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 …
Nina Simone was an American singer, songwriter, pianist and civil rights activist. Simone started playing piano by ear when she was 3 years old. She played piano in her mother’s church and soon began to study classical music with an Englishwoman called Muriel Mazzanovich. She developed a love of Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert. …
Susan B. Anthony was a suffragist, abolitionist, author and speaker She was the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Anthony grew up in a Quaker family, where she developed a strong commitment to social equality. Her father taught all of his children to be independent, teaching them about business and giving them responsibilities …
Amelia Boynton Robinson was an American activist who was a leader of the American Civil Rights Movement in Selma, Alabama and a key figure in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches. She was also the first black woman to run for Congress in Alabama. Robinson began her interest in activism at nine years old when …
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 …
Maud Wagner was a circus performer and the first known female tattoo artist in the United States. Wagner was an aerialist and contortionist who worked traveling circuses when she met the tattoo artist Gus Wagner at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. Wagner wanted to learn to tattoo and exchanged a date with Gus for …
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 …
Barbara Jordan was the first black woman elected to the Texas state senate and the first black Texan in Congress. Jordan had been inspired to become an attorney by a talk by Edith Sampson, a black lawyer who gave a talk at Phyllis Wheatley High School, which was segregated. Jordan was a member of the …