Flavia Agnes is an Indian women’s rights lawyer and pioneer of the women’s movement in India who focuses on issues of gender and law reforms. Agnes is a co-founder of MAJLIS, meaning ‘association’ in Arabic, “a legal and cultural resource centre that campaigns for and provides legal representation for women and children. So far MAJLIS …
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 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 Mercedes de Acosta, an American poet, playwright, and novelist. Her autobiography detailed her love affairs with some of the world’s most famous women. De Acosta, the daughter of affluent Cuban immigrants, grew up in New York where, in the 1920s, she was …
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. …
Susan Lawrence was one of the first three Labour women MPs, and the first woman to represent a London constituency. Lawrence began her political life as a Conservative member of London County Council. In 1912, she met trade unionist Mary Macarthur in 1912 and was converted to socialism. She rejoined the council as a member of the Labour …
Ellen Wilkinson was the first female Minister of Education and the second woman to become a Cabinet Minister. Wilkinson was known by some as “Red Ellen”, as in the early 1920s before she entered Parliament she was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Before entering politics, Wilkinson worked for a women’s suffrage …
Margaret Wintringham was the first female Liberal MP and the first British-born woman to take a seat in Parliament. Winteringham had begun her working life as a school headmistress, a magistrate and a member of the Grimsby Education Committee. She was a member of the National Union of Women Workers, the British Temperance Association, the National Union …
Margaret Bondfield was a British Labour politician, trade unionist and women’s rights activist. She became the first female cabinet minister, and the first woman to be a privy counsellor in the UK Bondfield began work as a shop assistant, after completing her apprenticeship she began work as a living-in assistant where she was shocked by …