MANCHESTER — A veteran of the front line in the fight for women’s equality Kathrine Switzer dodged an effort by a race official to physically remove her from the course as she became the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon.

Switzer Wednesday told a few hundred women at the annual Women Building Community luncheon sponsored by the Women’s Fund of New Hampshire and other groups that they can make a difference, both individually and collectively.

“Never ever underestimate what the smallest contribution can do to make change,” Switzer said. “A few bucks here and there or maybe just a few words of encouragement to a girl, you just never know what it’s going to do.”

In 1967 Switzer, a junior at Syracuse University joined members of the school’s NCAA cross country team for practices only. It was the era when women’s athletics at high school or college levels was rarely heard or seen.

She entered the Boston marathon. She read the rules and the entry form and found no rule or qualification that required participants to be male. She entered under her initials, K.V. Switzer, which she says was her normal signature, and race officials were unaware until she had run the first couple of the 26 miles in the race.

Race director Jock Semple, had other ideas about the place of women in the marathon. Semple tried to remove Switzer’s number bib and force her from the race, but her running companion — her future husband — blocked the attempt. A sequence of photographs of the failed effort to keep Switzer from running was listed among Life magazine’s 100 photographs that changed the world.

What the all-male Boston Athletic Association couldn’t do on the course they tried to do in the record book, formally disqualifying Switzer from the race she finished. But they couldn’t strike Switzer’s performance from the public mind.

“It’s hilarious in the retelling, it was horrible at the time,” Switzer said. “I was so embarrassed and so terrified.”

But the embarrassment and terror faded, and Switzer speaks often to women’s groups about the difference that seemingly simple acts can have in inspiring change.

Women were first welcomed as official Boston Marathon competitors in 1972.

Switzer noted that 17 years after she ran the race in Boston, the marathon became an Olympic women’s sport. Twenty-seven years after that, at the 2012 Olympics, the final barriers fell.

“For the first time in the 2,000 years of Olympic history, every country had a woman team member,” Switzer said. “Talent is everywhere, it only needs an opportunity.”

She urged the audience gathered in support of the Women’s Fund’s mission of helping women and girls to realize their potential to work daily toward that goal.

“Do the simple things,” Switzer told her audience. “Just put one foot in front of the other and change people’s lives.”

wsmith@unionleader.com