Day 100

Mary Jenkins, 1879-1967 

Founder Zonta International

 Mary Jenkins was born in 1879 in Syracuse, NY to Arthur Jenkins, founder of the Herald newspaper. In 1903, at the age of 24, she inherited the newspaper from her father and became president of The Herald Company. “Born with printer ink in her veins,” Jenkins was a pioneering Syracuse newspaperwoman and civic leader. She was president of the newspaper until her retirement in 1957, and was quoted as having made “one of the longest contributions to continuous newspaper service in the history of New York State.”

She helped found Zonta International in 1919 in order to bring together women who had occupied important positions during the First World War.  The organization still exists today. Jenkins was elected the first president of the Confederation of Zonta Clubs and the Syracuse Zonta Club, as well as an international charter member from 1919-1921.

She also helped found Syracuse Memorial Hospital, served on the board for 34 years, and was its president for 15 years. Furthermore, she was the first lay member of the Public Health Board of the New York State League of Nursing Education. In 1945, Mary Jenkins received a doctorate of humane letters from Syracuse University. She became an honorary member of the American Hospital Association in 1948. In 1950, the Jewish War Veterans named her “Syracuse’s most outstanding citizen.” Jenkins died in 1967, and is buried next to her husband in Oakwood Cemetery.

Source Onondaga Historical Association

Day 99

Florence Nightingale, 1820-1910

English Nurse, Social Reformer and Statistician

Nightingale gave nursing a favorable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture.

In 1860, Nightingale laid the foundation of professional nursing with the establishment of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London. It was the first secular nursing school in the world, and is now part of King's College London. In recognition of her pioneering work the Nightingale Pledge, taken by new nurses, and the Florence Nightingale Medal, the highest international distinction a nurse can achieve, were named in her honor. Her social reforms included improving healthcare for all sections of British society, advocating hunger relief in India, helping to abolish harsh prostitution laws, and expanding acceptable forms of female participation in the workforce.

Nightingale was a prodigious and versatile writer. She was also a pioneer in the use of infographics, effectively using graphical presentations of statistical data.

Nightingale led the first official team of British military nurses to Turkey during the Crimean War between Britain and Russia (1853-56). There, more soldiers died from disease than wounds and Nightingale advised the army medical services on how to reduce avoidable deaths. She was nicknamed ‘the Lady with the Lamp’ for the night rounds she made tending to the wounded and sick. Nightingale continued in her work after the war and was instrumental in establishing a permanent military nursing service and implementing improvements to the armymedical practices.

Source History Extra and Wikipedia

Day 98

Jane Addams 1860-1935

Social Reformer

Addams was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator, and author. She stood out in history for her social work and women’s suffrage in the US and an advocate for world peace.

Jane’s accomplishments are many. She co-founded Chicago’s Hull House, one of America’s most famous settlement houses.

In 1910, Jane was awarded an honorary Master of Arts degree from Yale University, becoming the first to receive an honorary degree from the school. In 1920, she co-founded the ACLU, and in1931 she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  She has been recognized as the founder of the social work profession in the US and is known by many as the first woman public philosopher in the United States.

Jane helped America address and focus on issues concerning mothers, such as the needs of children, local public health, and world peace.  Addams became a role model for middle class women who volunteered to uplift their communities.

Hull House and the Peace Movement are widely known as the key tangible pillars of Addams’ legacy. She worked with other reform groups toward goals including the first juvenile court law, tenement house regulations, an eight-hour work day for women, factory inspections, and workers’ compensation.

Source Wikipedia

Day 97

Margaret Sanger, 1879-1966

Birth Control Advocate 

Sanger was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. She popularized the term “birth control,” opened the first birth control clinic in the US, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Sanger used every means she could to promote her way of thinking on “birth control.”  She was prosecuted for her book Family Limitation and was forced to flee to Britain to avoid arrest.  She soon returned to the US to continue her work. Margaret helped legalize contraception in the United States, but let it be known that she drew a sharp distinction between birth control and abortion.

In 1916, she opened the first birth control clinic, which led to her arrest.  She wanted to prevent back alley abortions and the only practical way to avoid abortion was the use of contraception.

Margaret enrolled in White Plains Hospital as a nurse probationer in 1900.  In 1902 she married, had three children, and moved to Westchester, New York.
Sanger’s political interest, feminism and nursing experience led her to write two series of columns on sex education.

In 1948, Sanger helped found the International Committee on Planned Parenthood Federation, which became the world’s largest women’s health, family planning and birth control organization. She was the first president and remained in that role until she turned 80 years old.

Source Wikipedia

Day 96

Mary Wollstonecraft, 1759-1797

English Philosopher and Advocate

Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships, received more attention than her writing. Today, Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and authorities often cite both her life and work as important influences.

During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.

After two ill-fated affairs with Henry Fuseli and Gilbert Imlay (by whom she had a daughter, Fanny Imlay), Wollstonecraft married the philosopher William Godwin, one of the forefathers of the anarchist movement. Wollstonecraft died at age 38, eleven days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Shelley, who would became an accomplished writer and author of Frankenstein.

After Wollstonecraft's death, her widower published a Memoir(1798) of her life, revealing her unorthodox lifestyle, which inadvertently destroyed her reputation for almost a century. However, with the emergence of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century, Wollstonecraft's advocacy of women's equality and critiques of conventional femininity became increasingly important.

Source Wikipedia

Day 95

Marie Curie 1867-1934

Scientist

Marie Sklodowska Curie changed the world not once, but twice. She founded the new science of radioactivity – even the word was invented by her – and her discoveries launched effective cures for cancer. Curie boasts an extraordinary array of achievements. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (Physics), the first female professor at the University of Paris, and the first person to win a second Nobel Prize (Chemistry).

Born in Warsaw, Poland, Curie studied physics at university in Paris where she met her future research collaborator and husband, Pierre. Together they identified two new elements: radium and polonium, named after her native Poland. After he died, she raised a small fortune in the US and Europe to fund laboratories and develop cancer treatments.

Marie Curie was a woman of action as well as enormous intellect. During the First World War, she helped equip ambulances with x-ray equipment, and often drove them to the front line herself.

Despite becoming ill from the radioactive materials she constantly handled, Curie never lost her determination to excel in the scientific career that she loved. Her memory is preserved by the Cancer Society that bears her name and continues to help terminally ill patients all over the world.

Source Wikipedia

Day 94

Rosa Parks 1913-2005 

Civil Rights Activist 

In 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American living in Montgomery, Alabama, challenged race segregation by refusing to give up her seat on a bus for a white person. Her protest was supported by many other African Americans and sparked the civil rights movement, which, in the 1960s, eventually won equal rights.

Parks, a 42-year-old seamstress in a department store, boarded her bus for home as usual after work. As the bus became crowded, white driver J Fred Blake told Parks and other black passengers to vacate their seats. Segregation laws dictated that white passengers had priority. The blacks duly moved. Except for Parks. She sat silently still. “If you don’t stand up, I’m going to call the police and have you arrested,” Blake shouted at her. “You may do that,” Parks calmly replied. Blake left the bus and returned with two policemen. “Why don’t you stand up?” one of the officers asked Parks. “Why do you push us around?” Parks answered.  “I do not know,” said the officer, “but the law is the law and you are under arrest.” She was taken off to the city jail.

Parks’ arrest would lead to a 13-month boycott of city buses in one of the longest mass mobilizations of a black population ever witnessed in the United States. The boycott’s church-based community activism and ministerial leadership, together with its spirit of non-violence, would become hallmarks of the civil rights movement over the next decade.

Source Wikipedia

Day 93

Rosalind Franklin, 1920–1958

English Chemist

Franklin was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely recognized posthumously.

She is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA, particularly Photo 51. It is an X-ray picture showing a dark cross of dots, the signature image of a concealed molecular spiral.

This led to the discovery of the DNA double helix for which James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1962. Watson suggested that Franklin would have ideally been awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Wilkins, but the Nobel Committee generally does not make posthumous nominations.

After finishing her work on DNA, Franklin led pioneering work at Birkbeck on the molecular structures of viruses. Her team member Aaron Klug continued her research, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982.

The life-changing innovations that followed – mapping the human genome, test-tube babies, genetic engineering – all depend on understanding the chemical foundations of heredity.

Source Wikipedia

Day 92

Sandra Day O’Connor1930-present

US Supreme Court Justice

O’Connor is a retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States who served from 1981 until she retired in 2006. Appointed by President Reagan, she was the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court. Prior to her tenure on the Supreme Court, she was a judge and an elected official in Arizona, serving as the first female Majority Leader of the Arizona State Senate.

Sandra was born in El Paso, Texas. She grew up on a cattle ranch in Arizona, but spent most of her young life living with her grandmother in El Paso where she attended school. O’Connor went to Stanford University where she received her B.A. in economics. She continued at Stanford Law School and got her law degree in 1952.n 1952 she married John Jay O’Connor III and had three sons.  Sandra served as assistant Attorney General, was elected to the Arizona State senate, served on the Maricopa County Superior Court, and served on the court of Appeals-Division One until 1981.

Sandra’s husband suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for nearly 20 years until his death in 2009. Ironically in 2018, Sandra was diagnosed with early stages of Alzheimer’s-like dementia.

O’Connor once said, “We don’t accomplish anything in this world alone. Whatever happens is the result of the whole tapestry of one’s life - all the weavings of individual threads from one to another that create something.”

Source Wikipedia

Day 91

Emmeline Pankhurst 1858-1928

Social Reformer

Emmeline Pankhurst was a British political activist and organizer of the British suffragette movement that helped women win the right to vote.

She was widely criticized for her militant tactics, and historians disagree about their effectiveness, but her work is recognized as a crucial element in achieving women's suffrage in the United Kingdom.

In 1903, Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union to campaign for the parliamentary vote for women in Edwardian Britain, ‘Deeds, not words’ being its motto. It became known for physical confrontations: its members smashed windows and assaulted police officers. Pankhurst, her daughters, and other WSPU activists received repeated prison sentences, where they staged hunger strikes to secure better conditions, and were often force-fed. As Pankhurst's eldest daughter, Christabel took leadership of the WSPU, antagonism between the group and the government grew.

A charismatic leader and powerful orator, Pankhurst roused thousands of women to demand their democratic right in a mass movement that has been unparalleled in British history. Always in the thick of the struggle, she endured 13 imprisonments, her name and cause becoming known throughout the world.

In 1999, Time named Pankhurst as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century, stating "She shaped an idea of women for our time; she shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back.”  

Source Wikipedia

Day 90

Joan of Arc 1412-1431 

Martyr and Military Leader 

Joan of Arc, nicknamed “the Maid of Orleans” is considered a heroine of France for her role during the Lancastrian phase of the Hundred Years’ War.

Joan claimed to have received visions of the archangel Michael, Saint Margaret, and Saint Catherine of Alexandria instructing her to support Charles VII and recover France from English domination. The uncrowned King Charles VII sent Joan to the Siege of Orleans as part of a relief army.  She gained prominence after the siege was lifted only nine days later. Several additional swift victories led to Charles VII’s coronation. This long-awaited event boosted French morale and paved the way for the final French victory.

On May 23, 1430, Joan was captured by the Burgundian faction, a group of French nobles allied with the English. She was later handed over to the English and put on trial by the pro-English bishop Pierre Cauchon on a variety of charges. After he declared her guilty, she was burned at the stake on May 30, 1431 at the age of 19.

In 1456, an inquisitorial court authorized by Pope Callixtus III debunked the charges against her, pronounced her innocent and declared her a martyr. In the 16^th century, she became a symbol of the Catholic League and in 1803 was declared a national symbol of France by Napoleon Bonaparte. She was beatified in 1909 and canonized as a Saint in 1920.

Source Wikipedia

Day 89

Anna Mary Robertson (Grandma Moses) 1860-1961 

Artist

Born in Greenwich, New York, Robertson was the third of ten children born to Margaret and Russell King Robertson. She started painting at an early age, using lemon and grape juice to make colors for her landscapes.

At the age of 12 she left home and went to work for wealthy families as domestic help. One family noticed her interest in art and bought her chalk and wax crayons. Anna was on her way!

In 1887 she married. Only five of her ten children survived infancy. Her husband Thomas died in 1927 at the age of 67 and Anna would never marry again.

Grandma Moses would embroider pictures by the hour and she loved to quilt. Arthritis set in and she turned to painting once again, but now full time. She generated over 1,500 canvases in three decades. Everyone enjoyed her down-to-earth paintings;  light hearted, optimistic and beautiful. Her paintings could be seen on greeting cards, tiles, fabrics, and ceramics.

Grandma Moses received numerous awards and recognition. In 1955 she even made an appearance on the Edward R Murrow show.

All Americans mourned her death and her paintings will never be forgotten.

Source Wikipedia

Day 88

Marie Stopes 1880-1958

Advocate of Birth Control & Sex Educator

Marie was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant paleontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester.

Stopes attended the University of London as a scholarship student, where she studied botany and geology. She graduated with a first class B.Sc. in 1902 after only two years by attending both day and night schools. Following this, Stopes earned a D.Sc. degree from University College London, becoming the youngest person in Britain to have done so. She studied the reproduction of living cycads at the University of Munich, receiving a Ph.D. in botany in 1904. She held the post of Lecturer in Palaeobotany at the University of Manchester from 1904 to 1910; in this capacity she became the first female academic of that university.

With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, she founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual Married Love (1918) and a second book titled Wise Parenthood – which dealt explicitly with contraception – appeared shortly thereafter. A controversial figure, especially for her views on eugenics, Stopes nonetheless was a key figure in publicizing her cause. A birth control clinic was set up in a poor working-class area of north London in 1921, bringing to women worldwide the opportunity of planned pregnancies.

 

Source HistoryExtra & Wikipedia

 

Day 87

Queen Victoria 1819-1901

Queen of England

Victoria was Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from June 20, 1837 until her death. On May 1, 1876, she adopted the additional title of Empress of India. Known as the Victorian era, her reign of 63 years. It was a period of industrial, cultural, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom marked by a great expansion of the British Empire.

She inherited the throne at the age of 18 when her uncle, King William IV, died. In a constitutional monarchy the sovereign held relatively little direct political power. Privately, she attempted to influence government policy while publicly; she became a national icon who was identified with strict standards of personal morality.

Victoria was physically unprepossessing—she was stout, dowdy and only about five feet tall—but she succeeded in projecting a grand image.  She experienced unpopularity during the first years of her widowhood, but was well liked during the 1880s and 1890s, when she embodied the empire as a benevolent matriarchal figure. Contrary to popular belief, Victoria was immensely amused and roared with laughter on many occasions.

Through Victoria's reign, reforms of the voting system increased the power of the House of Commons at the expense of the House of Lords and the monarch.  By 1867, the monarch only retained "the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, and the right to warn.”  As Victoria's monarchy became more symbolic than political, it placed a strong emphasis on morality and family values.

