Janet Mock is an American best-selling author, transgender rights activist, sought-after speaker and the founder of #GirlsLikeUs, a social media project that empowers trans women. Mock was born in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1983. She grew up in Hawaii and Oakland, California. Mock knew at an early age that she wanted to become a writer, and …
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress and model. She became one of the world’s biggest and most enduring sex symbols. Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortenson in 1926, in Los Angeles, California. Monroe’s mother, Gladys Pearl Monroe was mentally and financially unprepared for a child, Monroe was placed with foster parents Albert and Ida Bolender …
Toni Morrison was a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist. She was the first Black Woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio to George and Ramah Wofford. Her parents had moved to Ohio to escape southern racism and taught their children about …
Julia Child was an American chef, author, and television personality. She brought French cooking to everyday Americans, with her groundbreaking cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Child was born Julia Carolyn McWilliams in 1912 in Pasadena, California. She was the daughter of John McWilliams, Jr, a Princeton graduate and early investor in California real …
bell hooks is an American author, feminist, and social activist whose work deals with issues of race, gender, class, and sexual oppression. hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a small, segregated town in rural Kentucky. Her experience in growing up within this community shaped her feminism and her father represented …
Gerda Lerner was an American historian, author and the single most influential figure in the development of women’s and gender history since the 1960s. Lerner was born Gerda Hedwig Kronstein in Vienna, Austria in 1920. She was the first child of the affluent Jewish couple Ilona (née Neumann), an artist and Robert Kronstein, a pharmacist. …
Virginia Hall, MBE was an American spy with the British Special Operations Executive during World War II and later with the American Office of Strategic Services and the Special Activities Division of the Central Intelligence Agency. She was “the most dangerous of all Allied spies”. Hall was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1906. She attended …
Syeda Ghulam Fatima is a Pakistani human and labour rights activist, known for her work in ending bonded labour in brick kilns. She is General Secretary of Lahore-based Bonded Labour Liberation Front Pakistan (BLLF). Fatima is the daughter of a trade-unionist and small-scale railway employee Syed Deedar Hussain. She holds a Masters Degree in Political …
Aliya Moldagulova was a sniper during World War II. She is a Hero of the Soviet Union. Moldagulova was born in 1925 in Bulak, Kazakhstan. She lost her parents at a young age. Her mother had been shot in 1931 by a guard patrolling potato fields, her father Nurmukhambet Sarkulov was a victim of the …
Anne Frank was a German-born diarist and writer. Her wartime diary entitled The Diary of a Young Girl is one of the most widely read books in the world. It provides an insight into the lives of Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Frank was born in 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany to Otto Frank and Edith …