I recently decided that although the photos and magnets and plants are nice and have improved things greatly, my office also needs something up on the walls. To that end, I got a couple of work-friendly feminist posters to cover some wall space. One is the iconic Rosie the Riveter "We Can Do It!" poster, a second is a poster based on the Laurel Thatcher Ulrich quote "Well behaved women seldom make history." As shown here, it's the Syracuse Cultural Workers' version, with a retro woman surrounded by the names of women who have made history.

Looking at the poster, I realized there are a number of names I'm not familiar with, as well as many that I am. Which brought me to the idea of putting up a blurb on my blog about one of the women each day, giving myself the opportunity to do a little research, and giving me lots of fodder for the upcoming NaBloPoMo. There are way more than 30 names on the poster (105, actually), so this project will likely be ongoing for the next few months, and will all be in the "Women Making History" category so I can have a full archive of not-so-well behaved women when I'm finished.

Enjoy!

The first name in the upper left-hand corner of the poster is that of the late, great Bella Abzug. And what a good place to start.

Russian-American Bella Abzug was born in 1920 to immigrant parents in New York. She went to law school at Columbia University and was the editor of the Columbia Law Review at a time when few women practiced law. As a private practicing labor attorney in the 1950s, she took on the McCarthy-driven House Un-American Activities Committee. She also married and had two daughters. In the 1960s, she co-founded the Women Strike for Peace organization, which worked against nuclear testing and the Vietnam War.

In 1970, at the age of 50, Abzug became the United States congresswoman representing Manhattan's 19th Congressional District. She was at that time one of 12 women in the Congress and the first Jewish Congresswoman. She served three terms, with a consistently anti-war, pro-woman, and pro-social justice voting record. Some of her most notable positions included calling an end to the draft, demanding the resignation of Richard Nixon, and pushing for the Civil Rights Act to include protections based on sexual orientation.

In 1976, she gave up her seat to run for Senate. She lost her Senate bid (the Senate at that time was 100% male) and also lost later campaigns for New York City mayor.

Abzug spent the remainder of her life working for feminist, environmental, and social justice causes. She chaired President Carter's National Advisory Committee on Women until she was fired for criticizing Carter administration economic policies, had integral roles in the UN International Women's Conferences, and co-founded several organizations, including Women USA and the Women's Environment and Development Organization.

After several years of ill health, Bella Abzug died in 1998 at the age of 77.

Sources:
Jewish Women's Archive
About: Women's History
New York Times
Library of Congress: From Haven to Home

The second history-making woman on my poster is Susan B. Anthony. She's one most folks have heard of, but worth a shout out all the same. A few things about her (because it is late, and I am tired, fewer things than she deserves):

Susan B. Anthony was born in 1820 in Massachutes. She was raised in a strict Quaker family with activist leanings. After spending several years as a teacher, she got very active in the temperance and anti-slavery movements. After experiencing the sexism of the these movements (for example, women were not often allowed to speak at rallies) and befriending another temperance worker, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, she became involved in women's suffrage, for which she worked the rest of her life, both alone and partnered with Cady Stanton. It is commonly believed that Cady Stanton was the main theoritican and writer in the partnership, while Anthony focused on traveling, speaking, and organizing.

Some of Anthony's most noted accomplishments include co-founding the American Equal Rights Association and the National Woman Suffrage Association, as well as co-editing The Revolution suffrage paper. In 1873, she was arrested and tried for illegal voting in an action for women's suffrage.

Anthony never married or had children. She died in 1906.

Sources:
The Susan B. Anthony House
About: Women's History
Western New York Suffragists: Winning the Vote

Civil Rights leader Septima Clark's is the first name on the poster that I don't already know a lot about. I knew Clark was a Civil Rights leader, and had admired the awesome photograph of her shown her, which is also the cover photo of Brian Lanker's book, I Dream a World (which you should check out, if you've never seen it, it's pretty amazing), but that was about it. So I'm happy with this project already for providing me with an opportunity to research fantastic women I don't know enough about.