Source Wikipedia

Day 86

Ada Lovelace 1815–1852 

Mathematician

A gifted mathematician, Ada Lovelace is considered to be the first computer programmer, an industry that has since transformed business, our lives and the world. In an industry still dominated by men, it’s particularly striking that the first programmer was a woman.

Born in the early 19th century to English poet Lord Byron, she had a fascination with science and mathematics that defied the expectations of her class and gender at her time. From age 4, Ada was tutored in math, prompted by her mother’s fear that she should be exposed to her father’s randy antics and moody nature.

Only 12 years old, she conceived a flying machine in the shape of a flying horse with steam powered wings. After being introduced at the age 17 to inventor Charles Babbage, her work with him ensured she would become one of the most important figures in the early history of the computer.

In her thirties, Ada became a compulsive gambler, pawning the family diamonds to pay her debts.

Despite the fact her work was only appreciated posthumously, Ada Lovelace is now regarded as one of the most important figures in the early history of the computer. She had a unique and farsighted understanding into the potential of computers beyond simple number crunching.

Source Wikipedia and Christopher Klein

Day 85

Anna Jacobson Schwartz 1915-2012 

American Economist 

Schwartz is widely acclaimed as the female research economist of the twentieth century, Anna Jacobson Schwartz has been described as “one of the world’s greatest monetary scholars.”

Anna became interested in economics while attending Walton High School. She graduated from Barnard College, and then earned her Master’s Degree in Economics from Columbia University. In 1936, she married Isaac Schwartz and began her professional career with Columbia University’s Social Science Research Council. Schwartz returned to Columbia University and earned a Ph.D.

Dr. Schwartz’s first published paper, British Share Prices, 1811-1850, written with Arthur Gayer and Isaiah Finklestein was published in the 1940 issue of The Review of Economics and Statistics. The paper was a precursor to much of her subsequent work, meticulous in the presentation, explanation, and interpretation of data.

In 1941, Dr. Schwartz began a more than seventy-year tenure working for the National Bureau of Economic Research. It was during this time that she met and began working with economist Milton Friedman. Together, the two co-authored A Monetary History of the United States, 1867 – 1960, which was described by Federal Reserve chair, Ben Bernanke, as “The leading and most persuasive explanation of the worst economic disaster in American history.”  The massive study demonstrated that changes in monetary policy have large effects on the economy and blamed a large portion of the Great Depression on the Federal Reserve; it is one of the most widely cited texts in economics today.

In 1981, Dr. Schwartz served as the Executive Director of the United States Gold Commission; the panel was responsible for recommending the future of gold in the nation’s monetary system. In 1988, she became president of the Western Economic Association.

Source National Women's Hall of Fame

Day 84

Margaret Heafield Hamilton 1936-present 

Software Engineer

Hamilton is an American Computer Scientist, Systems Engineer and business owner.

She founded two software companies:  Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986.  Margaret has published more than 130 papers about sixty projects and six major programs.  She is one of the people credited with coining the term “software engineering”.

After earning a BA in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College in 1958, she directed the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo Space program.  Her team of programmers ran the computers on both the command module and landing module of the Apollo 11 mission. Hamilton never left the earth’s atmosphere, but without her groundbreaking software, it’s unlikely that the American Flag would’ve been planted on the moon in July 1969.

Margaret began her career by developing programs to better predict the weather.  She wrote software which helped the military detect enemy planes.

Margaret met her husband James Cox Hamilton at Earlham College and married in the late 1950’s.  They had a daughter Lauren.  The couple eventually divorced.

On November 22, 2016, Margaret received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama.

For the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, Google unveiled a giant tribute to Hamilton in the California Mojave Desert: more than 107,000 mirrors reflected moonlight to form her image.

Source Wikipedia

Day 83

Jane Austen 1775-1817 

English Novelist 

Austen is an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels which interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage to pursue favorable social standing and economic security. Her use of biting irony, along with her realism, humor, and social commentary, have long earned her acclaim.

With the publications of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), and Emma (1816) she achieved success as a published writer. Her six full-length novels have rarely been out of print, although they were published anonymously and brought her moderate success, but little fame during her lifetime.

Her posthumous reputation improved in 1833, when her novels were republished and sold as a set. They gradually gained wider acclaim and popular readership. In 1869, fifty-two years after her death, her nephew's publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced a compelling version of her writing career.

During her lifetime, Austen may have written as many as 3,000 letters, but only 161 survived. Many of the letters were written to Austen's older sister Cassandra, who in 1843 burned the greater part of them and cut pieces out of those she kept. Ostensibly, Cassandra censored her sister's letters to prevent their falling into the hands of relatives who might read Jane Austen's acid or forthright comments.

Source Wikipedia

Day 82

Mother Teresa 1910-1997

Albanian-IndianRoman Catholic Saint and Missionary 

Mother Teresa, born in Albania, was a Roman Catholic nun who lived in India for most of her life. In 1950, she founded the Missionaries of Charity, which gave free service to the poorest of the poor. The order worked in over 130 countries, serving people dying of HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis. She set up soup kitchens, dispensaries, mobile clinics, children's and family counseling programs, orphanages and schools.

In 1946, Teresa heard the call within the call. "I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith.” Sister Teresa had just become Mother Teresa.

She began missionary work with the poor in 1948, replacing her traditional Loreto habit with a simple, white cotton sari with a blue border. After receiving basic medical training, Teresa ventured into the slums.

Teresa wrote in her diary that her first year was fraught with difficulty. With no income, she begged for food and supplies and experienced doubt, loneliness and the temptation to return to the comfort of convent life.

Although criticized for her opposition to abortion, her charitable work changed the lives of many of the most vulnerable people in the world.

Pope Frances canonized Mother Teresa on September 4, 2016 at the Vatican.

Source Wikipedia

Day 81

Ruth Handler 1916-2002 

Businesswoman and Inventor

Ruth Handler, famously known for the invention of the iconic Barbie doll, was once president of the toy manufacturer, Mattel, Inc.

In 1938, with her husband Elliot, they formed a furniture business that would eventually supply the Douglas Aircraft Company.

Ruth’s husband and a partner in 1945 created Mattel, Inc. What began as a picture frame manufacturing company slowly transformed into a toy company when its creators began crafting dollhouses out of wooden scraps.

Barbara Handler, Ruth’s daughter, was fond of paper dolls as a child. Ruth soon realized that children frequently preferred to be adults when playing. This gave Ruth the idea to craft an adult doll that was three-dimensional, not paper. The fully formed plastic doll could wear clothing made from real fabric, not the ill-fitting paper clothing used for traditional dolls.

In 1959, Ruth introduced her new doll at the New York toy fair. It was named Barbie, after her daughter. Advertisements ran during The Mickey Mouse Club and sales of the Barbie doll elevated Mattel to success beyond their wildest dreams.

In 1970, Ruth Handler was diagnosed with breast cancer. A modified radical mastectomy was performed to save her life. Consequently, she designed and constructed a realistic breast prosthetic called Nearly Me. With it, she formed the Ruthton Corp and sold her product to cancer survivors around the globe.

The Barbie doll is still one of the most famous and profitable toys for young girls in America and around the world.

Source Wikipedia

Day 80

Catherine the Great 1729-1796

Empress of Russia 

Catherine II, also known as Catherine the Great, was Empress of Russia from 1762 until 1796, the country's longest-ruling female leader. She came to power following a coup d'état that she organized, overthrowing her own husband, Peter III. Under her reign, the Russian Empire expanded rapidly.

There were victories over the Ottoman Empire and Russia colonized the territories along the coasts of the Black and Azov Seas. The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth was eventually partitioned, with the Russian Empire gaining the largest share. In the east, Russia started to colonize Alaska, establishing Russian America.

Catherine reformed the administration of Russian governmentand modernized Russia along Western European lines. Military conscription and the economy continued to depend on serfdom, and increasing demands of the state and private landowners led to increased levels of reliance on serfs. This was one of the chief reasons behind several rebellions.

Catherine decided to have herself inoculated against smallpox, controversial at the time. Catherine then sought to have inoculations throughout her realm. By 1800, approximately 2 million inoculations were administered in the Russian Empire.

As a patron of the arts she presided over the age of the Russian Enlightenment, a period when the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens, the first state-financed higher education institution for women in Europe, was established.

Source Wikipedia

Day 79

Beulah Louise Henry 1887-1973 

Prolific Inventor

Henry was an American inventor in the 1930s, and was given the nickname "Lady Edison.”

Of approximately 110 inventions, she was awarded around 49 patents over her lifetime.

Henry attended North Carolina Presbyterian College and Elizabeth College in Charlotte, North Carolina, where she submitted her first patents. She moved to New York City in 1924, where she devised one of her most popular early inventions, an umbrella with a snap-on cloth cover. This allowed the owner to coordinate the umbrella with clothing. The umbrella led to her appearance in Scientific American magazine as one of their "Outstanding Inventors.” The rights to her popular umbrella cover invention sold for $50,000, which enabled her to set up her own laboratory. She appointed mechanics, model makers, and draftsmen to turn her ideas into prototypes.

She founded two companies: the Henry Umbrella and Parasol Company, and the B. L. Henry Company of New York. Throughout the 1920s, she was awarded patents for a spring-limbed doll and sponges that held soap in the middle. She also designed the machine that produced the sponges.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the patents she received included a double-chain stitch sewing machine, a feeding and aligning device for typewriters, a bobbin-less sewing machine, a number of children´s toys, and another typewriter attachment for duplicating documents.

She preferred to live in New York hotels and never married. Beulah Louise Henry was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006.

Source People Pill thefamouspeople.com

Day 78

Margaret Thatcher, 1925–2013 

British Prime Minister

Thatcher was the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister, serving from 1979 to 1990. A Soviet journalist dubbed her “the Iron Lady,” a nickname that became associated with her uncompromising politics and leadership style.

She studied chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, and worked briefly as a research chemist, before becoming a barrister. Thatcher was elected Member of Parliament in 1959. She then was appointed Secretary of State for Education and Science. She became Prime Minister after winning the 1979 general election.

Thatcher introduced a series of economic policies intended to reverse high unemployment and Britain's struggles with an ongoing recession. Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasized deregulation, flexible labor markets, the privatization of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions. Thatcher's popularity in her first years in office waned until victory in the 1982 Falklands War and the recovering economy brought a resurgence of support.

Thatcher was re-elected for a third term in 1987, but her subsequent support for the Community Charge ("poll tax") was widely unpopular, and others did not share her views on the European Community in her Cabinet. She resigned as Prime Minister and party leader in November 1990. After retiring in 1992, she was given a life peerage as Baroness Thatcher, which entitled her to sit in the House of Lords. In 2013, she died of a stroke at the age of 87.

Wikipedia

Day 77

Elizabeth Fry 1780-1845

Social Reformer

Elizabeth Fry was an English prison reformer, social reformer and, as a Quaker, a Christian philanthropist. She has often been referred to as the "angel of prisons.”

Prompted by a family friend, Fry visited Newgate Prison in 1813. The conditions she saw there horrified her. The women's section was overcrowded with women and children, some of whom had not even received a trial. The prisoners were confined in small cells where they slept on straw.

In 1816, she founded a prison school for the children who were imprisoned with their mothers. In 1817, she helped found the Association for the Reformation of the Female Prisoners in Newgate. This association provided materials for women so that they could learn to sew patchwork. This allowed skills to develop, such as needlework and knitting, which could offer employment when they were released. She promoted the idea of rehabilitation instead of harsh punishment.

She campaigned for rights of women at Newgate Prison who were transported through the streets of London in open carts, often in chains. She visited prison ships and persuaded captains to implement policies to ensure each woman and child would get a share of food and water on the long journey.

Elizabeth Fry worked with other prominent Quakers to campaign for the abolition of the slave trade. From 2001–2016, Fry was depicted on the reverse of £5 notes issued by the Bank of England.

Source Wikipedia

Day 76

Mary Shelley 1797-1851 

Novelist

Shelley was an English novelist who also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after Mary as born.

When Mary was four, her father married a neighbor, with whom Mary had a troubled relationship.

In 1814, Mary began a romance with Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Mary became pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.

In 1816, vacationing in Geneva, Switzerland, Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm. A year later, Mary Shelley entirely devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumor, which killed her at age 53.

Her novel Frankenstein, remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels, Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830). Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society.

Source Wikipedia

Day 75

Josephine Butler 1828-1906 

Feminist & Social Reformer

In Victorian Britain, Josephine Butler brought into open discussion the double sexual standard that existed in a male-dominated society. She campaigned successfully for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, which provided for the compulsory and regular medical examination of women believed to be prostitutes, but not their male clients. In later life she campaigned against child prostitution and international sex trafficking.

While investigating the effect of the Acts, Butler had been appalled that some of the prostitutes were as young as 12, and that there was a slave trade of young women and children from England to the continent for the purpose of prostitution.

A campaign to combat the trafficking led to the removal from office of the head of the Belgian Police des Mœurs, and the trial and imprisonment of his deputy and 12 brothel owners.

Butler fought child prostitution with help from the campaigning editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, William Thomas Stead, who purchased a 13-year-old girl from her mother for £5. The subsequent outcry led to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which raised the age of consent from 13 to 16 and brought in measures to stop children becoming prostitutes.

Source: Wikipedia & History Extra

Day 74

Georgia O’Keeffe 1887-1986 

American Artist

O’Keeffe was an American artist known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes.

She was born in a farmhouse in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin to dairy farmers and the second of seven children. At 10 years of age, she had decided to become an artist. She completed high school at Chatman Episcopal Institute in Virginia and graduated in 1905.

In 1905, Georgia started her serious formal training at The Art Institute of Chicago and then moved on the Art Students League of New York. She worked for two years as a commercial illustrator and taught in Virginia, Texas, and South Carolina. She moved to New York in 1918 and began working as a serious artist. She married Arthur Wesley Dow (an art dealer and photographer) in 1924. After her husband’s death, she lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

O’Keeffe was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 1967 was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1973 she received an honorary degree from Harvard University. In 1977, President Ford presented Georgia with the Presidential Medal of Freedom and in 1985 she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Reagan. After her death, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum was established in Santa Fe. In 1993, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

In 2014, Georgia’s painting of Jimson Weed sold for $44,405,000, more than three times the previous world auction record for a female artist.

Source Wikipedia

Day 73

Bessie Coleman 1892-1926 

Civil Aviatrix

Bessie Coleman was the sixth of 13 children to a family of sharecroppers. Her father was mostly Cherokee and part African-American. At the age of six she began walking four miles each day to attend a segregated one-room school in Waxahachie, Texas. She loved to read and established herself as an outstanding math student. Every year, Coleman’s routine would be interrupted by the cotton harvest. At the age of 18, she took her savings and enrolled in the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University but after one term the money ran out and she returned home.

At 24, she moved to Chicago and worked as a manicurist and heard stories about pilots returning from WW1. She took a second job to save money in hopes of becoming a pilot. After taking a French-language class she traveled to Paris in 1920 and became the first woman of African-American and Native American descent to earn an aviation pilot’s license.

With commercial flight still a decade away, she realized that in order to make a living she would have to become a “barnstorming” stunt flier. She launched her career in exhibition flying in air shows. Billed as “the world’s greatest woman flier, she became known as “Queen Bess.”

She hoped to start a school for African-American fliers but died in a plane crash in 1926 while testing a new aircraft. Her pioneering role was an inspiration to early pilots and to the African-American and Native American communities.

Source Wikipedia

Day 72

Estée Lauder 1906-2004

Cosmetics company founder

Lauder was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in New York City. The baby's nickname became "Estee,” the name she would grow up using. Eventually, when she launched her perfume empire, she added an accent mark to make her name sound French.

Much of her childhood was spent trying to make ends meet. She worked at the family's hardware store, where she got her first taste of business. When Lauder grew older, she agreed to sell creams, lotions, rouge, and fragrances for her uncle Dr. John Schotz, and his company New Way Laboratories. After graduating from high school, she focused on her uncle's business.

Lauder named one of her uncle's blends Super Rich All-Purpose Cream and began selling the preparation to her friends, clubs, and resorts. One day, as she was getting her hair done, the salon's owner asked Lauder about her perfect skin. Soon, Estée returned to the beauty parlor to hand out her uncle's creams and demonstrate their use. The owner was so impressed that she asked Lauder to sell her products at her new salon.

In 1953, Lauder introduced her first fragrance, Youth-Dew bath oil that doubled as a perfume. In the first year, it sold 50,000 bottles; by 1984, the figure had risen to 150 million.

Estée Lauder's Clinique brand became the first women's cosmetic company to introduce a second line for men, which continues to be sold at Clinique counters worldwide.

Source Wikipedia

Day 71

Sally Ride 1951-2012 

US Astronaut & Physicist

Sally Ride became the first American woman to go into space when she flew on the space shuttle Challenger on June 28, 1983.  At age 32, Ride remains the youngest American astronaut to have traveled to space.

Sally attended Stanford University, where she was a double major in physics and English. In 1978, Ride was selected to be an astronaut as part of NASA Astronaut Group. She applied after seeing an advertisement in the Stanford student newspaper, and was one of only 35 people selected out of the 8000 applications. After graduating training in 1979, she served as the ground-based capsule communicator for the second and third space shuttle flights, and helped develop the space shuttle's "Canadarm" robot arm.

During a press conference prior to her first space flight, she was subject to media attention due to her gender. She was asked, "Will the flight affect your reproductive organs?" and "Do you weep when things go wrong on the job?" Despite this, Ride insisted that she saw herself in only one way—as an astronaut.

After flying twice on the Orbiter Challenger, she left NASA in 1987. She worked for two years at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Arms Control, then at the University of California, San Diego as a professor of physics, primarily researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering.

She was included in the National Women’s Hall of Fame and the Astronaut Hall of Fame.

QUOTE:  “If we want scientists and engineers in the future, we should be cultivating the girls as much as the boys.”

Sally died of pancreatic cancer in 2012.

Source Wikipedia

Day 70

Isabella Lucy Bird 1831-1904 

Explorer and Writer 

Isabella Lucy Bird was born in Yorkshire, England. From early childhood Bird was frail, suffering from a spinal complaint, nervous headaches, and insomnia.

In 1854, the doctors urged a sea voyage to improve her health and her life of traveling began. Bird accompanied her cousins to the United States and wrote bright descriptive letters home, which became the basis for her first book, An Englishwoman in America. She was to become an explorer, writer, photographer, and naturalist.

Bird traveled to Australia and Hawaii, which prompted her second book. She then moved to Colorado. Her letters to her sister were printed in the magazine The Leisure World and comprised her fourth and perhaps most famous book, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.

She traveled to Asia, India, Tibet, and Persia. Featured in journals and magazines for decades, Bird became a household name. In 1890, she became the first woman to be awarded the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and two years later was the first woman allowed to join the Royal Geographical Society. She was elected a member of the Royal Photographic Society.

Her final great journeys took place in 1897 when she traveled up the Yangtze and Han rivers in China and Korea followed by a trip to Morocco where she traveled among the Berbers. She had to use a ladder to mount her black stallion, a gift from the Sultan.

A few months after returning, Bird fell ill and died at her home in Edinburgh.

Source Wikipedia

Day 69

Hedy Lamarr 1914-2000

American Actress and Inventor

Most people know Hedy Lamarr as an actress but when you mention she was actually an inventor people are shocked.

She was born in Vienna and by the age of 16, dropped out of high school and started acting. When she was 19 years old, she married for the first time. Hedy ended up marrying six times and had three children.

When WWII, started, she wanted to quit acting and help the war effort using her knowledge of munitions and secret weapons, learned from her first husband who was an arms dealer. She wanted to join the National Inventors Council but was told by an inventor, Charles Kettering, that she would be more helpful with the war effort, as a celebrity selling war bonds.

With George Antheil, she helped develop radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes, using frequency-hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the axis powers. It is a technique of conducting radio signals by quickly switching a carrier among many frequency channels, using a pseudo random sequence known to both transmitter and receiver.

The two shared a patent for an invention that prevented radio signals being intercepted by the enemy. She received a patent in 1942 for technology that remains fundamental to every cell phone, Bluetooth device, and Wi-Fi network in use today. It wasn’t until the 1990s that she was properly recognized for this. She always said “Any girl can be glamorous, all you have to do is stand there and look stupid.”

Source Wikipedia

Day 68

Cleopatra 69BC-30BC

Egyptian Pharaoh

Cleopatra VII was born in early 69 BC and was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt. From her childhood tutor she learned the Greek arts of oration and philosophy.

Her native language was Koine Greek and she was the first Ptolemaic ruler to learn the Egyptian language. Aside from Greek, Egyptian, and Latin, she learned many other languages, which reflected Cleopatra's desire to restore North African and West Asian territories that once belonged to the Ptolemaic Kingdom.

Cleopatra ruled as an absolute monarch, serving as the sole lawgiver of her kingdom. She was the chief religious authority, presiding over ceremonies dedicated to the deities of both the Egyptian and Greek polytheistic faiths. She oversaw the construction of temples to Egyptian and Greek gods, a synagogue for the Jews in Egypt, and built the Caesareum of Alexandria.

Cleopatra was directly involved in the administrative affairs of her domain, tackling crises such as famine by ordering royal granaries to distribute food to the starving populace during a drought. Her government attempted to impose price controls, tariffs, and state monopolies for certain goods. It set fixed exchange rates for foreign currencies, and rigid laws forcing peasant farmers to stay in their villages during planting and harvesting seasons.

Cleopatra's legacy survives in ancient and modern works of art. Her ancient depictions include Roman, Renaissance, Baroque, and Ptolemaic coinage, Roman sculptures, busts, and paintings, as well as reliefs and cameo glass and carvings.

Source Wikipedia

Day 67

Clara Barton 1821-1912 

American Red Cross Founder 

Clara Barton was born in 1821 in Massachusetts. At 10 years old, she took the task of nursing her brother back to health after the doctors had given up. He fully recovered. Clara was very timid but her parents convinced her to become a schoolteacher. She achieved her teacher’s certificate at the age of 17 and was an educator for the next 12 years.

1861, the Baltimore Riot resulted in the first bloodshed of the American Civil War. Wanting to help, Barton went to the Washington D.C. railroad station and nursed 40 men. It was then that she began efforts to collect medical supplies for the Union soldiers. She gained permission to go to the front lines in 1862 and worked to distribute stores, clean field hospitals, apply bandages and serve food to the injured soldiers, both Confederate and Union.

After the end of the war, Barton discovered thousands of unanswered letters to the War Department from distraught relatives. President Lincoln allowed her to reply to their inquiries. She ran the Office of Missing Soldiers for the next 4 years writing letters, helping find, identify and properly bury thousands of soldiers.

In Switzerland, she was introduced to the Red Cross. Barton returned to the United States and worked to gain recognition for the International Committee of the Red Cross. She became President of the American branch of the society in 1881. She served as President until the age of 83 and opened the first American International Red Cross headquarters in the heart of Turkey after the Hamidian Massacres.

Source Wikipedia

Day 66

Eleanor Rathbone 1872-1946 

Member of Parliament and Philanthropist 

Eleanor Florence Rathbone was born May 12, 1872 in London, United Kingdom to the social reformer William Rathbone VI. Her family encouraged her to concentrate on social issues and after her graduation from Somerville College in Oxford, she worked alongside her father to investigate social and industrial conditions in Liverpool. After her father’s death, she published their report on conditions in 1903.

In 1897, Rathbone became the Honorary Secretary of the Liverpool Women’s Suffrage Society where she campaigned for women to get the right to vote.

She was elected as an independent member of the Liverpool City Council in 1909 and retained the position until 1935. At the outbreak of World War I, Rathbone organized the Town Hall Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Family Association to support wives and dependents of soldiers. From 1918 onwards, Rathbone argued for a system of family allowances paid directly to mothers.  She also advocated for women’s rights in India.

In 1929, Rathbone entered parliament where she campaigned during the depression for cheap milk and better benefits for the children of the unemployed. One of her first speeches was about female genital mutilation in Kenya. She denounced British complacency in Hitler’s remilitarization. In 1938, she denounced the Munich Agreement and pressured parliament to aid the Czechoslovaks and grant entry for dissident Germans, Austrians, and Jews as well as to publicize the evidence of the Holocaust in 1942.  She continued in parliament until her sudden death in 1946.

Source Wikipedia

Day 65

Golda Meir 1898-1978 

Prime Minister of Israel

Golda was an Israeli teacher, kibbutznik, stateswoman, politician,and the fourth Prime Minister of Israel.

She was born Goldie Mabovitch in Kiev in 1898. Her family immigrated to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1906. She was educated there, becoming a teacher. At 14, she studied at North Division High School and worked part-time at Shuster's department store and the Milwaukee Public Library. Her mother wanted Golda to leave school and marry, but she declined. She bought a train ticket to Denver, Colorado, to live with her married sister, Sheyna Korngold. The Korngolds held intellectual evenings at their home, debating Zionism, literature, women's suffrage, trade unionism, and more. In her autobiography, Meir wrote: "To the extent that my own future convictions were shaped and given form ... those talk-filled nights in Denver played a considerable role."

She attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, becoming a leader in the Milwaukee Labor Zionist Party. In 1917, she married and in 1921 she and her husband immigrated to Palestine, settling on a kibbutz.

She emerged as a forceful spokesperson for the Zionist cause while negotiating with the British authorities. In 1943, Goldie was a signature of Israel’s independence declaration. Goldie said that after she signed... she cried.

She was elected to the Parliament in 1949 and served until 1979. Appointed foreign minister in 1956, she Hebraized her name to Golda Meir. In 1969, Meir became Prime Minister. She resigned in 1974, believing that she had served enough time as premier. "Five years are sufficient  ... It is beyond my strength to continue carrying this burden.”

Source Wikipedia

Day 64

Margaret Mead 1901-1978 

Cultural Anthropologist

Mead was a cultural anthropologist. She was the first of five children born to Edward and Emily Mead. Mead studied one year at DePauw University and then transferred to Barnard College, where she earned her bachelors degree in 1923. Next year she earned her masters degree at Columbia University. After graduation, she set out to do field work in Samoa. In 1926, Mead became the assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History and three years later she received her PhD in 1929 from Columbia University.

Margaret was married three times. She and her third husband Gregory Bateson had a daughter Mary Catherine Bateson.

Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern America and Western Culture and was often controversial as an academic. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asia traditional cultures influenced the 1960’s sexual revolution.

Mead held many executive positions and was honored numerous times for her work. She was a mentor to many anthropologists and sociologists. In 1976, Mead was a key participant at the United Nations Habitat I, the first UN forum on human settlements.She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame; awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom; had several schools named after her and the United States Postal Service issued a stamp with her image.

Quote:  “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Source Wikipedia

Day 63

Nellie Bly 1864-1922 

Pioneering Journalist

Elizabeth Cochran Seaman was born in Cochran’s Mill Pennsylvania in 1864. After her father’s death in 1870, her family moved to Pittsburgh.

A newspaper column entitled “What girls are good for” prompted Elizabeth to write a response. The editor, impressed with her passion, offered her a full-time job. It was customary for female newspaper writers to use pen names and the editor chose to call her “Nellie Bly.”

As a writer, Bly focused on the lives of working women, writing investigative articles on women factory workers. The newspaper soon received complaints from factory owners and she was reassigned to the women’s pages to cover fashion, society, and gardening.

Penniless, she took an undercover assignment at the New York World to feign insanity and investigate reports of brutality at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum. Her report, Ten Days in a Mad-House, caused a sensation leading to reforms. In 1888, she suggested to her editor that she take a trip around the world, to duplicate the fictionalAround the World in 80 Days. Bly made the trip in just over 72 days. She also became the first woman and one of the first foreigners to visit the war zone between Serbia and Austria where she was arrested when mistaken for a British spy.

In her later years, she became an industrialist taking over Iron Clad Manufacturing Company upon her husband’s death, where Nellie invented nesting garbage cans.

Source Wikipedia

Day 62

Oprah Winfrey 1954-present

Media Executive

Oprah was born to a teenage single mother. Molested in her teens, she became pregnant at 14 years old, but her son died in infancy. After years of bad behavior, Oprah was sent to live with her father in Nashville. Under the strict guidance of her father, she became an excellent student and won a full scholarship to Tennessee State University.

Oprah was offered a job at CBS affiliate Columbia Broadcasting System. She became the first African American female co-anchor of the evening news. She appeared for 7 years on the morning talk show “Baltimore is Talking.” Her ratings were better than those of Phil Donahue.

Oprah launched “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 1986, which ran until 2011. In August 1986, she formed her own production company, Harpo, Inc. In September 1996, she started an on-air reading club. She also introduced “Oprah’s Favorite Things,” an annual list of holiday gifts curated by the mogul on her talk show.

In the final season Oprah made the ratings soar when she revealed that she had a half sister named Patricia. “It was one of the greatest surprises of my life,” she exclaimed.

She bought 10% stake in Weight Watchers; co-founded Oxygen Media, started “The Oprah Magazine,” and returned to acting. The list goes on and on.

Oprah has been in a relationship with Stedman Graham since the mid 80’s, but they have never married. The couple lives in Chicago with homes in California, Indiana and Colorado.

Source Wikipedia

Day 61

Theodora

Theodora 500-548

Empress of Byzantium

Theodora was born in the year 500 in Cyprus. From an early age she worked in a Constantinople brothel and as an actress. In 522, she gave up her former lifestyle, settling as a wool spinner in a house near the palace. The son of Emperor Justin I, Justinian sought to marry her and in 525 he repealed the law preventing anyone of senatorial rank from marrying actresses.

When Justinian succeeded to the throne in 527, Theodora became Empress of the Eastern Roman Empire. Justinian called her his “Partner in my deliberations.” She had her own court, her own entourage, and her own imperial seal.

