Betty Friedan was an American writer, women’s rights activist, and feminist. She co-founded the National Organisation for Women (NOW). Friedan was involved with the school newspaper while at Peoria High School, after her application to write her own column was turned down she and 6 friends launched a literary magazine called ‘Tide’. She graduated from …
Edith New was an English suffragette. She was one of the first to smash windows in an attempt to bring attention to women’s suffrage. New had been an assistant mistress at Queenstown Infant School from 1899-1901 before leaving Swindon to teach in deprived areas of Deptford and Lewisham. After hearing Emmeline Pankhurst speak at a …
Angela Davis is an American academic, Civil Rights Activist, scholar and Women’s Rights Activist who advocates for the oppressed. Davis’ political activism began when she was a child in Birmingham, Alabama. She lived in the “Dynamite Hill” neighbourhood, which was marked by racial conflict and experienced racial prejudice and discrimination. As a teenager she organised …
Sylvia Plath was an American Academic, Author, Editor and Poet best known for her novel ‘The Bell Jar’, and for her poetry collections ‘The Colossus’ and ‘Ariel’. Plath showed an aptitude for writing from a young age and was writing complete poems from age 5. At age 8 she had a poem published in the …
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American suffragist, social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women’s rights movement. Cady Stanton was introduced to the abolitionist, temperance, and women’s rights movements through her cousin, the reformer Gerrit Smith. In 1840 she married the reformer Henry B. Stanton, she insisted that ‘obey’ be dropped from the …
Gloria Steinem is is a writer, lecturer, political activist, and feminist organiser who became nationally recognised as a leader and spokeswoman for the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 70s. Steinem was given her first serious assignment as a freelance writer by Esquire magazine features editor Clay Felker. Her first draft on the …
Kathleen Hanna is an American musician, feminist activist, and punk zine writer. She is best known for being one of the founding members of the Riot Grrrl band Bikini Kill. Hanna was born in 1968 in Portland, Oregon. She became a feminist at a young age, inspired by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, the feminist …
Amelia Earhart was a writer and an American aviation pioneer, she was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Earhart had no interest in flying until a short 10 minute trip on a plane at a Long Beach air show in 1920. As soon as Earhart was two or three hundred …
Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer, philosopher and advocate of Women’s rights. Wollstonecraft was brought up by an abusive father whom she left at age 17 when her mother died. She set up a school in Newington Green with her sister, who had fled an abusive marriage. She used this experience to write the pamphlet …