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 …
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 …
Nawal El Saadawi is an Egyptian feminist writer, activist, physician and psychiatrist. El Saadawi was born in 1931 in the small village of Kafr Tahla. Her family were a mix of traditional and progressive. At the age of six El Saadawi was pinned down by four women in her home in Egypt and was subjected …
Faith Bandler was an Australian civil rights activist who campaigned for the rights of Indigenous Australians and South Sea Islanders. She is known for her leadership in the 1967 referendum on the rights of Aboriginal Australians. Bandler was born Ida Lessing Faith Mussing in Tumbulgum, New South Wales. Her father, Wacvie Peter Mussing was a …
Mary Carpenter was an English educational and social reformer. She brought education to poor children and young offenders in Bristol who had been previously denied it. Carpenter was born in 1807 in Exeter. In 1817 her family moved to Bristol and her father took charge of the Lewin’s Mead Unitarian meeting house. He also established …
Grace Lee Boggs was an American author, social activist, philosopher and feminist. She fought relentlessly for civil rights, feminism and labor for seven decades and was hugely influential in bringing about social change in Detroit. Boggs (born Grace Chin Lee or Yuk Ping (玉平) to use her Chinese name) was born in Providence, Rhode Island …
Barbara Brenner was a renowned American breast cancer activist and leader of the Breast Cancer Action organisation. Brenner’s activism started at a young age when her mother took her to a Civil Rights march when she was 10 where she heard Martin Luther King, Jr speak. While at Smith College she was active in the …
Claudia Jones was a feminist, black nationalist, political activist, community leader, communist and journalist. She is the founder of Britain’s first black weekly newspaper “The West Indian Gazette” and has been described as the mother of the Notting Hill Carnival. Jones was born Claudia Vera Cumberbatch in Belmont, Port of Spain, Trinidad in 1915. At …
Audrey Hepburn was an actress, style icon and humanitarian. Hepburn was educated in England until, in September 1939 Britain declared war on Germany. Hepburn and her mother relocated to Arnheim in the Netherlands where she attended Arnhem Conservatory and studied ballet in addition to her academic studies. After the Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940, …
Christabel Pankhurst was one of the driving forces of the Suffragette movement, she was a co-founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Pankhurst was born in Manchester in 1880. She was the daughter of radical socialist Dr. Richard Pankhurst and women’s suffrage movement leader Emmeline Pankhurst. Her father had been responsible for drafting …