Dr. Justina Ford was an American physician who become the first female African American physician licensed to practice in Denver, Colorado, challenging and overcoming gender and racial barriers to succeed in her medical career. She practiced gynaecology, obstetrics, and paediatrics from her home for half a century. Ford was born in 1871 in Knoxville, Illinois. …
Barbara Kruger is an American feminist conceptual artist who challenges cultural assumptions by manipulating images and text in her photographic compositions. She is best known for her print Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989) which uses her signature style of a black and white photograph with red and white text. The image was designed …
Mary Seacole was a Jamaican-born nurse who helped soldiers during the Crimean War by setting up a “British Hotel” behind the lines for sick and convalescent officers. She was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit in 1991. Seacole was born Mary Grant in 1805 in Kingston, Jamaica. She was of Scottish and Creole descent …
Ann Oakley is a British sociologist, feminist and writer who pioneered research into women’s lives, including the role of a housewife, childbirth and motherhood. She is currently a Professor at the Institute of Education, University of London where she founded the Social Science Research Unit and established the EPPI-Centre (Evidence for Policy and Practice Information …
Stephanie Kwolek was an American chemist who is best known for inventing the first of a family of synthetic fibers of exceptional strength and stiffness: poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide—better known as Kevlar. Kwolek was born in 1923 in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Her father, John Kwolek, was a naturalist and Kwolek spent hours exploring the woods and fields …
Carrie Fisher was an American actress and writer. She is best known for playing Princess Leia in Star Wars. She has written a semi-autobiographical novel Postcards from the Edge, as well as two autobiographical novels Wishful Drinking and Shockaholic which deal with her struggles with addiction and bipolar disorder. Fisher was outspoken in her views …
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is an award-winning Nigerian novelist, nonfiction writer and short story writer. She is best known for her novels, Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah and her inspirational 2012 TEDx talk entitled “We should all be feminists” which was adapted into a book-length essay in 2014. Adichie was born in …
Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American scholar in the field of critical race theory, and a professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School. She is a leading authority in the areas of Civil Rights, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism and the law and a co-founder and executive director of the African …
Judith Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist. She is best known for her books Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. Her work has influenced political philosophy, ethics and the fields of feminist, queer and literary theory. Butler was born in 1956 …
Bessie “Queen Bess” Coleman was a pioneer in the field of aviation. She was the first black female pilot, the first black woman to earn an international pilot’s license and the first black woman to fly a plane in a public airshow in the U.S. Coleman was born in 1892 in Atlanta, Texas to sharecroppers …