Ida Van Smith was an African-American pilot and flight instructor who founded a series of flight training clubs for children to encourage their involvement in aviation and aerospace sciences. Smith worked as a history and special education teacher until the age of 50 when she fulfilled her dream of learning to fly. After gaining her …
Shulasmith Firestone was a Canadian-American radical feminist, writer and activist. Firestone was a founding member of the radical-feminist groups: New York Radical Women, Redstockings, and New York Radical Feminists. With these groups, Firesmith was a part of many feminist protests and political actions, She disrupted abortion legislation meetings and organised the first abortion speak out, …
Emma Goldman was an anarchist, ardent proponent of birth control and free speech, a feminist, a lecturer, and a writer. She was known as Red Emma both for her heritage and her political involvement. Goldman became one of the most outspoken and well-known American radicals. Her core beliefs were informed in part from a Jewish tradition …
Annie Besant was a trade unionist, socialist, theosophist, women’s rights activist and philanthropist. Besant was a leading socialist and successful public speaker, filling halls across Britain for the National Secular Society. She was a prominent member of the Fabian society and the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF). In 1877, she was prosecuted for publishing a …
For #LGBThistorymonth I will be posting an #lgbtq #womaninhistory every day. Today is Josephine Ho, one of the most known feminist scholars in Taiwan. She is called “the godmother of the Taiwanese queer movement.” Ho has been a women’s rights activist since the 1990s when she led Taiwan’s first demonstration against sexual harassment, and devised …
For #LGBThistorymonth I will be posting an #lgbtq #womaninhistory every day. Today is Christine Delphy, a French sociologist, feminist, writer and theorist known for pioneering materialist feminism. Delphy co-founded the French Women’s Liberation Movement (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes, or MLF) in 1970 and the journal Nouvelles questions féministes (New Feminist Issues) with Simone de …
For #LGBThistorymonth I will be posting an #lgbtq #womaninhistory every day. Today is Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, who became the world’s first openly LGBT head of government when elected as the Prime Minister of Iceland in 2009. Jóhanna was active in the trade union movement before entering politics in 1978 when she was elected as an MP. …
For #LGBThistorymonth I will be posting an #lgbtq #womaninhistory every day. Today is Dr Louisa Martindale, a pioneering surgeon, an ardent suffragist and one of the most influential figures in Brighton in the early 20th century. Martindale’s mother believed that girls should have the same access to education as boys, and because of this she …
Alix Kates Shulman is a feminist, political activist and writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays. Shulman was one of the early radical activists of second-wave feminism and In 1967 she joined the new Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), becoming a member of the early groups New York Radical Women, Redstockings, WITCH, and New York Radical Feminists. …
Sheila Rowbotham is an English theorist and historian of feminism and radical social movements. In 1969 she published her influential pamphlet “Women’s Liberation and the New Politics” in which she set out her theory of socialist feminism, arguing that women’s liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources …