for women to follow after them.
Industry’s loss has proved to be the U.S. Air Force’s gain, as well as the gain of the entire national scientific research effort.
Judith Gleason Koestler is a woman scientist whom Industry refused to hire after her graduation from Baylor with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1958 and a Master of Science in Physics in 1963.
So, for several years, she taught mathematics and physics in high school and junior college while her husband, Alfred Gustav (“Freddie” at Baylor) was taking graduate work toward a doctoral degree in the Baylor Department of Psychology.
Judy and Fred are both now research scientists with the Air Force Missile Development Center at Holloman AFB, New Mexico. Judy is a research analyst in the Central Inertial Guidance Test Facility (CIGTF), and Fred is in the Aeromedical Research Laboratory.
Judy was recently named winner of the Patricia Kayes Glass Award — an award made to women in the Air Force Systems Command for outstanding scientific achievement. The gyroscope evaluation projects with which she has been associated, according to her citation, “will have a direct, major impact on current and future U. S. ballistic missile and space guidance systems, as well as aircraft navigation systems.”
A recommendation by her executive officer states : “Mrs. Koestler’s analysis methods have now become the standards for gyro evaluations. . . She is one of the few women in the world who work in the field of guidance and space systems.”
Mrs. Koestler says that when she decided to enter the field of physics she had a great deal of trouble finding anyone who would seriously consider her application for employment. “Most companies would not even consider a woman scientist,” she said, adding that she has encountered no prejudice, however, at Holloman.
Betty Beniteau, 1959 Baylor graduate, is not only one of America’s comparatively few women Certified Public Accountants but is an executive with one of the nation’s largest and most respected accounting firms.
A recent story about Miss Beniteau in the New York Times comments: “Women doctors and lawyers are not especially rare these days . . . but accounting usually has been regarded as a male preserve, especially by the big public accounting firms whose seal of approval appears in the annual reports of the nation’s major corporations.”
The Times story also cites figures from the American Institute of Public Accountants, indicating that there are only about 1,500 women C.P.A.’s in the entire country out of a total of more than 100,000— or, roughly, 1 1/2 percent of the profession.
But pretty Betty Beniteau was not daunted by formidable percentages. She acquired two degrees in accounting and now has been named a principal executive in the firm of Haskins and Sells, an old-line New York concern with offices in Dallas, where Betty recently assumed her new post.
Betty worked for her father during her high school days and came to Baylor to enroll in the Hankamer School of Business as an accounting major.
She made a brilliant record and was selected the outstanding woman student in the School in her senior year. But she was dismayed when the university personnel advisers discouraged her in her effort to obtain an accounting job and when she found that visiting Company interviewers were simply not interested in employing a woman accountant.
So she went to the University of Texas and obtained a Master’s degree, meanwhile teaching an accounting course. Finally, she was hired in the fall of 1960 by Haskins and Sells, and she has rapidly advanced to one of its top posts.
The only woman County Attorney of Texas is ex-Baylorite, Betty Dohony, of Hillsboro in Hill County.
In private life she is the wife of Robert G. Dohoney, Hillsboro automobile dealer, and the mother of three children — Kathy, 11; Betsy, 10; and Patrick, 7.
A native of Hillsboro, she attended the University of Texas before her marriage. But, having long been interested in politics and in law, as soon as her children were of school age, she decided to enroll in the Baylor School of Law, to which she commuted daily until she obtained her LL.B. degree in 1966.
It was just at that time that District Judge Sam Johnson resigned to direct the Houston Legal Foundation [See BAYLOR LINE, Jan.-Feb. ’66, p. 14] and the man who was at that time County Attorney was appointed by the Governor to take his place. The Commissioners’ Court then appointed Mrs. Dohoney to fill the County Attorney’s unexpired term; and since that time she has been duly elected to the post.
The pretty “Law Lady” says she enjoys her work and feels no discrimination in it because of her sex. She is particularly interested in working with juvenile delinquents and in behalf of the dependent and neglected. She also finds it both pleasant and satisfactory to work with the Commissioners’ Court and as legal counselor to all county officers.
“Women do have to make double the effort to prove they can handle a man’s work,” the young C.P.A. concedes, adding, “but there is more demand for accountants than the men can fill, so I think there is a real opportunity for women in the field, especially in income tax work. Women have the patience for it, and even if they are married, the work does not interfere with their home life.”
