Skip to content

The first lady

Nope, this one is not about the President’s wife.

This is about an amazing true story I heard on a podcast recently. The lady in question was the first female employee at Ford Motors many decades ago. And what a crazy journey she had getting there!

This was being recited by the lady’s son. She grew up in a refugee camp on the Indo-Pak border. There was no running water and no electricity. But she did something really amazing. She taught herself how to read. And the first book that she read from cover to cover was the biography of Henry Ford. She started visualizing that she wanted to be an engineer at Ford Motor Co.

This looked unlikely if not impossible, but somehow her parents saved every penny and managed to put her on a boat to America. She ended up getting a scholarship, and graduated as the only female engineer in her class. The next day she was in Detroit to find some way or the other to apply for her dream job. The man she met there said, “Sorry, we don’t have any female engineers. Goodbye.” To which the lady made her case, detailing everything she had gone through to get to this point. The man was moved, and said he would take it up to fight for her. She ended up being the first lady at Ford Motor Co., back in 1967.

What about us, what do we do in the face of adversity?

Like it? Please share it!

Leave a Reply