What is perhaps most striking about Mary Kenner’s story, when it is examined whole, is the persistence.

The decades of developing inventions alongside the regular work of running a flower shop.

The eighteen-year wait for a manufacturing partner.

The continued filing of patent applications through the decades when the sanitary belt invention sat unmanufactured.

The maintenance of an inventive identity through years when that identity had no external validation in the form of commercial success.

This kind of persistence is not adequately captured by the word “resilience,” which has become somewhat overused in discussions of the challenges faced by people from marginalized groups.

What Mary Kenner demonstrated was not merely the ability to withstand adversity.