Justinian and Theodora rebuilt and reformed Constantinople and made it the most splendid city the world had seen for centuries. Theodora participated in Justinian’s legal and spiritual reforms and her involvement to increase the rights of women was substantial. She had laws passed that prohibited forced prostitution and she was known for buying girls, freeing them, and providing for their future. She created a convent for ex-prostitutes, closed brothels, instituted the death penalty for rape, and expanded the rights of women in divorce and property ownership.

Theodora worked against her husband’s support of Chalcedonian Christianity and sheltered and hid many Miaphysite leaders for years. Her influence was so strong that after her death in 548, Justinian worked to bring harmony between the two factions in the Empire. Both Theodora and Justinian are now saints in the Eastern Orthodox Church commemorated each November 14.

Source Wikipedia

Day 60

Emily Hobhouse

Emily Hobhouse 1860-1926

British Welfare Campaigner

Hobhousewas an English reformer and social worker whose humanitarian undertakings in South Africa caused her to be dubbed the “Angel of Love” by grateful Boer women.She is primarily remembered for bringing this to the attention of the British public, and changing the deprived conditions inside British concentration camps in South Africa.

Hobhouse spent the first sheltered 35 years of her life at her father’s rectory. Upon his death, she engaged in temperance work in the United States. At the outbreak of the South African War in 1899, she became an outspoken critic of British policy. When she learned of the high mortality rate of Boer women and children in British concentration camps, she went to South Africa in 1900 to discover the facts for herself. Her investigations led to a storm of indignation in England. An amelioration of conditions soon followed. A second visit in October 1901 led to her deportation. Nonetheless, Hobhouse returned in 1903 and spent the next five years shaping the education of women and girls in the Orange River Colony (now Free State province).

During World War I, Emily took up further relief work with the destitute and war-ravaged peoples of central Europe, continuing her efforts after the war until ill health forced her to retire. After her death in London, her cremated remains were interred at the foot of the Women and Children’s Memorial in Bloemfontein.

Source Encyclopedia Britannica

Day 59

Katherine Graham

Katherine Graham 1917-2001

Newspaper Publisher

Katharine Graham was born in 1917 into a wealthy New York family. Her father Eugene Meyer, a financier, was Chairman of the Federal Reserve and in 1933 purchased The Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction.

While attending the University of Chicago she became quite interested in labor issues. Upon her graduation, she worked for a short time at a San Francisco newspaper where she helped cover a major strike by wharf workers. Katherine began working for the Post in 1938.

In 1940, she married Philip Graham and took over the Post in 1946. Philip dealt with alcoholism and mental illness throughout their marriage and in 1963 committed suicide.

Katharine assumed the reins of the company and held the title of president and was de facto publisher. She became the first female Fortune 500 CEO in 1972 and the second publisher of a major American newspaper. She had no female role models and had difficulty being taken seriously by many of her male colleagues. The convergence of the women’s movement led her to promote gender equality within her company.

Graham presided over the Post at a crucial time in history. The Post played an integral role in unveiling the Watergate conspiracy, which ultimately led to the resignation of President Nixon. When Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein brought the Watergate story to her, Graham supported their investigative reporting and ran the stories of Watergate when few other news outlets were reporting the matter.

Source Wikipedia

Day 58

Sarojini Naidu

Sarojini Naidu 1879-1949

Political Activist and Poet

Naidu was a political activist, feminist, poet, and the first Indian woman to be president of the Indian National Congress and to be appointed an Indian state governor. She was sometimes called “The Nightingale of India.”

Sarojini was the eldest daughter of Aghorenath Chattopadhyay, a Bengali Brahman who was principal of the Nizam’s College, Hyderabad. She entered the University of Madras at the age of 12 and studied (1895–98) at King’s College, London, and later at Girton College, Cambridge.

After some experience in the suffragist campaign in England, she was drawn to India’s Congress movement and to Mahatma Gandhi’s Noncooperation Movement. In 1924, she traveled in eastern Africa and South Africa in the interest of Indians there and the following year became the first Indian woman president of the National Congress—having been preceded eight years earlier by the English feminist Annie Besant.

In 1928–29, she toured North America, lecturing on the Congress movement. Back in India, her anti-British activity brought her a number of prison sentences. She accompanied Gandhi to London for the inconclusive second session of the Round Table Conference for Indian–British cooperation (1931). Upon the outbreak of World War II she supported the Congress Party’s policies, first of aloofness, then of avowed hindrance to the Allied cause. In 1947, she became governor of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), a post she retained until her death.

Source Wikipedia

Day 57

Empress Dowager Cixi

Empress Dowager Cixi 1835-1908

Chinese Ruler

Cixi was a Chinese empress dowager and regent of the Manchu Yehenara clan, who controlled the Chinese government for 47 years during the late Qing dynasty. She was selected as an imperial concubine of the Xianfeng Emperor. When the emperor died in 1861, she became the Empress Dowager.

She never wanted to adopt the western models about forming a government, but supported technological and military reforms. Cixi even agreed to the so-called Hundred Days’ Reforms she eventually turned them down and put the Guangxu Emperor under house arrest for supporting the reformers who tried to kill her. 

In 1900, when the Boxer Rebellion broke out in northern China, Cixi threw her support to the anti-foreign bands by making a formal declaration of war on the Western powers. During the Battle of Beijing, the entire imperial court evacuated to Xi’an as the allied forces invaded the city.

After the fall of the city, the Eight-Nation Alliance negotiated a treaty with the Qing government, and sent messages to Cixi in Xi’an. Cixi decided that the terms were generous enough for her to acquiesce and stop the war.

In 1902, the whole court made a ceremonial return to Beijing, where Cixi implemented sweeping reforms. She sent high officials to Japan and Europe to gather facts and draw up plans for sweeping administrative reforms.

Ironically, Cixi sponsored the implementation of the New Polices, a program more radical than the one proposed by the reformers she had beheaded in 1898.

She died in 1908 in Beijing. Some 100 years after her death, researchers concluded that the cause of her death was acute arsenic poisoning.

Source Wikipedia

Day 56

Maria Bochkareva

Maria Bochkareva 1889-1920

Russian Army Officer

Bochkareva was a Russian soldier who fought in World War I. She was the first Russian woman to command a military unit.

At the outbreak of World War I, she joined the army and began front-line duty receiving a decoration for rescuing fifty wounded soldiers.

After recovering from wounds, she returned to the front as a corporal. She suffered another injury but returned to the front as a senior non-commissioned officer. She was discharged in the spring of 1917.

After the abdication of the Tsar, she proposed the creation of an all-female combat unit to fix the Army's morale problem. Bochkareva's 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death, was comprised of around 300 women, which were sent to the Russian western front where she was promoted to the rank of lieutenant.

Taking a message to a general in the White Army, she was detained by the Bolsheviks and scheduled to be executed. A soldier convinced the Bolsheviks to stay her execution. Allowed to leave the country, Bochkareva travelled to the United States.

Bochkareva went to New York City, where she dictated her memoirs, Yashka: My Life As Peasant, Exile, and Soldier. In Washington, D.C., she met with President Woodrow Wilson. Then she traveled to Great Britain where she was granted an audience with King George V.

Back in Russia in 1919, she tried to form a women's medical detachment, but was recaptured by the Bolsheviks and interrogated. Ultimately, against Lenin's orders, she was shot as an "enemy of the working class.”

Source Wikipedia

Day 55

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison 1931-2019

Novelist

Chloe Anthony Wofford "Toni" Morrison was an African-American novelist, essayist, editor, teacher, and professor emeritus at Princeton University. Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, her parents instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through telling traditional African-American folktales and ghost stories and singing songs.

Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 and went to graduate school at Cornell University. In the late 1960s, she became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City. In the 1970s and 1980s, she developed her own reputation as an author, and her perhaps most celebrated work, Beloved, was made into a 1998 film.

Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Also that year, she was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

In May 2011, Morrison received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Rutgers University where she delivered a speech on the "Pursuit of life, liberty, meaningfulness, integrity, and truth."

In 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

Source Wikipedia

Day 54

Elinor Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom 1933 – 2012 

Political Economist 

Ostrom was an American political scientist.

She earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s, and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California. There she met Vincent Ostrom, and the couple married in 1963. Her first academic appointment was at Indiana University at Bloomington, where she remained in the political science department as an assistant professor from 1965 to 1984 ultimately becoming the department chair. She was the first female to hold this post.

In addition, she cofounded the university’s Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis. Ostrom later served as a professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science. She was a founding co-director of the university’s Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change. She also was a research professor and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Institutional Diversity at Arizona State University at Tempe.

Throughout her career Ostrom was a consultant for various entities, including the State of California Local Government Reform Task Force 1973–74.

In 2009, Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their work in the area of economic governance, the ways economic systems and hierarchical organizations operate outside the market. She was the first woman to win the economics prize. Ostrom focused on ways in which resources such as forests, irrigation systems, and oil fields can be managed without government regulation or privatization.

Source Encyclopedia Britannica

Day 53  

Mary Somerville

Mary Somerville 1780-1872 

Science Writer and Polymath

Mary's parents saw no need to provide an education for their daughter, so they sent her to a school where she was taught needlework. Mary began to educate herself by reading every book that she could find.

Mary married when she was 24 years old and gave birth to two sons. On the death of her husband, she met William Wallace, a professor of mathematics at the Royal Military College, he strongly encouraged her in her studies of mathematics and science. In 1812, Mary married William Somerville who also supported his wife's desire to study.

Somerville published her first paper The Magnetic Properties of the Violet Rays of the Solar Spectrum in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1826.

In 1827, Lord Brougham requested that Mary translate Laplace's Mécanique Céleste. She went far beyond a translation, explaining in detail the mathematics used by Laplace.

In 1834, Mary published The Connection of the Physical Sciences. She proposed a hypothetical planet perturbing Uranus, which lead astronomers to the discovery of Neptune.

Mary wrote many works. Most important of her later publications was Physical Geography, her most successful text used until the beginning of the 20^th century in schools and universities.

Somerville was a strong supporter of women's education and suffrage. Somerville College in Oxford was named after her in 1879 because of her strong support for women's education.

“Her grasp of scientific truth in all branches of knowledge, combined with an exceptional power of exposition made her the most remarkable woman of her generation.”  John Stuart Mill.

Source School of Mathematics and Statistics
University of St Andrews, Scotland

Day 52

Yeshe Tsogyal

Yeshe Tsogyal 757-817

Mother of Tibetan Buddhism

Yeshe Tsogyal, born in eighth century Tibet, was the founding Mother of Tibetan Buddhism and the foremost female master of Tibetan Tantra. It is believed she was an incarnation of Dorje Phagmo and was chosen by Guru Padmasambhava to help establish the Buddhist teachings in Tibet. She is considered an enlightened figure who intentionally took birth to benefit beings. She is also viewed as a role model for those seeking enlightenment, especially through the tantric path. Her life story recounts her very tangible struggles on the path and her ultimate victory—overcoming dualistic thought and compassionately benefiting countless beings. As a teacher, she used her own life story to instruct and nurture her disciples so they could learn how to attain their own enlightenment.

On an abstract level, Yeshe Tsogyal represents the enlightened feminine. Her archetype is that of the heroine who fuses the absolute and the relative into a seamless enlightened existence. In the Mother Essence Lineage, Yeshe Tsogyal and her incarnations and emanations are of primary importance, because she is the Mother of Vision, and therefore the Mother of non-dual experience. Although Yeshe Tsogyal is often referred to as Guru Rinpoche’s consort, the two are in fact simultaneous manifestations of the integrated principles of skillful means and sublime knowing.

An example of her teaching: “When you understand the dualistic mind, there will be no separation from me. May my good wishes fill the sky.”

Source Awaken Past Teachers

Day 51

Gertrude Ederle

Gertrude Ederle 1906-2003

Swimming Champion

Gertrude Ederle was born on October 29, 1905, in Manhattan, New York, the daughter of German immigrants. Her father taught her to swim at an early age. The sport was becoming increasingly popular with the evolution of a bathing suit that made it easier to slip through the water. At 12 years of age, she joined the Women’s Swimming Association in Manhattan, where she could swim for $3.00 a year.

That same year, she set her first world record in the 880-yard freestyle, becoming the youngest world record holder in swimming history. She set eight more world records after that. In total, Ederle held 20 US national and world records from 1921 to 1925. At the 1924 Summer Olympics, Ederle won a gold medal in the 400-meter freestyle relay and bronze medals for the 200-meter freestyle and 400-meter freestyle.

In 1925, Ederle turned professional and the Women’s Swimming Association sponsored her attempt at swimming the English Channel. At that time, only five men had been able to accomplish the task. On August 6, 1926, she became the first woman to swim across the English Channel, doing it in 14 hours and 34 minutes. The record stood until Florence Chadwick, in 1950, swam the channel in 13 hours and 20 minutes.

Source Wikipedia

Day 50

Helen Gwynne-Vaughan

Helen Gwynne-Vaughan 1879-1967

Pioneering RAF commandant and Botanist

Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, a British botanist who was the head of women's services in both world wars. She combined an academic career with distinguished military service.

Receiving her degree in botany in 1904, Gwynne-Vaughan taught at various London colleges while studying for her doctorate, which she received in 1907. In 1909, she became the head of the botany department at Birkbeck College in London. Early in her career, she was active in the University of London Suffrage Society, which she founded with Louisa Garrett Anderson. She married D.T. Gwynne-Vaughn in 1911.

During World War I, Gwynne-Vaughan served as joint chief controller of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in France, and then as a commandant in the Women's Royal Air Force (1918–19). Returning to Birkbeck College in 1921, she served as a member of the Royal Commission on Food Prices in 1924.

At the onset of World War II in 1939, she was appointed the first director of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, although disagreements with senior officers brought about her forced resignation in 1942. She returned to Birkbeck College, where she remained until 1944.

Gwynne-Vaughan published many scientific studies, two textbooks on fungi, and authored an autobiography, Service with the Army (1942). She was named Dame of the British Empire (DBE) in 1919 and Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE) in 1926.

Source Wikipedia

Day 49

Marie Marvingt

Marie Marvingt 1875-1963 

French Athlete and Journalist 

Marvingt was a French athlete, mountaineer, aviator, and journalist. When Marie's mother died, the fourteen-year-old found herself in charge of the household, and the family moved to Nancy, where she remained for the rest of her life.

Her father was a local billiards and swimming champion. He shared his love of sports with Marie. By the age of four, she could swim 4 kilometers. She grew to also enjoy many other sports. In 1890, at the age of 15, she canoed over 400 kilometers from Nancy to Koblenz, Germany. Marie was the first woman to climb many of the peaks in the French and Swiss Alps.

During World War I, she disguised herself as a man and served on the front lines. Marie was discovered and sent home but later participated in military operations with the Italians. She also served as a Red Cross surgical nurse and a war correspondent.

In 1915, Marvingt became the first woman in the world to fly combat missions over German-held territory and she received the Croix de guerre (Military Cross). Between the two World Wars she worked as a journalist, war correspondent, and medical officer with French Forces in North Africa. While in Morocco, she came up with the idea of using metal skis for air ambulances so that they could land on desert sand.