Septima Clark was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1898. A public school teacher and advocate for adult education, Clark began her Civil Rights work well before the movement took hold in a broad way in the 1950s. She began organizing in the 1920s and was a member of the NAACP from 1919, very soon after the organization's inception. Her early organizing work focused on the fight to allow African Americans to teach in public schools. Later, she branched out into community building, vote registration, and anti-segregation activities. In 1956, she was fired from her job as a public school teacher for being involved with the NAACP. She then became a full-time Civil Rights activist.

In 1961, Clark became the director of education for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Through this work, she became an early proponent of and teacher Citizenship Schools, which taught Black Americans to read, write, understand the basic government structure in order to be informed voters. She worked with SCLC until her retirement in 1970, after which she served two terms on the Charleston County School Board.

Septima Clark died in 1987. Her lifelong commitment to civil rights has earned her the title "grandmother of the civil rights movement."

Sources:
South Carolina African-American History Online
Septima Clark: Teacher to a Movement (unpublished article)
Wikipedia: Septima Poinsette Clark

The first entertainer listed on the history-making women poster, as well as the first living woman listed, is the awesome Bernice Johnson Reagon. I know of Reagon in her capacity as the founder of and one of the strongest voices in the amazing African-American a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, but her work with Sweet Honey is only the tip of the iceberg.

Bernice Johnson Reagon was born in 1942 in Albany, Georgia. She entered Albany State College in 1959, but was expelled in 1961 after being arrested while protesting with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She then briefly attended Spelman College, before quitting to join the Freedom Singers civil rights music group. She spent the remainder of the 1960s bearing her two children, daughter Toshi (also an accomplished musician and kick-ass woman) and son Kwan Tauna, and recording and releasing two solo albums. During this time period, she also began her study of traditional African American folk music and story telling.

Johnson Reagon then finished her degree in non-Western history at Spelman College and became involved in black nationalism. During the first years of Sweet Honey in the Rock (formed in 1973), she earned her doctorate in in history at Howard University, becoming Dr. Johnson Reagon.

Over the course of the next three decades, Johnson Reagon was involved in multiple black pride and African American history activities. Her work with Sweet Honey continued, and the group toured, put on festivals, and released many albums (and are continuing to do so today). She started work with the Smithsonian Institutions as a cultural historian in 1974, and in 1983 was promoted to curator at the National Musuem of American History, where she had previously begun the musuem's program in Black American Culture. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, she was appointed professor emeritus at American University and won a MacArthur Fellowship.

Johnson Reagon was also involved in many well-known radio, television, and film projects dealing with African-American history and culture, including the Eyes on the Prize series, NPR's Wade in the Water, the television series We Shall Overcome, and the film Beloved.

Now in her 60s, Johnson Reagon has retired from Sweet Honey in the Rock. However, she has continued her work in African-American culture and music in the 2000s, most recently writing music and libretto for the play The Temptation of St. Anthony, playing some concerts with her daughter, Toshi Reagon, and lecturing.

To hear examples of the musical work of Bernice Johnson Reagon and Sweet Honey in the Rock, please go here and here.

Sources:
Bernice Johnson Reagon 2006 Bio Statement
Sweet Honey in the Rock website
PBS African American World

Ida B. Wells was born in Mississippi in 1862, a few months before the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. She was the eldest of eight children, and when her parents died in the late 1870s, she supported and raised her younger siblings. She attended Rust College (later called Shaw University) and became a teacher in Memphis, Tennessee in 1888.

During her time in Memphis, Wells also co-owned and wrote for a black newspaper, "The Free Speech and Headlight," and began to agitate for civil rights for African-Americans, including winning a lawsuit on train desegregation (this decision was later overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court). After an acquaintance was lynched in 1892, she began to write anti-lynching editorials and encourage Black southerners to move west to escape Southern racism. In 1895, after living abroad for a few years, Wells published a history of lynching, "A Red Record." She also started the United States' first civic organization for black women, the Women's Era Club, which was later renamed the Ida B. Wells Club in her honor.

