When Corinne Claiborne was a young girl she attended school at a convent in New Roads, La. The education she got there was from more than books. Years later, she would write that the convent experience gave her an early glimpse at the power of women and what they could accomplish. The women she saw were Catholic nuns who ran the school, and also did the gardening, painting, carpentry and drove the truck.

In this, our Top Female Achievers issue, I am reminded of Corinne Claiborne, who was inspired by the can-do influence of the nuns. In 1973 after her husband, Congressman Hale Boggs, disappeared in a plane accident somewhere over Alaska, Claiborne, by then better known as Lindy Boggs, ran for his seat. Being the grieving widow might have gotten her elected once but merit got her re-elected eight times.

When her husband was alive she had already proven herself to be an able political technician; she would parlay that skill into her own career. Boggs did face one disadvantage that her husband had not, as articulated by first lady Lady Bird Johnson who shrewdly asked Boggs if it would be possible to do the job, “without a wife.”

During her congressional career (1973-’91) Boggs established many female firsts, including being the first woman to chair a Democratic Party convention. She also relished that critical female role: mom. Of her two daughters, Barbara Boggs Sigmund became mayor of Princeton, N.J., though her career was cut short by terminal cancer. The other, Cokie Roberts, is the Cokie Roberts of ABC news. Her son, Thomas Hale Boggs Jr., is a very prominent Washington lobbyist.

After retiring from Congress, Boggs would make one more entry into the public spotlight. In 1997 she went to Rome to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican. Though there was a bit of wry humor about being the philanderer Bill Clinton’s representative to the Pope, Boggs performed with distinction. (In one unpublicized episode she worked with the church to have excess food from U.S. aircraft carriers that were docked in Naples trucked to refugees in Bosnia.)

There is some poetry to the fact that the little girl from New Roads who grew up inspired by nuns ended her career as ambassador to the Vatican. Little girls of the present can draw inspiration from that.