In World War II, she resumed work as a Red Cross nurse with the rank of corporal and she continued her promotion of the ambulance-airplane. Marie also founded and maintained a home for wounded aviators.  

Source Wikipedia

Day 48

Lise Meitner

Lise Meitner 1878-1968

Austrian Physicist

Lise Meitner was born November 7, 1878 in Vienna Austria-Hungary. She loved math and science and at age 8 recorded her earliest research in a notebook kept under her pillow. She was particularly interested in studying the colors of an oil slick, thin films and reflected light. She became the second woman to obtain a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna in 1905.

As a physicist, Meitner worked on radioactivity and nuclear physics. Otto Hahn, Otto Robert Frisch and Lise led a small group of scientists who first discovered nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra neutron. Their research helped to pioneer nuclear reactors to generate electricity as well as the development of nuclear weapons during World War II.

Meitner spent most of her career as a physics professor in Berlin. She was the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany. In the 1930s, she lost her position because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany. In 1938 she fled to Sweden and became a Swedish citizen.

Meitner received many awards and honors late in her life but the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for nuclear fission was awarded exclusively to her long-time collaborator Otto Hahn. Several scientists and journalists have called her exclusion unjust. In 1992 the scientific community posthumously honored Lise by naming the chemical element 109 meitnerium after her.

Source Wikipedia

Day 47

Indira Gandhi

Indira Gandhi 1917-1984 

Indian Prime Minister 

Indira Priyararshini Gandhi was born November 19, 1917 and was the daughter of Jawaharial Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India.  She served as her father’s personal assistant and hostess during his tenure as Prime Minister between 1947 and 1964.

Indira was elected President of the Indian National Congress in 1959 and upon her father’s death in 1964, was appointed as a member of the Rajua Sbha [upper house]. She became a member of Lal Bahadur Shastri’s cabinet as Minister of Information and Broadcasting. In the Congress Party’s parliamentary election in early 1966, she defeated her rival to become leader, and thus she became Prime Minister of India.

As Prime Minister, Gandhi was known for her political intransigency and unprecedented centralization of power. She went to war with Pakistan in support of the independence movement and war of independence in East Pakistan. That resulted in an Indian victory and the creation of Bangladesh as well as increasing India’s influence to the point where it became the regional hegemon of South Asia. In a response to a call for revolution, she instituted a state of emergency from 1975 to 1977 where basic civil liberties were suspended and the press was censored. Widespread atrocities were carried out during the emergency. In 1980, she returned to power after free elections, but was assassinated by two of her bodyguards and Sikh nationalists in 1984.

In 1999, Indira Gandhi was named “Woman of the Millennium” in an online poll organized by the BBC.

Source Wikipedia

Day 46

Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper 1906-1992 

Computer Scientist

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was born in New Your City on December 9, 1906. She attended Vassar College and earned a Ph.D in mathematics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College.

Hopper attempted to enlist in the Navy during World War II but was rejected because she was 34 year old. Undaunted, she joined the Navy reserves.

She began her computing career in 1944 when she worked on the Harvard Mark I team. In 1949 she joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and was part of the team that developed the UNIVAC I computer. While there, she began developing the compiler. She believed that a programming language based on English was possible.  Her compiler converted English terms into machine code. By 1952, Hopper had finished her program linker for the A-O System.

In 1954, Eckert-Mauchly chose Hopper to lead their department for automatic programming. She led the release of FLOW-MATIC and in 1959 the COBOL language.

In 1966, she retired from the Naval Reserve but was recalled to active duty in 1967. She retired again in 1986 as a Navy rear admiral. The U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper was named after her as was the CrayXE6 “Hopper” supercomputer at NERSC. During her lifetime, she was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities across the world. She died in 1992 at age 85 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. On November 22, 2016, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

Source Wikipedia

Day 45

Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou 1928-2014 

Poet and Civil Rights Advocate 

Maya was an American poet, singer, memoirist, and civil rights activist. From a young age she was tossed back and forth between family members. She was raped at the age of 8 by her mother’s boyfriend, and became mute for five years. At the age of 17, she gave birth to a son.

The details of Angelou’s life tend to be inconsistent and sketchy. Especially when it came to the number of husbands and numerous occupations. She was a poet, writer, fry cook, sex worker, nightclub dancer, journalist, actress, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies and public television.

Maya is best known for her series of seven autobiographies, which focused on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings tells of her life up to the age of 17. This brought her international recognition and acclaim. She received many awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Maya was active in the Civil Rights Movement and worked with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X. Dr. King asked Angelou to become the northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Jimmy Carter appointed Maya to the Commission for International Woman of the Year. “To know her life story is to simultaneously wonder what on earth you have been doing with your own life and feel glad that you didn’t have to go through half the things she has.”

Quote: “I always wear a hat or a very tightly pulled tie when I write. I suppose I hope by doing that I will keep my brains from seeping out of my scalp and running in great gray blobs down my neck, into my ears, and over my face.”

Source Wikipedia

Day 44

Leona Woods

Leona Woods 1919-1986 

Scientist

Leona graduated from high school at 14 and earned her degree in physics from the University of Chicago when she was 18.

After passing her qualifying exams in chemistry, she went to work for Robert Mulliken. Her doctoral thesis, "On the Silicon Oxide Bands,” prepared under the supervision of Mulliken and Polish chemist Stanisław Mrozowski was accepted in 1943.

In a project led by her mentor Enrico Fermi, Woods was instrumental in the construction and utilization of Geiger counters for analysis during experimentation. She was the only woman present when the world’s first reactor went critical under the stands of the University’s football field in 1942. She worked with Fermi on the Manhattan Project, and supervised the construction and operation of Hanford's plutonium production reactors.

After the war, she became a fellow at Fermi's Institute for Nuclear Studies. She later worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and New York University, where she became a professor in 1962. Her research involved high-energy physics, astrophysics and cosmology.

She became a professor at the University of Colorado, and a staff member at RAND Corporation. In later life she became interested in ecological and environmental issues, and studied climate change. She was a strong advocate of food irradiation as a means of killing harmful bacteria.

Source Wikipedia

Day 43

Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter 1866-1943 

Writer and Scientist 

Born into an upper middle class household, Potter was educated by governesses and grew up isolated from other children. She had numerous pets and spent holidays in Scotland and the Lake District, developing a love of landscape, flora, and fauna, all of which she closely observed and painted.

As was common in the Victorian era, women of her class were privately educated and rarely went to university. However, her study and watercolors of fungi led to her being widely respected in the field of mycology. In her thirties, Potter self-published the highly successful children's book The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Following this, she began writing and illustrating children's books full-time.

Beatrix Potter was interested in every branch of natural science save astronomy. Potter was eclectic in her tastes: collecting fossils, studying archeological artifacts from London excavations, and pursued entomology. In all these areas she drew and painted her specimens with increasing skill. By the 1890’s, her scientific interests centered on mycology.

Potter was also a canny businesswoman. She made and patented a Peter Rabbit doll, followed by other "spinoff" merchandise over the years, including painting books, board games, wallpaper, figurines, baby blankets, and China tea sets.

She continued to write and illustrate until diminishing eyesight made it difficult to continue. In all, Potter wrote thirty books. She died of complications from pneumonia and heart disease in1943 at Castle Cottage. She left nearly all her property and her book illustrations to the National Trust.

Source Wikipedia

Day 42

Ida Wells

Ida Wells 1862-1931

Advocate and Suffragist

Wells was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. (NAACP).

She was born into slavery in Mississippi and was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. When she was a teenager her parents and her younger brother died of yellow fever. At the age of 24, she wrote, "I will not begin at this late day by doing what my soul abhors; sugaring men, weak deceitful creatures, with flattery to retain them as escorts or to gratify a revenge."

In 1884, a train conductor ordered Wells to give up her seat in the first-class ladies car and move to the smoking car, crowded with other passengers. When Wells refused to give up her seat, the conductor and two men dragged her out of the car. She eventually lost her court case.

Soon she co-owned the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper. Wells’ news reporting covered racial segregation and exposed lynching as a barbaric practice. A white mob destroyed her newspaper office and presses.

In 1891, the Memphis Board of Education dismissed Wells from her teaching post because her articles criticized conditions in the black schools of the region.

Wells married, had a family, and continued to work. She was extremely active in women’s rights and the women’s suffrage movement. Ida established several notable women’s organizations such as the National Afro American Council. She also worked alongside Josephine St Pierre Ruffin and Harriet Tubman who helped found the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.

Source Wikipedia

Day 41

Junko Tabei

Junko Tabei 1939-2016 

Japanese Mountaineer 

Ishibashi Junko was born September 22, 1939 in Fukushima, Japan. She was considered a frail, weak child but nevertheless began mountain climbing at the age of 10, going on a class-climbing trip to Mount Nasu. Although she was interested in doing more climbing, it was an expensive hobby so Tabei made only a few more climbs during her high school years.

From 1958 to 1962, Tabei studied at Showa Women’s University where she joined the mountain climbing club. She also married another climber named Masanobu Takei and they had two children. She also formed the company, Ladies’ Climbing Club: Japan in 1969 with a slogan “Let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves.” During this time she climbed Mount Fuji and the Matterhorn.

By 1975, Tabei’s company formed a team known, as the Japanese Women’s Everest Expedition comprised of 15 members. She helped find sponsors and the team began the expedition early in May. Camping at 6,300 meters, the group was struck by an avalanche and was buried under the snow. Tabei lost consciousness for approximately six minutes until her Sherpa guide dug her out. Twelve days later, on May 16^th, with her Sherpa, Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Everest.

By 1991, Tabei became the first woman to complete the “Seven Summits.” In addition to climbing, she focused on the environmental degradation of Everest caused by the waste left behind by climbing groups and preserving mountain environments. She led and participated in “cleanup” climbs in Japan and the Himalayas.

Source Wikipedia

Day 40

Carrie Champan Catt

Carrie Chapman Catt 1859-1947 

Suffrage Leader 

Catt was a key coordinator of the woman suffrage movement and a skillful political strategist. She revitalized the National American Woman Suffrage Association and played a leading role in its successful campaign to win voting rights for women. Upon ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, she founded the League of Women Voters.

Carrie Clinton Lane was born in1859 in Ripon Wisconsin, the second of three children. At the age of seven, her family moved to rural Charles City, Iowa where she graduated from high school. When Catt graduated from Iowa Agricultural College, she was the only woman. She worked as a schoolteacher and a principal. In 1883, she became one of the first women in the nation appointed superintendent of schools.

In 1885, She married Leo Chapman who unfortunately died the following year of typhoid. After her husband’s death, she returned to Charles City and joined the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association as a professional writer and lecturer. From 1890 to 1892 she served as the Iowa Association organizer. In June, she married George Catt.

She succeeded Susan B Anthony as president of the NAWSA. At a convention in New Jersey, Catt unveiled her “Winning Plan.” Because of her plan and strong leadership, the nineteenth Amendment officially became part of the United States Constitution.

She expanded her interest to world peace and child labor. Honored and praised by countless people, Carrie Chapman Catt died of heart failure at home on March 9, 1947.

Source Wikipedia

Day 39

Alice Milliat

Alice Milliat 1884-1957

French Athlete 

Milliat was a pioneer of women's sport in France and around the world. Her lobbying on behalf of female athletes forced the inclusion of women's events in the Olympic Games.

Milliat, a translator by profession participated in the sport of rowing. She was also an avid  swimmer and hockey player.

A member of Femina Sport, a club founded in 1911, she helped form the Federation Francaise Sportive Feminine in 1917, becoming treasurer and later president. In 1921, she organized the first international women's sporting event in Monte Carlo.

She is credited with applying pressure on the Olympic games to allow more female representation in a broader range of sports, a process that is still ongoing today. Her name is engraved on the pediment of a gymnasium in the 14th arrondissement in Paris, thanks to her contributions to athletics. To this day, the Olympics do not offer an equal slate of men and women's sports. However, Milliat's pressure greatly expanded women’s representation at the Olympics.

In a 1934 interview, Milliat said: "Women's sports of all kinds are handicapped in my country by the lack of playing space. As we have no vote, we cannot make our needs publicly felt, or bring pressure to bear in the right quarters. I always tell my girls that the vote is one of the things they will have to work for if France is to keep its place with the other nations in the realm of feminine sport."

In 1920, Milliat assembled a football (Soccer) team of women from Paris who toured the UK and played on behalf of France in the world’s first internationally recognized women’s football tournament.

In 1934, Milliat spoke to an interviewer from the women's magazine "Independent Woman." In her statement, she advocated for women's suffrage in France. She believed women's suffrage would lead to greater support for women's sports.

Source Wikipedia

Day 38

Amelia Earhart

Amelia Earhart 1897-1937

Aviatrix and member of  Zonta

Amelia was an American aviation pioneer and author.  Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots.

Born in Atchison, Kansas, Earhart developed a passion for adventure at a young age. In 1928, Earhart became the first female passenger to cross the Atlantic by airplane accompanying pilot Wilmer Stultz. In 1932, piloting a Lockheed Vega 5B, Earhart made a nonstop solo transatlantic flight, becoming the first woman to achieve such a feat. She received the United States Distinguished Flying Cross for this accomplishment. In 1935, Earhart became a faculty member at Purdue University as an advisor to aeronautical engineering and a career counselor to women students. She was also a member of the National Women's Party and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.

In 1937, she began a flight around the world. Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan, were reported missing on 2 July near Howland Island in the Pacific. Earhart’s disappearance is one of history’s unsolved mysteries and she was declared dead in absentia in 1939.

In 1938, Zonta International established The Amelia Earhart Fellowship. The $10,000 Fellowships are awarded annually to up to 30 women pursuing Ph.D./doctoral degrees in aerospace applied sciences.

Since the program’s inception, Zonta has awarded 1,603 Amelia Earhart Fellowships totaling more than $10.3 million to 1,174 women representing 73 countries.

Zonta Fellows have gone on to become astronauts, aerospace engineers, astronomers, professors, geologists, business owners, heads of companies, and even Secretary of the US Air Force.

Source Wikipedia & Zonta International

Day 37

Christa McAuliffe

Christa McAuliffe 1948-1986

Teacher and US Astronaut

Sharon Christa McAuliffe was born on September 2, 1948. She was an American teacher and astronaut from Concord, New Hampshire, and one of the seven-crew members killed in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986.

She came from a family of many teachers. From a young age, she was known as Christa, her middle name. Growing up, she was inspired by the Apollo moon landing and Project Mercury. After John Glenn orbited Earth, she commented to a friend that one-day people will go to the moon and she wanted to do that. On her NASA application, McAuliffe said she wanted to partake since she watched the “Space Age” being born.

She was married in 1970 to her longtime boyfriend. They moved closer to Washington, D.C. so that he could attend law school at George Town University. They had two children.

She started teaching US History in 1970 at a junior high school in Maryland. After receiving her Master of Arts in education supervision and administration in 1978, they moved to New Hampshire where she continued to teach.

In 1985, she was selected from more than 11,000 applicants to participate in the “NASA Teacher in Space Project.” On January 28, 1986, about to become the first teacher in space, the Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart killing her at the age of 37. In 2004, she was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor by President George Bush.

Source Wikipedia

Day 36

Dorothy Harrison

Dorothy Harrison Eustis 1886-1946 

Dog breeder and Philanthropist

In 1906, her husband died making her a 29-year-old widow with two young children, ages 1 and 8. She returned to Philadelphia and in 1923, married George Eustis.

Shortly after their wedding, the couple rented a chalet in the Swiss Alps and started breeding German shepherds to work as police dogs. To help them with their project, they hired Elliot "Jack" Humphrey, a self-taught geneticist and animal trainer. She founded The Seeing Eye, Inc., the first dog guide school for the blind in the United States. Humphrey would later be instrumental in developing the method for training dogs, as well as students, at The Seeing Eye.

For the first three years of its existence, The Seeing Eye had no permanent facility, so trainers traveled to different cities to hold their classes. In 1931, Eustis purchased a ten-bedroom mansion in Whippany, New Jersey with enough room to house students while they were learning to work with their dogs. The school relocated to a newly constructed, and more user-friendly facility in Morristown in 1966.

Eustis continued to play an active role in the affairs of The Seeing Eye until 1940, when she resigned as president and took on the role of a member of the board of trustees. By then she had also become increasingly more devoted to Christian Science, and had begun a Christian Science healing practice. Eustis continued the practice until 1945, the year before she died.

She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2011.

Source Wikipedia

Day 35

Anne Frank

Anne Frank 1929-1945 

Holocaust Victim and Diarist 

Annelies Marie “Anne” Frank was a world-famous German-born diarist and World War II Holocaust victim.

Fleeing Nazi persecution of Jews as a teenage girl, her family moved to Amsterdam and later went into hiding.

In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. As Frank later wrote, "After May 1940, the good times were few and far between; first there was the war, then the capitulation and then the arrival of the Germans, which is when the trouble started for the Jews." Beginning in 1940, the Nazis imposed anti-Jewish measures. Jews were required to wear a yellow Star of David at all times and observe a strict curfew.

In July 1942, the Frank family went into hiding for two years, never once stepping outside the dark, damp, sequestered portion of the building. During this time, Frank wrote about her experiences and wishes in the renowned work, The Diary of Anne Frank which has been read by millions.

In 1944, German secret police and four Dutch Nazis stormed into their Secret Annex. The family was shipped off to a concentration camp in the middle of the night and transferred to Auschwitz, Poland.

After months of hard labor, Anne was transferred to Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Germany where food was scarce, sanitation awful, and disease rampant. She caught typhus in the spring of 1945 and died a few weeks before British soldiers liberated the German concentration camp. Anne was just 15 years old at the time of her death, one of more than 1 million Jewish children who died in the Holocaust.

Source Wikipedia

Day 34

Madeline Albright

Madeline Albright 1937-present 

Politician and Diplomat

Madeline Jana Korbel Albright was born Marie Jana Korbelova in 1937. She immigrated to the United States from Czechoslovakia in 1948. She and her family lived in Denver and eventually in 1957 she became an American citizen. She attended Wellesley College and received a PhD from Columbia.

After graduating from Columbia, she became an aid to a senator. She then worked on the National Security Council until 1981 when President Jimmy Carter left office. Albright then joined the faculty of Georgetown University. After Clinton’s win in 1992 for the presidency, she helped assemble his National Security Council. In 1993, he appointed her as US Ambassador to the United Nations. She stayed there until 1997 then became the first female to be the United States Secretary of State, serving from 1997 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton.

After her term as Secretary of State was completed, she founded the Albright Group, an international strategy consulting firm. It was to engage in private fund management related to emerging markets. She then served on the Board of Directors for the New York Stock Exchange. Albright also serves on many other boards such as the Council on Foreign Relations, Commission of Legal Empowerment of the Poor, Council of Women World Leaders and many others. She has even guest starred on several television shows.

Source Wikipedia

Day 33

Julia Child

Julia Child 1912-2004 

Chef and Television Personality

Julia Carolyn McWilliams Child was an American chef, author and television personality. She is recognized for bringing French cuisine to the American public in the early 1960s.

She was born in Pasadena, California where she went to boarding school and attended Smith College graduating in 1934 as a history major.

Julia wanted to join the Women’s Army Corps during World War II, but at six feet two, she was too tall. She ended up joining the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, DC where she eventually became a top-secret researcher. She assisted a team of developers of shark repellent. It was to minimize the risk to stranded aviators and sailors in the water.

In 1944, she was stationed in Ceylon and a year later she went to Kunming, China where she ended up meeting her husband. They were married in 1946 and shortly after, his job took them to Paris.

While they were in Paris and her husband was at work she wanted to attend the Cordon Bleu. Two of Julia’s friends convinced Julia to make a cookbook. In 1962, after many attempts, “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” was published.

When her husband retired from the government service in 1961, they moved to Massachusetts where she continued to write cookbooks and eventually had her own cooking show. In the next 20 years she ended up being the star of several cooking shows, always known for using lots of butter and cream. She brought the shallot to the American housewife.

Source Wikipedia

Day 32

Alice Paul

Alice Paul 1885-1977 

Suffragist 

Alice was born into a Quaker family in New Jersey. After two years with the National American Woman Suffrage Association she cofounded the Congressional Union and then formed the National Woman’s party in 1916.

Paul worked as a caseworker for a London settlement house, where she served her apprenticeship for what became her vocation: the struggle for women’s rights. Her education as an activist was acquired through a series of arrests, imprisonments, hunger strikes and forced feedings. She learned how to generate publicity for her cause and how to capitalize on that publicity.

Upon her return to the United States, she earned a PhD in sociology. In 1912, she launched her full time suffrage career. She led demonstrations and was subject to imprisonment as she sought a voting amendment. Her actions helped bring about the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Paul continued to push for equal rights and worked from National Woman’s party headquarters in Washington D.C. until her later years.

Throughout her life, Alice Paul remained personally conservative and professionally demanding of both herself and her colleagues. She stated: “I think if we get freedom for women, then they are probably going to do a lot of things that I wish they wouldn’t do, but that isn’t our business to say what they should do with it. It is our business to see that they get it.”

Source Wikipedia

Day 31

Marie Van Brittan Brown

Marie Van Brittan Brown 1922-1999 

Inventor of Closed Circuit TV

Marie Van Brittan Brown was born October 30, 1922 in the Jamaica neighborhood of Queens, New York.

The crime rate in her neighborhood was very high and working as a nurse, she would come home at irregular hours. Wondering who was on the other side of her door was always something Brown feared.

Driven by the time it took the police to arrive in her neighborhood, Brown and her husband invented the first home security system. Brown’s system had a set of three peepholes. At the opposite side of the door, a camera was attached with the ability to slide up and down to allow a person to see through each peephole. Also, the resident could unlatch the door by remote control. The system included a device that enabled a homeowner to use a television to view the person at the door and hear the caller’s voice. The system allowed the monitor to be in a different room; all of this was possible via a radio controlled wireless system. If the person viewing the images on the monitor did not feel safe, they could press a button that would send an alarm to police or security.

The invention was the first closed-circuit television security system and Brown and her husband were able to patent it in 1966, the first patent of its kind.  Fifty years later, her invention is still being used by smaller businesses and living facilities.

Source Wikipedia

Day 30

Mary Seacole

Mary Seacole 1805-1881 

Jamaican Business Woman and Nurse

In her late forties, Mary travelled from her home in Jamaica to Britain to offer her services as a nurse during the Crimean War (1853-56). A woman of mixed-race with a Jamaican mother and Scottish father, she dealt with prejudice and impediments her whole life.

Funding her own passage to the Crimea, Mary established the British Hotel near Balaclava. She described this as "a mess-table and comfortable quarters for sick and convalescent officers." Coming from a tradition of Jamaican and West African “doctresses," Seacole used herbal remedies to nurse soldiers back to health. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991. In 2004 she was voted the greatest black Briton.

When the Crimean War broke out, she was one of two nurses to tend the wounded, along with Florence Nightingale. Hoping to assist, Seacole applied to the War Office but was refused, so she travelled independently and set up her hotel and tended the battlefield wounded.

After her death, she was largely forgotten for almost a century, but today is celebrated as a woman who made a success of her career despite experiencing racial prejudice. Her autobiography, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (1857), is one of the earliest autobiographies of a mixed-race woman, although present-day supporters of Nightingale have questioned some aspects of its accuracy.

Source Wikipedia & History Extra

Day 29

Ethel Smyth

Ethel Smyth 1858-1944 

Composer and Suffragist

Dame Ethel Mary Smyth was born in 1858 in Sidcup, United Kingdom. She loved music but her father, John Hall Smyth, a General in the Royal Artillery, was very much opposed to her making it a career.

After a major battle with her father, Smyth was allowed to attend the Leipzig Conservatory where she studied composition and had the opportunity of meeting Dvorak, Grieg, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. She became a composer and her extensive work included works for the piano, chamber music, orchestral works, choral works, and operas. Her opera, The Wreckers is considered by some critics to be the “most important English opera composed during the period between Purcell and Britten.” Another of her operas, Der Wald was for more than a century the only opera by a woman composer ever produced at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

In 1910, Smyth joined the Women’s Social and Political Union, a suffrage organization, giving up music for two years to devote herself to the cause. In 1911, The March of the Womenbecame the anthem of the women’s suffrage movement.

In recognition of her work as a composer and writer, Smyth was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1922 becoming the first female composer to be awarded the honor. On her seventy-fifth birthday her work was celebrated in the presence of the Queen. Heartbreakingly, she was already completely deaf and could hear neither her own music nor the adulation of the crowds.

However, she found a new interest in literature and, between 1919 and 1940, she published ten highly successful mostly autobiographical books.

Source Wikipedia

Day 28

Andrea Dworkin

Andrea Dworkin 1946-2005

Radical Feminist and Writer 

Dworkin was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she argued was linked to rape and other forms of violence against women. Her views were widely criticized by liberal feminists. At the same time, she maintained a dialogue with political conservatives, and wrote a topically related book, Right-Wing Women. After suffering abuse from her first husband, she was introduced to radical feminist literature and began writing Woman Hating.

After moving to New York, she became an activist and a writer on several issues eventually publishing 10 books on feminism.

During the late 1970s and 1980s, Dworkin became known as a spokeswoman for the feminist anti-pornography movement, particularly for Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) and Intercourse (1987) which remain her two most widely known books. She considered the pornography industry to be based on turning women into objects for abuse by men. She testified at a federal commission against pornography, leading some stores to withdraw certain magazines from sale, but a court ruled the government's efforts unconstitutional. Critics argued that no causal relationship between pornography and harm to women had been found.

Her book Intercourse has been interpreted as comparing all heterosexual intercourse to rape, but Dworkin disagreed stating that, “Sex must not put women in the subordinate position. It must be reciprocal and not an act of aggression.” Some critics of Dworkin accused her of supporting incest. She subsequently wrote much in opposition to incest. When she said she was drugged and raped in a hotel in 1999, controversy over the truth of the allegations followed. In her later years, she suffered from severe osteoarthritis, which limited her mobility. She died of acute myocarditis at the age of 58.

Source Wikipedia

Day 27

Billie Jean King

Billie Jean King 1943- Present 

Athlete

Billie Jean is an American former World No. 1 professional tennis player. She was born in Long Beach, California to Betty and Bill Moffitt. Billie Jean’s first sport was basketball. She then moved to softball and finally on to tennis.

In 1958, she turned pro, and former women’s tennis great Alice Marble became her coach. She married law student Larry King in 1965. Then in 1966, Billie Jean achieved the goal she set for herself when she became #1 in the world in women’s tennis. She held the #1 ranking for 5 additional years. She was known for her lightening-fast speed, forceful net game and fierce backhand, but this is only half her story.

She was a champion for equal prize money. Billie Jean spearheaded the formation of the Women’s Tennis Association and became the first President. Billie Jean battled proclaimed male chauvinist Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” and beat him.

In the early 70’s, Billie Jean began a secret relationship with a woman and soon found herself publicly known as a lesbian causing her to los all of her endorsement deals. Following her divorce from Larry King in 1987, she found lasting love with Ilana Kloss.

On August 12, 2009, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama for her advocacy work.

Her tireless efforts to fight injustice and discrimination worldwide continue today. On September 22, 2018, it was announced that Billie Jean King and her partner joined the Los Angeles Dodgers ownership group.

Source Wikipedia

Day 26

Maryam Mirzakhani

Maryam Mirzakhani 1977-2017 

Iranian Mathematician 

Maryam Mirzakhani was born on in Tehran, Iran. Growing up, she loved math and in her junior and senior year of high school, won the gold medal for mathematics in the Iranian National Olympiad. She was also the first female Iranian student to win the gold medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong scoring 41 out of 42 points.  The following year, she became the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score.

She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and became a professor at Princeton University and later at Stanford University.

In 2005, Mirzakhani was honored with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics. Thus, she became both the first, and to date, the only woman and the first Iranian to be honored with the award. The award committee sited her work in the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.

Mirzkhani died in 2017, at the age of 40, from cancer. Upon her death several Iranian newspapers, along with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, broke taboo and published her photographs with her hair uncovered, a gesture widely noted in the press and social media. Rouhani said in his message that, “The unprecedented brilliance of this creative scientist and modest human being, who made Iran’s name resonate in the world’s scientific forums, was a turning point in showing the great will of Iranian women and young people on the path towards reaching the peaks of glory and in various international arenas.”

Source Wikipedia

Day 25

Irene Sendler

Irene Sendler 1910-2008 

Social Worker and Humanitarian

At the onset of World War II, the Germans outlawed helping Polish Jews, making it punishable by death including death to their entire family. Sendler realized the danger, but it didn’t stop her from saving the lives of over 2,500 Jewish children.

At school, she was a vocal critic of the system that segregated Jewish pupils from non-Jewish counterparts during classes and lectures.

When Germany invaded Poland, Irena was working for the Polish Social Welfare Department, which barred them from helping any Polish Jews. Irena and some of her co-workers falsified 3000 documents to help Jewish families. Sendler had permission to enter the Warsaw Ghetto, where under the guise of performing sanitation inspections, she smuggled children out in ambulances, trams and even loaded children into packages and suitcases.

Over 2,500 children were smuggled, and at least 400 by Sendler herself. In hopes of one day uniting families, she wrote all the names on a slip of paper she kept at her home.

Sendler was arrested in late 1943 and tortured by the Gestapo, but never named any of her comrades or the children she saved. Unfortunately, she was unable to reunite the families as they had been killed or were missing.

Though she received countless awards, Irena remained humble about her contribution to the Jewish community.

One year before her death at 98, she said: “I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning regardless of religion and nationality.”