In 1909, Wells-Barnett (she had married in 1895 and subsequently had four children) became a founding member of the "Committee of 40," which later grew into the NAACP. However, she was excluded from the organization due to her radical views by the mid 1910s. She then founded the Negro Fellowship League. She also became active in the suffrage movement, as well as Jane Addams' work against school segregation. She stayed active in the fight for civil rights for African-Americans and women until her death in 1931.

Sources:
Women in History
About: African-American History
National Women's Hall of Fame

Ella Baker was born in 1903 in Virginia. She grew up in North Carolina and in 1927 graduated as the class valedictorian from Shaw University. She then moved to New York City and became active in several social justice organizations, including the Young Negroes Cooperative League, which focused on developing black economic power, for whom she became the national director. She also worked for the Works Progress Administration.

In the late 1930s, Baker became involved in the NAACP, first as a field secretary, then as a branch director. Though she left the NAACP staff in 1946, Baker remained an active volunteer, eventually becoming the president of the New York NAACP branch in 1952. During this time, she led the fight for school desegregation in New York City.

In 1957, Baker returned to the South, moving to Atlanta in order to help organize Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Though her focus was more grassroots than that of the SCLC, Baker stayed on for two years. She also organized voter registrations for African-Americans during this time period.

After leaving the SCLC, Baker went on to become a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960. Significantly older than most SNCC members, Baker served as a "quiet leader" and mentor to the younger activists with whom she worked. She was also a major organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964.

Baker returned to New York in the mid-1960s, where she continued to work as an organizer. She died in 1986. She is perhaps best remembered in Sweet Honey in the Rock's "Ella's Song," which states that "we who believe in freedom cannot rest."

Sources:
SNCC-People
Wikipedia
PBS
In These Times

Born in New York in 1957, Amy Goodman is, thus far, the youngest history making woman the poster lists. And one of the best known currently, due especially to her very popular radio and TV news program (and podcast), Democracy Now! Many current Goodman fans consider her the "voice of the disenfranchised left."

After growing up in a politically progressive family on Long Island, Goodman graduated from Harvard in 1984 with a degree in anthropology. She then spent a decade as an evening news show producer for WBAI, the Pacifica radio station in New York. During her decade as a radio news journalist, Goodman was attacked by Indonesian soldiers while covering the independence movement in East Timor in 1991. Goodman speculated that U.S. support of the Indonesian military was the only reason she and fellow journalist Allan Nairn were not killed. Goodman credits this experience as the pivotal moment in career, the point at which she realized how important it is to "go where the silence is" and get the word out.

In 1996, Goodman co-founded Democracy Now!. She continued to do the type of journalism she was known for, covering, among other things, the role of the Chevron Corporation in the conflict between Nigerian villagers and the Nigerian Army in 1998. This coverage won Goodman a George Polk Award.

In 2000, Democracy Now! split with Pacifica and went independent, broadcasting from an old fire station. This move coincidentally made Goodman the journalist reporting on 9/11 from the geographically closest location to Ground Zero.

First independently and then reunited with Pacifica in 2002, Goodman and Democracy Now! have continued to provide hard-hitting, left-leaning coverage of national and international politics for the last several years, expanding from its radio roots and adding a televised broadcast in 2001. Perhaps Goodman's best known grilling was the one she gave Bill Clinton when he called before the 2000 election to tell listeners why they should support Gore rather than Nader. Rather than giving him free advertising airtime, Goodman grilled Clinton on NAFTA, capital punishment, and sanctions against Iraq.

Goodman is the author of two books, The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them (2004), co-written with her brother, Mother Jones writer David Goodman, and Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People who Fight Back (2006).

