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Dr. Sarah "Sally" Lowenstein Stephenson

Dr. Sarah "Sally" Lowenstein Stephenson

Posted: 25 Mar 2015 6:59PM GMT
Classification: Obituary

Dr. Sarah "Sally" Stephenson, 92, of Monongahela, PA. died Tuesday, March 10, 2015, in her home.
She was born in Bentleyville, Pennsylvania, a daughter of the late Henry and Violet Patton Lowenstein.
She grew up at the home of her maternal grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. John Patton Sr. in Bunola.
Dr. Stephenson attended Elizabeth High School.
In 1943, she joined the U.S. Navy WAVES and served for 2½ years, teaching instrument flight procedures to Navy pilots in Squadron VRF.
In 1946, she married Kenneth Stephenson, a sailor with whom she served at Willow Grove Naval Air Station. They had a daughter, Kathleen.

In 1951, Dr. Stephenson enrolled at what was then California State College, under the G.I. Bill. She graduated with single highest honors in 1954.

She taught history and English at Elizabeth Forward Township High School for 10 years, serving as chairwoman of the history department for five years. While teaching, she earned a master's degree in 1968 and a doctorate in 1981 in history from Carnegie Mellon University
. She was inducted into the Carnegie-Mellon chapter of the Honor Society Phi Kappa Phi.
In 1968, she became a professor at California University of Pennsylvania, where she taught for 19 years. She was chairwoman of the social sciences department at her retirement in 1987.
She received the C.R. Wilson Distinguished Faculty Award, and she was a member and university sponsor of Honor Society Pi Gamma Mu.
After her retirement, she served in several Navy and community organizations. She was two-term president of the Three Rivers chapter of WAVES National.

She was a member of Mid-Mon Valley Shipmates, a member of Washington County, Pennsylvania Veterans Council, past member of Monongahela Veterans Council, past president of Monongahela Historical Society, past member of the board of directors of Washington County Historical Society, and a charter member of the National Organization for Women.
In 2008, she was one of 12 older Monongahela women who posed for the "Vixens of the Valley" pin-up calendar to raise money for the historical society.
The group attained national recognition.
Surviving are a daughter, Kathleen Stephenson and son-in-law, Eugene Bradley of Portland, Oregon, and several caring nieces and nephews, Shelley Urbank Wolf, Darcy Urbank Battisti, Paul Battisti, Chris and Lynn Bartkus and Randy Bartkus.
Deceased, in addition to her parents and husband, are sisters Jean Urbank, Elsie McCoy and Louise Bartkus.
Cremation and burial at sea.

The family suggests memorial contributions be sent to Monongahela Area Library Memorial/Honor/Commemorative Donation, 813 West Main Street, Monongahela, PA 15063 or The National Organization for Women.
Arrangements by Cremation Society of Pennsylvania Inc.

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Published in Observer-Reporter on Mar. 22, 2015
- See more at: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/observer-reporter/obituary....
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Sally Stephenson spent World War II as a Navy Wave teaching male pilots how to fly, but she wasn’t allowed to fly herself because she was a woman. She dedicated a great deal of the rest of her life to ensuring the same wouldn’t be true for the women who came after her.

Ms. Stephenson of Monongahela, who in addition to battling for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment taught at California University of Pennsylvania for 19 years and chaired the Social Sciences Department, died March 10. She was 92.

Ms. Stephenson’s passion for history and women’s rights came together in the classroom. According to niece Shelley Wolf of Bethel Park, who sometimes sat in on her aunt’s classes, Ms. Stephenson often faced criticism of her insistence that women could accomplish all that men could.

“She battled those young boys in those classes,” Ms. Wolf said. “They didn’t want to hear it.”

Ms. Wolf also remembers Ms. Stephenson talking about the lack of a restroom for female professors in the classroom building where she taught, indicating that the women’s rights movement still had a long way to go.

Among the hundreds of Cal U alumni Ms. Stephenson taught is Geraldine Jones, the interim president of the university.

“Dr. Stephenson was my professor for world cultures. I remember her telling the class in 1968 about the little-known country of Kuwait and how important it would become in the future,” Ms. Jones said.

Ms. Jones also remembers Ms. Stephenson as a colleague, one who went out of her way to mentor Ms. Jones and other younger faculty members.

Ms. Stephenson’s interest in learning about world cultures went beyond the classroom, and she was in China on Jan. 1, 1979, when the United States officially recognized the People’s Republic of China, thus normalizing relations with the country. While there with the National Education Association, she conducted sessions that taught female delegates about the progress of the women’s rights movement in the United States.

Of Ms. Stephenson’s commitment to women’s activism, daughter Kathleen Stephenson noted her struggles to finish high school, not graduating until her twenties because of transportation challenges, as a reason that she didn’t take women’s education for granted.

“As a person who had gone back to school and had to make her way in a world that was, at that time, dominated by men, I think that she saw areas of discrimination and was interested in finding ways that women could get rights,” Kathleen Stephenson said.

And Sally Stephenson found female empowerment in unexpected places. She gained national fame at age 84 when she posed as Ms. July for a pinup calendar called “Ladies of the Mon” created to benefit the Monongahela Area Historical Society.

Kathleen Stephenson said of her mother’s decision to join the women making the calendar: “It was a few years after my father died, and those women got together, socialized, went to events together. They became a little support group. And I think it felt maybe a little bit empowering for women of their age to get that kind of attention.”

Friend Lorys Crisafulli of San Francisco, who organized the calendar’s production, called it a bit of fun after a long life of battling obstacles.

“Most of her life I think she’d been so serious. Making the calendar was the fun thing we all did,” she said.

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