Source Wikipedia

Day 24

Benazir Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto 1953-2007 

Prime Minister of Pakistan 

Bhutto was born in Karachi, Pakistan, the child of former premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

After completing her early education in Pakistan, she pursued her higher education in the US at Harvard, and in the UK, at Oxford.

Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 1977 and was placed under house arrest after a military coup overthrew her father's government. One year later, the elder Bhutto was hanged. She inherited her father's leadership of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).

She moved to England in 1984, becoming the joint leader in exile of the PPP. Returning to Pakistan in 1986, she launched a nationwide campaign for open elections.

In 1988, Bhutto was elected prime minister, making her the first ever-female prime minister of a Muslim nation.

While in self-imposed exile in Britain and Dubai, she was convicted in 1999 of corruption and sentenced to three years in prison. She continued to direct her party from abroad.

After President Musharraf granted her amnesty on all corruption charges, Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 2007. Tragically, Bhutto's homecoming rally was hit by a suicide attack, killing 136 people. She called for Musharraf's resignation four days later. Bhutto was killed when an assassin fired shots and then blew himself up after an election campaign rally on December 2007. The attack also killed 28 others and wounded at least another 100.

Source Wikipedia

Day 23

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir 1908-1986 

Writer and Philosopher

Simone de Beauvoir was born January 9, 1908 into a bourgeois Parisian family. Her father was a wealthy banker and her mother a legal secretary who once inspired to be an actress.  After World War I ended, the family struggled financially, but as devout Catholics, her parents sent Simone to a prestigious convent school. In her early teens, she lost her faith and remained an atheist for the rest of her life.

After completing an M.A. from the University of Paris, de Beauvoir taught until she could support herself solely on the earnings from her writings.  De Beauvoir wrote novels, biographies, an autobiography, and monographs on philosophy, politics, and social issues.

She became known for being not only a writer, but also an intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist, and social theorist.

Her notable works are She Came to Stay, written in 1943 and The Mandarins, published in 1954. She also is known for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women’s oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.

De Beauvoir was bisexual and her relationships with young women were controversial.  Her license to teach was revoked due to accusations she had seduced a 17 year-old pupil in 1939. In 1977, she and much of the era’s intelligentsia signed a petition to abrogate the age of consent in France.

De Beauvoir died of pneumonia in Paris at the age of 78.

Source Wikipedia

Day 22

Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor Roosevelt 1884-1962 

US Political Figure

A shy, insecure child, Eleanor Roosevelt grew up to become one of the most important and beloved First Ladies.

Born in New York City, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the first of three children. Following the deaths of both parents and one of her brothers before she was ten years old, her harsh and critical maternal grandmother raised her.

In 1899, Roosevelt began her three years at London’s Allenswood Academy. Roosevelt returned to New York for her social debut in 1902. In 1905, after a long courtship, she married her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In 1911, Franklin was elected to the New York State Senate. When World War I broke out, Eleanor volunteered with various relief agencies. She discovered that her husband had an affair, but stayed married and remained his political ally and advisor

Roosevelt promoted the League of Women Voters and the Women’s Trade Union League. Though unhappy about his bid for the governorship and his successful run for the presidency in 1932, Eleanor became the most politically active and influential First Lady in history.

Roosevelt’s political activism did not end with her husband’s death in 1945. She served for more than a decade as a delegate to the United Nations, chaired the UN’s Human Rights Commission, and helped write the 1948 UN’s Declaration of Human Rights. In 1960, at the request of President John F. Kennedy, she chaired the President’s Commission on the Status of Women. Kennedy nominated Roosevelt for the Nobel Peace Prize, but she didn’t win.

Source National Women’s History Museum

Day 21

Sirimavo Bandaranaike

Sirimavo Bandaranaike 1916-2000 

Prime Minister of Sri Lanka

Sirima Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike was born into an aristocratic Kandyan family in Sri Lanka. She was educated in Catholic, English-medium schools, but remained a Buddhist and spoke Sinhala as well as English. On graduating from secondary school, she worked for various social programs before marrying and raising a family.

She married S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who was to become Prime Minister, and gained his trust as an informal advisor.

In 1941, Sirimavo joined the Sri Lanka Women's Association, the country's largest women's voluntary organization. As secretary of the organization, she met with farming experts to develop new methods for increasing rice yields. Over time, Bandaranaike became president of Mahila Samiti, focusing on issues of girl's education, women's political rights, and family planning.

Following her husband’s assassination in 1959, she was elected Prime Minister of Ceylon in 1960, becoming the world's first non-hereditary female head of government in modern history.

She attempted to reform the former British Colony of Ceylon into a socialist republic by nationalizing organizations. Surviving a coup d’état in 1962, Sirimavo oversaw the drafting of a new constitution and the formation of the Sri Lankan republic in 1972. In 1975 she also created the Sri Lankan Ministry of Women and Child Affairs.

Ousted from power in the 1977 elections and upon losing the election for President in 1988, she served as Leader of the Opposition until 1994. Her daughter won the presidential election in 1994, and Sirimavo was appointed to her third term as Prime Minister at which she served until her retirement in 2000, two months prior to her death.

Source Wikipedia

Day 20

Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathal 1940-2011 

Environmental Activist 

Maathai was born in the village of Ihithe in the colony of Kenya. Her family was Kikuyu and had lived in the area for several generations.

She attended primary school in the village and at age 11 moved to a boarding school in Nyeri. In 1960, she became one of 300 Kenyans selected by the Joseph P Kennedy Foundation to study in the U.S. Continuing her studies for a MA in Biology at the University of Pittsburgh; she first experienced environmental restoration issues when locals pushed to rid the city of air pollution.

After becoming the 1^st Eastern African woman to receive a PhD, she taught at the University of Nairobi and campaigned for equal benefits for female staff.

Over the years, she became a renowned social, environmental and political activist. In 1977, she founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women’s rights. She was elected as a Member of Parliament and served as assistant minister for Environment and Natural resources.

In 2004, Maathal was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace.  She became the first African woman and environmentalist to win the prize.   She died on September 25, 2011 of complications from ovarian cancer.

Source Wikipedia

Day 19

Sacagawea

Sacagawea 1788-1812 

Shoshone Interpreter

Sacagawea was born into the Lemi Shoshone tribe near Salmon, Idaho. When she was about 12 years old, she and several other girls were kidnapped by a group of Hidatsa and held captive in their village. At about age thirteen, she was sold into a nonconsensual marriage to Toussaint Charbonneau, a Quebecois trapper.

In 1804-05, Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, needing an interpreter and guide to take them up the Missouri River; hired Charbonneau as his wife spoke Shoshone.

In April, the expedition headed up the Missouri River. On May 14, Sacajawea rescued supplies, journals and records of Lewis and Clark from a capsized boat. She was praised for her quick action and the Sacagawea River named in her honor. Stopping at a Shoshone tribe to trade for horses to cross the Rocky Mountains, Sacagawea found that the Chief was her brother. He sold them horses and provided guides to take them over the mountains. As the expedition approached the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Coast, Sacagawea gave up her beaded belt to enable the captains to trade for a fur robe they wished to give to President Thomas Jefferson.

On the return trip, she advised Clark of easier routes through Yellowstone River basin, which would later become the route for the Northern Pacific Railway to cross the continental divide.

It is believed that Sacagawea died in 1812 at the age of 25 of an unknown illness.

Source Wikipedia

Day 18

Wilma Rudolph

Wilma Rudolph 1940-1994 

US Olympic Champion 

Rudolph overcame long odds to become one of the world's best-known athletes.

She was born premature into a large family. As a child, she had polio, scarlet fever, and pneumonia; leaving her left leg partially deformed.

At age 16, Wilma competed for and won a spot on the U.S. Olympic Team. Her 4x100-meter relay won the bronze medal at the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, Australia.

At the 1960 Olympics in Rome, she became the first American woman—white or black—to win three gold medals in one Olympics. She was named the Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year.

Her return home to Tennessee was a momentous occasion. The governor wanted to have a victory parade for her, but Rudolph wouldn't allow it unless restrictions on people's skin color were eliminated. The governor agreed, and the parade was the first integrated event in Clarksville.

Rudolph remained a public figure, working to help young athletes get better and to improve the rights of African-Americans. She worked as a track coach at DePauw University and created the Wilma Rudolph Foundation to help young athletes. She was voted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame, the Black Athletes Hall of Fame and the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame. She was also a sports commentator. In 1963, she married Robert Eldridge; they had four children.

Sadly, she died of brain cancer in 1994. She was just 54.

Source Wikipedia

Day 17

Helen Keller

Helen Keller 1880-1968 

Political Activist and Lecturer

Helen Adams Keller was born in 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama. When she was 19 months old, she contracted an unknown illness possibly scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness left her both deaf and blind. She described it as “at sea in a dense fog.”

When she was six years old, her mother contacted the Perkins Institute for the Blind and they put her in touch with Anne Sullivan. It was the beginning of a 49-year long relationship. Anne was vital in Helen's learning of language and communication and used finger spelling of words into Helen's hand for months to teach her words. The age of her illness gave her some advantages when learning as compared to children born deaf and blind.

In 1904, Helen graduated from Harvard University at the age of 24 and was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She is remembered as an advocate for people with disabilities, suffragette, pacifist, radical socialist, and birth control supporter.

In 1915, she co-founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization, which is devoted to research in vision, and nutrition. In 1920, she helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Keller was considered a radical at the beginning of the 20th century, and as a consequence, her political views have been forgotten or glossed over in the popular mind.

Keller was a member of the Socialist Party and actively campaigned and wrote in support of the working class from 1909 to 1921. Many of her speeches and writings were about women's right to vote and the impacts of war.

Source Wikipedia

Day 16

Cut Nyak Dhien

Cut Nyak Dhien 1848-1908

National Hero of Indonesia

Cut Nyak Dhien was born into an Islamic aristocratic family in Indonesia. She was educated in religion and household matters. Renowned for her beauty, many men proposed to her until her parents arranged for her marriage to Teuku Cek Ibrahim Lamnga, the son of an aristocratic family, when she was twelve.

In 1873 during the Aceh Waragainst the Dutch, Dhien and her baby, along with other mothers, were evacuated to a safer location while her husband Ibrahim Lamnga fought to reclaim power. He died in action in 1878 and upon hearing this, she swore revenge against the Dutch, leading guerrilla actions 25 years.

In 1880, she married an Acehnese hero Teuku Umar. Although she rejected him at first, she accepted his proposal when Umar allowed her to continue fighting. This greatly boosted the morale of Aceh armies in their fight against the Dutch infidel. TeukuUmar and Cut Nyak Dhien had a daughter together named Cut Gambang. Dhien was very determined to stay in the war so she took her dau mom ghter with her.

After her second husband died, Cut Nyak Dhien continued to resist the Dutch with her small army until its destruction in 1901. Cut Nyak Dhien suffered from nearsightedness and arthritis as she got older, which made her fighting harder. The number of her troops kept decreasing and they suffered from a lack of supplies.

She was posthumously awarded the title of National Hero of Indonesia on May 2, 1964 by the Indonesian government.

Source Wikipedia

Day 15

Katherine Johnson 1918-present;  Dorothy Vaughan 1910-2008; Mary Jackson 1921-2005

NASA Mathematicians

Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson - She started working for NASA in 1953. She was co-author of a report documenting the trajectory equations for putting a craft into orbit around the Earth. One of the most notable moments of her career was leading up to the orbital launch of John Glenn's flight, which was really a turning point in the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Dorothy Vaughan

Dorothy Vaughan - A mathematician and human computer, she worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and NASA. In 1949, she became acting supervisor of the West Area Computers, the first African-American woman to supervise a group at the center. She prepared for the introduction of machine computers in the early 1960s by teaching herself and her staff the programming language of FORTRAN.

Mary Jackson

Mary Jackson - A mathematician and aerospace engineer who worked at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), and (NASA). She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. She took advanced engineering classes and, in 1958, became NASA's first black female engineer. After 34 years at NASA, Jackson had earned the most senior engineering title available.

The three were the basis for the book and movie, Hidden Figures.

Source NPR & Wikipedia

Day 14

Queen Nzinga

Queen Nzinga 1583-1663

Queen of Angola

Queen Nzinga was a 17th-century queen in what is known as Angola today.

She was greatly favored by her father, who carried her with him to war. She attended strategic war meetings and other governance affairs. She was trained as a warrior and was taught to read and write in Portuguese by visiting missionaries. She grew up during a period when the Atlantic slave trade and the consolidation of power by the Portuguese in the region were growing rapidly. Nzinga assumed power over the kingdoms after the death of her brother. She ruled for 37 years.

Nzinga fought for the freedom and stature of her kingdoms against the Portuguese, who were concentrating their efforts to control the slave trade.

Nzinga converted to Christianity, in order to strengthen the peace treaty with the Portuguese. She adopted the name Dona Anna de Sousa in honor of the governor's wife when she was baptized, who was also her godmother.

Nzinga was clearly aware that being female reduced her legitimacy in the eyes of even her supporters. In the 1640s, Nzinga decided to 'become a man', which is actually a practice many female rulers in central and western Africa used to maintain their power. Nzinga reinforced this maleness by leading her troops personally in battle, and she was quite deft in the use of arms herself.

Today, she is remembered in Angola as the Mother of Angola, the fighter of negotiations, and the protector of her people.

Source Wikipedia

Day 13

Helvi Sipila

Helvi Linnea Aleksa Sipilä 1915-2009

Finnish lawyer

Born in Helsinki, Finland Helvi was among the first women to graduate in law from Helsinki University.

Having established her own law office in 1943, Helvi began her international work with the Girl Guides in the 1950s, then was elected Zonta International President 1968-70. Helvi represented the government of Finland on the Commission on the Status of Women in the UN, and became its chair in 1967. She advanced to chair the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural affairs committee of the general assembly in 1971.

In 1972, she joined the UN secretariat as first female assistant secretary general of the United Nations, and during her tenure organized and chaired the first UN world conference on women, in Mexico in 1975. Helvi used to say that half the world was "found" by Christopher Columbus in the 15th century, but it would take another 500 years before half of humanity was officially recognized. For all practical purposes, she said, women were discovered in 1975 in Mexico City. The conference set targets on securing equal access for women to resources such as education, employment opportunities, political participation, health services, housing, nutrition and family planning.

Helvi's period of leadership lasted until 1980, during which time the "magna carta" of women, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), was finalized. One tool was the UN Voluntary Fund for Women (UNIFEM) which provides assistance to innovative programs to foster gender equality. She held twelve honorary doctorates and was granted the title of Minister in 2001.

The Guardian

Day 12

Susan B Anthony

Susan B Anthony 1820-1906 

American Social Reformer

Susan B. Anthony was a women’s rights activist, who helped women obtain the right to vote. Born in 1820 to a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17.

Also, at 17, she was sent to a boarding school in Philadelphia, but was only able to study for one year because of financial difficulties.

In 1851 she met and became lifelong friends with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the organizers of the Seneca Falls convention supporting women suffrage. Together they passed a bill giving married women the right to own property, enter into contracts, and be joint guardian of their children.