Sources:
The Nation
Democracy Now!
Wikipedia
Americans Who Tell the Truth

Political activist Medea Benjamin was born in 1952. She has two masters degrees, one in Economics from the New School for Social Research and one in Public Health from Columbia University. She is married and has two children.

Benjamin co-founded feminist anti-war organization CODEPINK: Women for Peace, and is involved with other anti-war organizations. She's also a founding member of the NGO Global Exchange, a fair trade organization. In 2000, Benjamin ran for the U.S. Senate in California on the Gree Party ticket. She has since become involved with progressive Democrat organizations.

Benjamin is perhaps best known for her controversial political actions, including interrupting speeches and and political conventions to make anti-war statements. She has also travelled widely, particularly to underdeveloped countries, to document and expose military and human rights abuses and sweat-shop labor conditions.

Benjamin has written or edited eight books, including the award winning Don't Be Afraid, Gringo: A Honduran Woman Speaks from the Heart.

Sources:
Wikipedia
Global Exchange
California League of Women Voters

Elizabeth Blackwell is a good example of a history-making woman that I should have known about and didn't. She and those like her are exactly the reason I am doing this exercise.

Elizabeth Blackwell was born in England in 1821, moving to the U.S. in 1832. She was unusually well-educated for a woman of her time, due partially to her progressive father's views on education and partially to the private school she, her mother, and her sisters opened in Cincinnati to support themselves after her father's death.

While working as a teacher, first in her family's school, then in Kentucky and North and South Carolina, Blackwell began to study medicine privately. By 1847, she had made up her mind to go to medical school and began searching for a program that would accept a woman. She was eventually accepted to Geneva Medical School in New York, when the students, thinking the application to be a practical joke, voted to let her in.

After many hardships suffered as the first female medical student in the country, Blackwell graduated at the top of her class in 1849. Shortly thereafter, Blackwell returned to Europe and began studying midwifery in Paris. She suffered an infection that left her blind in one eye at this time, forcing her to abandon plans to become a surgeon.

Upon returning to the U.S. in 1851, Blackwell was not permitted to practice at any hospitals, so she bought a house and opened her own private practice, where she saw women and children. In 1853, she opened a dispensary in New York with her sister, who was newly graduated from medical school, and another female doctor. In 1857, the dispensary was incorporated as the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. During the Civil War, the Blackwell sisters helped select and train Union nurses.

After the war, in 1868, the Blackwells opened the Women's Medical College at the Infirmary. The College operated for 31 years, but Blackwell herself moved to England the next year, where she founded the London School of Medicine for Women with Florence Nightingale. She worked there and at the London School of Medicine for Children until her retirement in 1907.

Elizabeth Blackwell never married. She adopted a child, Kitty, in 1854. She died in 1910.

Sources:
About: Women's History
National Women's Hall of Fame
Wikipedia
National Institute of Health

Given my general disgust with our present-day media, particularly this close to election time, I'm happy to say that today's history making woman is Nellie Bly.

Nellie Bly was born Elizabeth Jane Cochrane in 1864 in Pennsylvania. As a teenager and young woman, she worked in a boarding house, though she dreamed of being a writer. She was hired to write for the Pittsburgh Dispatch after writing an angry editorial letter denouncing a popular columnist for insisting that women belong only in the home. When she started writing for the Dispatch, she took the pen name Nellie Bly, inspired by a Stephen Foster song.

Bly left the Dispatch after a short tenure, as a result of being relegated to women's and society pages, rather than being allowed to do the investigative journalism she craved. When she was 23, she moved to New York and convinced New York World's managing editor to give her a shot as an investigative reporter by pitching an idea for a story in which she would investigate conditions in mental hospitals by having herself committed. Bly then did have herself committed, spending 10 days on at the mental institution on Blackwell Island. After her return, she wrote a shocking piece chronicling the experience, including beatings, ice baths, and force-fed meals. The shocking piece received a lot of attention, and inspired some reforms of New York's mental institutions.

