T-shirt creator celebrates historic nomination of woman presidential candidate

In 1933, Ann Moliver Ruben said her cousin, Irwin, told her that a girl could never be president.

Decades later, corporate America, it seemed, was trying to tell her the same thing. Ruben, a psychologist from Pittsburgh, had been studying children's perceptions of women leaders in the 1990s when she stumbled upon a 'Dennis the Menace” comic strip in a Sunday newspaper - an episode in which a young, curly-haired feminist named Margaret told Dennis, 'Someday a woman will be president!”

Ruben put the slogan on T-shirts and sold them to a Wal-Mart store in Florida, which pulled them from the shelves in the 1990s. According to Ruben, Wal-Mart said that 'the message went against their philosophy of family values.”

Following a nationwide uproar, Wal-Mart put them back - and, Ruben recalled, she later created a new version with a second message on the back: 'Someday is now.”

Ruben, a 91-year-old women's rights advocate, said that 'someday” came Tuesday night at the Democratic National Convention when Hillary Clinton became the first female presidential nominee for a major party.

Over the decades, Ruben has broken her own glass ceilings. During World War II, she was starting a family and praying for her husband's safe return from battles overseas while earning a college education at a time when most women did not do that.

She received a bachelor's degree in elementary education from the University of Pittsburgh, then a master's in counseling and psychology, and a doctorate in higher education and psychology, according to her website.

'My father told me, ‘Annie, you're very smart, and whatever you decide to do in your life, you're going to be successful. So don't ever give up, Annie,'” she said. 'I heard him loud and clear, and that gave me the incentive.”

For years, Ruben was a psychology professor in Florida before she went into private practice, where she said she focused on providing family therapy.

In 1993, Ruben began studying children's attitudes toward women leaders, surveying 1,500 elementary school students in Miami. She found that nearly half of them believed that only men could be president, according to an article in the Miami Herald the next year.

'The girls who finished the survey were sad,” she told the newspaper at the time. 'It was clear that if they're going to do anything, they'll have to do it themselves. They can't count on boys who grow up to be men to help them.”

Ruben created a company called Women are Wonderful Inc., and started selling T-shirts to raise girls' self-esteem, according to a 1995 report in the Herald.

'I don't want girls to believe what I grew up believing - that a girl can never be president,” she said at the time.

Indeed, more than 20 years ago, it was Ruben's inspirational T-shirts, based on a cartoon, that created a flap, exposing tension between competing ideals.

The 1993 'Dennis the Menace” comic strip showed Dennis building a clubhouse. No girls were allowed. Margaret attempted to school him on all the things girls would do, including growing up to become president.

Ruben said she called the cartoon's creator, Henry King Ketcham, and received permission from King Features Syndicate to use the panel for a T-shirt.

She sold several dozen to a Wal-Mart store in Miramar, a city in south Florida, but the company pulled the shirts after some customers complained that the message was too political, according to news reports from the time.

Ruben told the Washington Post on Wednesday that she put one of the T-shirts on her then-eight-month-old grandson, boosted him atop her shoulders and went to see an Associated Press reporter to get out her story.

The wire version went into newspapers across the country, Ruben said, and women were soon flooding Wal-Mart's phone lines to voice their concerns.

Ruben said women with the Miami chapter of the American Association of University Women, of which she was a member, marched in protest.

Almost immediately, Wal-Mart representatives admitted they 'made a mistake.”

Ruben told the Miami Herald in December 1995 that since the incident, she had received 50,000 orders from women's groups and other companies, and another 30,000 orders from Wal-Mart, which said it heard customers 'loud and clear” and stocked more than 2,000 stores.