In 1856, she became the New York state agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society in Massachusetts.

In 1872, Anthony was arrested and convicted for voting in her hometown. Although she refused to pay the fine, the authorities declined to take further action. In 1878, Anthony and Stanton arranged for Congress to be presented with an amendment giving women the right to vote. It was ratified as the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.

Anthony traveled extensively in support of women's suffrage, giving as many as 75 to 100 speeches per year. She worked internationally playing a key role in creating the International Council of Women, which is still active. She also brought about the World's Congress of Representative Women at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

She became the first woman to have her portrait appear on US coin.

Source Wikipedia

Day 11

Eva Peron

Eva Perón 1919-1952 

First Lady of Argentina

Maria Eva Duarte de Perón, often referred to as Evita, was the wife of the Argentinian president, Juan Perón and the First Lady of Argentina.

She was born in a small rural area in the Buenos Aires province of Argentina. At age 15, she moved to the capital to pursue a career in film. She met her husband during a charity event and the following year they were married. In 1946, her husband was elected President of Argentina.

Eva became very powerful and ran the Ministries of Labor and Health, founded and ran the charitable Eva Perón Foundation, championed women's suffrage, and founded and ran the nation's first large-scale female political party, the Female Peronist Party.

In 1946, a new women’s suffrage bill was introduced and was approved unanimously in 1947. It established equality of political rights for both men and women and universal suffrage in Argentina.

In 1951, Eva ran for the office of Vice President, a move that angered many military leaders. According to the Argentine Constitution, the Vice President automatically succeeds the President in the event of the President's death. The possibility of Evita becoming president was not something the military could accept. However, she withdrew because of her declining health.

In 1952, shortly before passing away at the age of 33 from cervical cancer, she was given the title “Spiritual Leader of the Nation.” She was given a state funeral upon her death, a prerogative generally reserved for heads of state.

Source Wikipedia

Day 10

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe 1811- 1896

American Abolitionist and Author

Harriet was an American author best known for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written in 1852. She was born in Connecticut, one of 13 children. Her father was a preacher and her mother, a very religious person, passed away when Harriet was only five years old. She attended the Hartford Female Seminary school run by her older sister. There she received a traditional academic education, usually reserved for males at the time, with a focus on the classics, including studies of languages and mathematics.

In 1832, at the age of 21, Beecher moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, to join her father, who had become the president of Lane Theological Seminary. There, she also joined the Semi-Colon Club, a literary salon and social club.

It was in the literary club where she met her husband, Calvin Stowe. He was an ardent critic of slavery, and they supported the Underground Railroad, temporarily housing several fugitive slaves in their home. Most slaves continued north to secure freedom in Canada.

She knew she wanted to write about the problem of slavery and wanted people to hear her thoughts. In 1851, the first installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in The National Era. The book sold 300,000 copies in less than a year.

Towards the end of her life, Mark Twain, a neighbor of hers in Hartford, Connecticut wrote that her mind had decayed. Researchers today believe that she suffered Alzheimer’s disease towards the end of her life. She passed away in 1896.

Source Wikipedia

Day 9

Queen Elizabeth

Queen Elizabeth II 1926-present

Queen of the United Kingdom

She was born Princess Elizabeth of York in 1926, but not as the “crown princess.” Her uncle, King Edward the 8th abdicated his throne in 1936 to her father. When her father passed away in 1952, she became Queen of England. At the time of her coronation, she became the Queen of the United Kingdom and the thirty-five other Commonwealth realms.

Queen Elizabeth married her second cousin once removed, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark in 1947 at Westminster Abby. They have four children together plus eight grandchildren and eight great grandchildren.

She is now the queen regnant of 16 Commonwealth realms.

During the 1960s and 70s she saw an acceleration in the decolonization of Africa in the Caribbean. Over 20 countries gained independence from Britain which was part of a planned transition to self-government.

She has been fond of corgis since she was a small child, having more than 30 since she became queen. She also adores and keeps an interest in horses and horse racing, and has had horses since the age of four - some of her horses have won the Royal Ascot.

Elizabeth has occasionally faced republican sentiments and press criticism of the royal family, in particular after the breakdown of her children's marriages, her annus horribilis in 1992 and the death in 1997 of her former daughter-in-law Diana, Princess of Wales. However, in the United Kingdom support for the monarchy has been and remains consistently high, as does her personal popularity.

She has reigned for 67 years. Queen Elizabeth II is now the longest lived and longest reigning British monarch and world’s longest serving female head of state.

Source Wikipedia

Day 8

Soraya Tarzi 1899-1968

Queen Consort of Afghanistan

Born in Damascus, Syria, Soraya was the first Queen consort of Afghanistanand the wife of King Amanullah Khan. She studied in Syria, learning Western and modern values.

In Afghanistan, she met Prince Amanullah. They married in 1913 and was King Amanullah Khan's only wife, breaking centuries of tradition.

At a public function, King Amanullah said that "Islam did not require women to cover their bodies or wear any special kind of veil". At the conclusion of the speech, Queen Soraya tore off her veil (hejab) in public and the wives of other officials present at the meeting followed this example.

Queen Soraya opened the first school for girls in Kabul. In 1926, at the seventh anniversary of Independence from the British, Soraya said “Independence belongs to all of us and that is why we celebrate it. Do you think, however, that our nation from the outset needs only men to serve it? “

In 1928, the King and Queen received honorary degrees from Oxford University. Other Muslim nations, like Turkey, Iran, and Egypt were on the path to modernization. The British distributed pictures of Soraya without a veil and dining with foreign men. Conservative mullahs and regional leaders took the images to be a flagrant betrayal of Afghan culture, religion, and "honor" of women. When the royal family returned from Europe, they were eventually forced out of office.

In 1929, the King abdicated in order to prevent a civil war and went into exile. Queen Soraya lived in exile for the rest of her life in Rome, Italy, with her family.

Source Wikipedia

Day 7

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1815-1902

Suffragist

Elizabeth was born in 1815 in New York. She is often credited with initiating the first organized women’s rights and suffrage movement in the United States. She was the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association from 1890 until 1892.

When she married in 1940, she insisted that her vows did not state “promise to obey.” She and her husband had seven children.

Before Stanton narrowed her political focus almost exclusively to women's rights, she was an active abolitionist. Unlike many of those involved in the women's rights movement, Stanton addressed various issues pertaining to women beyond voting rights. Her concerns included women's parental and custody rights, property rights, employment and income rights, divorce, the economic health of the family, and birth control. She was also an outspoken supporter of the 19th-century temperance movement.

In 1848, she organized the Seneca Falls Convention, where 68 women and 32 men signed a document call the Declaration of Sentiments. This was the first women’s rights convention.

She opposed giving added legal protection and voting rights to African American men while women, black and white, were denied those same rights. Her position on this issue, together with her thoughts on organized Christianity and women's issues beyond voting rights, led to the formation of two separate women's rights organizations that were finally rejoined, with Stanton as president of the joint organization, about twenty years after her break from the original women's suffrage movement.

She passed away of heart failure in 1902 before women were granted the right to vote in the United States.

Source Wikipedia

Day 6

Shirin Ebadi

Shirin Ebadi 1947 – present

Iranian Political Activist

Born in Hamadan, Iran, Shirin is an Iranian political activist, lawyer, a former judge and founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran.

She was admitted to the law department of the University of Tehran in 1965 and upon graduation, became the first woman judge in Iran. She received her doctorate degree in 1971. In 1975, she became the first woman president of the Tehran city court and served until the 1979 Iranian revolution when Ebadi was demoted to a secretarial position. Clerics had insisted that Islam prohibits women from becoming judges.

On October 10, 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially women's, children's, and refugee rights. She was the first Iranian and the first Muslim woman to receive the prize.

In 2004, she was listed by Forbes magazine as one of the "100 most powerful women in the world."

In 2009, Norway's Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, published a statement reporting that Ebadi's Nobel Peace Prize had been confiscated by Iranian authorities and that "This was the first time a Nobel Peace Prize had been confiscated by national authorities." Iran denied the charges.

Ebadi has been in exile in the UK since June 2009 due to the increase in persecution of Iranian citizens who are critical of the current regime.

Since receiving the Nobel Prize, Ebadi and five other Nobel Laureates, created the Nobel Women's Initiative to promote peace, justice and equality for women.

Source Wikipedia

Day 5

Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai 1997- Present

Pakistani Activist

Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist for female education and a Nobel Prize Laureate. She is known for human rights advocacy, especially the education of women and children in Pakistan, where the local Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school.

Yousafzai was educated mostly by her father, an educational activist himself. In a speech covered by newspapers and television channels, Yousafzai asked her audience, "How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?" In 2009, Yousafzai began working in schools to help young people discuss social issues.

In 2012, while on a bus in the Swat District, Yousafzai was shot by a Taliban gunman in retaliation for her activism. Hit in the head with a bullet, she remained in a coma for over a week. She was transferred to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, UK. The attempt on her life sparked an international outpouring of support. Weeks after the attempted murder, a group of fifty leading Muslim clerics in Pakistan issued a fatwā against those who tried to kill her.

Following her recovery, Yousafzai founded the Malala Fund, a non-profit organization in Birmingham. She co-authored I Am Malala, an international best seller. She was the co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, then the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. In 2017, she was awarded honorary Canadian citizenship and became the youngest person to address the House of Commons of Canada. Yousafzai is currently studying for a bachelor's degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

Source Wikipedia

Day 4

Queen Lili'uokalani

Queen Lili’uokalani 1838-1917

Hawaiian Queen

Liliʻuokalani was the last sovereign monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The composer of "Aloha ʻOe" and numerous other works, she wrote her autobiography Hawaiʻi's Story by Hawaiʻi's Queen during her imprisonment following the monarchy’s overthrow.

She was born in Honolulu, on the island of Oʻahu. She was hānai(informally adopted) at birth by Abner Pākī and Laura Kōnia. Baptized as a Christian and educated at the Royal School, she was proclaimed eligible for the throne by King Kamehameha III. She married American-born John Owen Dominis, who later became the Governor of Oʻahu. In 1877, after her younger brother Leleiohoku II's death, she was proclaimed as heir apparent to the throne. During the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria, she represented her brother as an official envoy to the United Kingdom.

During her reign, she attempted to draft a new constitution which would restore the power of the monarchy and the voting rights of the economically disenfranchised. Pro-American elements in Hawaiʻi overthrew the monarchy on January 17, 1893, aided by the landing of US Marines.

The coup d'état established the Republic of Hawaiʻi, but the annexation of the islands to the United States, was temporarily blocked by President Grover Cleveland. After an unsuccessful uprising to restore the monarchy, the oligarchical government placed the former queen under house arrest. On January 24, 1895, Liliʻuokalani was forced to abdicate the Hawaiian throne, officially ending the monarchy. With the outbreak of the Spanish–American War, the United States annexed Hawaiʻi. Living out the remainder of her later life as a private citizen, Liliʻuokalani died at her residence, in Honolulu.

Source Wikipedia

Day 3

Hannah Kudjoe

Hannah Kudjoe 1918-1986

Activist for Ghana Independence

Hannah Kudjoe was a prominent activist for Ghanaian independence in the 1940s and 1950s. She was one of the first high-profile female nationalists in the movement, and was the National Propaganda Secretary for the Convention People's Party. She was also an active philanthropist and worked to improve women's lives in Northern Ghana.

Born in the Western Region of the Gold Coast (now Ghana), she was the youngest of 10 children. After finishing school, she became a popular dressmaker in Tarkwa, where she lived with her brother, a prominent United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) activist. She was inspired to enter into politics when Kwame Nkrumah stayed at their house in June 1947 and convinced her of the importance of women in politics.

She was very involved in the Committee on Youth Organization within the UGCC and followed them when they split from the UGCC to form the Convention People’s Party (CPP). Kudjoewas heavily involved with Positive Action, a campaign of mass civil disobedience that eventually led to the end of colonial rule. She was an extremely effective organizer, mobilizing many people, including women, to join the CPP.

After independence was won, Kudjoe founded the All-African Women's League in 1957, which later became the Ghana Women's League. She also worked to establish day nurseries and taught women hygiene practices. She also helped distribute food in times of famine, and encouraged women to farm to grow their own food.

Her obituary published on 8 May, 1986 ends: "She was a priceless gem ….. and the vacuum created by her demise in spiritual terms though temporary, will be difficult to fill."

Source Wikipedia

Day 2

Marian de Forest

Marian de Forest 1864-1935

American Journalist and founder of Zonta International

Born in Buffalo, New York, Marian de Forest contributed greatly to her community. She worked as a reporter, drama critic, and editor of the city newspaper. She is best known for writing and producing Little Women, a play based on the Louisa May Alcott novel.

She graduated from Buffalo Seminary in 1884 and became one of the first female reporters in western New York, writing for the Buffalo Evening News and The Buffalo Commercial.

She brought music to children through the Buffalo Music Foundation which she co-founded. Marian was the executive secretary of the Board of Women Managers for the Women’s Pavilion for the 1901 Pan American Exposition. She also played a prominent role in the founding of the Buffalo Philharmonic and was a member of the Boards of the SPCA and Eric County Library Associations.

Marian founded Zonta International, a worldwide women's service club, in Buffalo NY in 1919. Zonta is a service organization of executive women working to improve the legal, political, economic, and professional status of women worldwide. Zonta is a Lakota Sioux Indian word that means "honest and trustworthy." In one of her early speeches, de Forest explained, "Zonta stands for the highest standards in the business and professional world ... seeks cooperation rather than competition and considers the Golden Rule not only good ethics but good business.” “This is the woman's age and in distant lands and foreign climes women of all nations are rallying to the call … Zonta is given the opportunity of uniting them into one great, glorious whole."

Marian de Forest was inducted into the Western New York Women's Hall of Fame and the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

Source Wikipedia

Day 1

Susanne von Bassewitz

Susanne von Bassewitz 

Zonta International President 2018-2020 

Susanne is the 2018-2020 President and CEO of Zonta International and Zonta International Foundation. Susanne lives in Düsseldorf on the Rhine River in Germany with her husband Eberhard.

In 2012, she developed Zonta Says No to Violence Against Women, a campaign that has grown every year and continues today. She started to work on women’s issues when preparing for her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in mass communications research, Roman languages, and philosophy. She is a communications consultant with more than 25 years of experience in corporate communications and brand management. Susanne has worked for major international and publicly held corporations as Director and Vice President of Public Relations.

In addition to her professional endeavors and 25-year long involvement with Zonta International, she has been a frequent lecturer with a focus on communications management at German universities.

Susanne is a member of the Zonta Club of Düsseldorf II, Germany and she has taken the reins at Zonta International at a key time in our history. Our centennial anniversary starts this year on November 8th. Happy Birthday Zonta!  Empowering women for over 100 years through service and advocacy.

We look forward to the 100th anniversary program she has worked on so diligently.

Source Zonta.org