For the next several years, Bly continued to work as an investigative reporter for The World, and she always sided with the poor and disenfranchised in her pieces. Most notably, when covering the Chicago Pullman Railroad strike of 1894, she was the only reporter to write from the perspective of the striking workers.

In 1889, Bly made her famous trip around the world in 72 days, having challenged the fictional hero of Jules Vernes' "Around the World in 80 Days."

In her 30s, Bly briefly retired, after marrying a man several decades her senior. When he died, however, she picked her career back up, taking over her husband's businesses and moving them to the forefront of industrial and workers' reforms, but eventually going bankrupt. She then worked as a journalist for the New York Evening Journal, and covered World War I from the eastern front in Europe.

Bly died from pneumonia in 1922, at the age of 57.

Sources:
National Women's Hall of Fame
PBS
New York Times

I have to make my biases known at the outset: this may well be my favorite Woman Making History entry. Of all of the feminist leaders I admire, the Boston Women's Health Collective is very very high on the list.

The Boston Women's Health Collective (originally the Boston Women's Health Book Collective) was formed in 1969, after its founding members met at a women's health seminar and discussed the lack of health resources available to women. The group originally tried to compile a list of doctors in the Boston area who were sensitive to women's health needs and respected their female patients as people. Finding their list far too short, they decided to compile a manual of health advice and self-care instructions for women. A completely volunteer effort, researched and written by the women themselves, the book, the first edition of which was published in 1970 under the name "Women and their Bodies," was originally intended as a companion to a course on women's health. It quickly became an underground sensation, however, selling 250,000 copies in New England with no formal advertising.

The next, expanded version of the book was published in 1973, with the new title "Our Bodies, Ourselves." Since then, the effort has exploded, with a new, updated, and expanded version of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" coming out every few years, and a range of other books as well, including comprehensive manuals about younger women's heath, women's health in older age, and the specific health concerns of Latina women.

As the Boston Women's Health Collective's projects grew, so did the organization, moving from a completely volunteer effort to one with a permanent staff of 11, as well as a volunteer network and an internship program. The Collective is not only responsible for publishing the books, but also for advocacy and consulting in the arena of women's health. The most recent editions of the books have been translated into many languages, and the organization has worked to increase its focus on global women's health issues.

Sources:
Women's E-News
Our Bodies, Ourselves
American Medical Women's Association

Exciting! Today's Woman Making History is one who is completely new to me!

Margaret Bourke-White was born in 1904 in New York. She developed an interest in photography while attending Columbia University in the early 1920s. After switching schools several times, Bourke-White graduated from Cornell University in 1927. A year later, she moved to Cleveland and took a job as an industrial photographer.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Bourke-White made the switch to magazine photojournalism. She was the first Western photographer allowed into the Soviet Union, and was hired by Life magazine as their first female photojournalist, with one of her pictures featured on the magazine's very first cover. During the mid-1930s, Bourke-White photographed Dust Bowl victims, and she and her husband, novelist Erskine Caldwell, published a book about the Depression, Have You Seen Their Faces.

During World War II, Bourke-White became the first female war correspondent and first female to be allowed to work in a combat zone. When German forces invaded Moscow, she was the only foreign photographer in the city. She then moved on to North Africa, then Italy. In 1945, she traveled through Germany as it collapsed, accompanying the troops of General Patton.

After the war, Bourke-White produced a book of photographs from the Buchenwald concentration camp, Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly.

Bourke-White had a knack for being in the right place at the right time to photograph events and people of great historical significance. Just two years after photographing the survivors at Buchenwald, she took pictures of the violent independence and partition of India and Pakistan. She also interviewed and took pictures of Gandhi just hours before his assassination.

Unusual for a photographer of her time, Bourke-White became somewhat of a celebrity. She did endorsements for coffee and cigarettes, and the heroine of Hitchcock's "Lifeboat" is said to be modeled after her.

In the 1950s, Margaret Bourke-White was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and forced to first slow and then abandon her career. After fighting the disease for many years, she died in 1971.

Sources:
Wikipedia
NPR
Boston Globe

You'll have to forgive me for the lateness and possible incoherence of this entry. I've got a miserable cold and blogging is a bit much for me right now. However, because I am committed both to the NaBloPoMo project and my own Woman Making History project, I've got to stick it out and get something up here.

Rachel Carson was a lauded biologist, writer, and environmentalist in the first half of the 20th century. She was born in 1907 in Pennsylvania, where she grew up in a small town. She graduated from Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) in 1929, then studied at the Wood Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, then received her MA in zoology from Johns Hopkins in 1932. Carson then taught zoology at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland for several years. She hoped to get her Ph.D., but was unable to attain this goal due to financial difficulties and needing to take care of her mother after her father's death.

During the Depression, Carson wrote radio scripts for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. She supplemented this income by writing nature-related feature pieces for the Baltimore Sun. She began her long career in federal service in 1936 as a scientist and editor, and worked her way up to Editor-in-Chief of all publications for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Carson also wrote lyric prose, publishing a book "Under the Sea-Wind" in 1941. In the 1950s, she followed with two "biographies of the ocean," The Sea Around Us in 1952 and The Edge of the Sea in 1955. In 1952, Carson retired from federal service to devote herself to her own writing. At this time, she and her mother moved to rural Maine. Carson also adopted the orphan son of a cousin who had died unexpectedly.

Though she wrote several more articles about the living world, and planned another book about ecology, Carson changed her focus after World War II, as she became increasingly concerned about the use of pesticides, particularly DDT. In 1962, she published Silent Spring (first serialized in The New Yorker), which challenged pesticide use and the general behavior of human kind toward the natural world. The book earned her both respect and some attacks by the chemical industry and the government. Carson stuck to her guns, however, testifying before Congress in 1963 about the need for new policies to force humans to protect the environment. In retrospect, many people credit Silent Spring with having launched the global environmental movement.

Rachel Carson died of breast cancer in 1964, at the age of 56. In 1980, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her environmental writing and activism.

Sources:
Rachel Carson.org
Wikipedia
Time

Note: This one is a bit sparse not due to disinterest on my part, but due to a swimming viral head. My apologies.

St. Joan Chittister is a member of the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania. She is a social psychologist with a Ph.D. from Penn State, the author of more than 30 books, and a regular columnist for the National Catholic Reporter.

Chittister's work focuses on women’s roles in church and society, human rights, and global peace. She speaks widely on these issues, as well as addresses them in her writing. Chittister has been very critical of the Bush administration and their Iraq policy, and she favors the ordination of women in the Catholic church.

Chittister has received several awards and honors, including the Pax Christi USA Pope Paul VI Teacher of Peace Award in 1990 and the Thomas Merton Award in 2001, joining the likes of Dorothy Day and Sister Helen Prejean.

St. Joan Chittister was born in 1936.

Sources
Benetvision
PBS
Beliefnet
Wikipedia

Clara Barton's is a name most have heard, but I wonder how many could say for sure what she did? I'm embarrassed to say I couldn't have.

Clara Barton was born in 1821 in Massachutes, the far youngest of six siblings. She was home-schooled, taught by her older siblings as much as her parents. Her interest in medicine began at the age of 11, when one of her brothers took ill. She tended him for two years, administering his medications, including leeches. She was also inspired by an aunt who was a noted midwife.

Barton spent her early adulthood working first as a teacher and advocate for public schools and then as a copyist in the U.S. Patent Office. She was the first woman to have an independent clerkship in the U.S. federal government.

When the Civil War began, Barton became a field nurse. Seeing how unprepared the Army Medical Department was for the casualties coming in, in 1861 she formed an agency to obtain and distribute supplies to wounded soldiers. The next year, she got permission from the Army to bring her own supplies on to the battlefields. In 1865, President Lincoln placed her in charge of the search for missing Union soldiers. She traced the fates of 30,000 men while in this position.

After the war, Barton met Susan B. Anthony and began her involvement in women's suffrage. She also met Frederick Douglass and became involved in early black civil rights.

Barton's hard work during and after the Civil War took a toll on her health, and in 1869 her doctor recommended she take a restful vacation to Europe. In 1870, while abroad, she became involved in the International Red Cross. When she returned to the U.S. after this trip, she immediately began work organizing the American Red Cross. In 1881, the American Red Cross was officially founded, with Barton as its President.

Barton continued her work providing medical aid to those in war and disaster situations late into her life. In 1898, she brought a cargo of medical supplies into Cuba; later she spent six weeks aiding survivors of the Galveston floods. She did not resign from the Red Cross until 1904, at the age of 83.

Clara Barton died in 1912 at the age of 91.

Sources
Wikipedia
New York Suffragists
National Women's Hall of Fame

Legendary folk musician Odetta was born in 1930 in Birmingham, Alabama. She grew up in Los Angeles and started operatic training at the age of 13. After flirting with musical theater, after 1950 she began to focus solely on folk music, touring nationally and building a solid following at venues such as San Francisco's hungry i and New York's Blue Angel.

Odetta was involved in the civil rights movement both as a participant and as an entertainer, marching with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and performing at civil rights rallies.

Odetta's career spanned several decades, culminating in being awarded the National Endowment for the Arts' Medal of the Arts by President Clinton in 1999, at which time she released her first album of new music in many years, Blues Everywhere I Go. She followed this album with several more records and an international tour in 2006.

Odetta is credited as inspiring some of the greatest musicians of modern times, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Janis Joplin.

Sources

Wikipedia
World Folk Music Association
NPR

Still sick...forgive me...

Bessie Coleman was born in 1892 to a large Texas family. Her father left the family when Coleman was young, and the remainder of her childhood was difficult. She was unable to attend school much beyond the eighth grade due to financial difficulties. At the age of twenty-three, she moved to Chicago to stay with her brother and look for work.

Coleman worked as a beautician in Chicago for several years before, in 1919, she went to France to attend aviation school (there were no opportunities for a black woman to learn to fly in the United States). She was funded by sponsors and her own savings.

In 1921, she became the first African-American to earn an aviation license. She returned to the U.S. to surprising press coverage. Knowing she'd need public following to make flying pay, she created an exciting image, including dressing in military uniform. She flew in air shows and gave lectures for several years, often refusing to perform unless audiences were desegregated.

In April 1926, Bessie Coleman died in a flying accident before an aviation show in Jacksonville, Florida.

Sources
bessiecoleman.com
PBS

Angela Davis was born in 1944 in Birmingham, Alabama, to educated, politically active, middle-class parents. She attended high school at the Little Red School House, a radical private school in Greenwich Village. She then attended Brandeis on a full scholarship, one of only three Black students in her entering class.

Davis graduated from Brandeis magna cum laude in 1965. During her time there, she spent several semesters in Europe, particularly France, and became involved in the European Communist Party and in the Black Power movement. She living in Germany on and off for several years post-graduation, taking her masters from the University of California, San Diego and her Ph.D. in philosophy from the Humboldt University of Berlin, GDR.

During her time as an advanced student in the late 1960s, Davis began working as a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1969, the UCLA Board of Regents, headed by Ronald Reagan, made the controversial decision to fire her based on her ties to the Communist Party. She was later reinstated, due to public outcry.

During the late 1960s, Davis was involved in the Communist Party, radical feminist organizations, and the Black Power movement, including the Black Panthers. In 1970, she became the third women ever on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List, after she was charged with kidnapping, conspiracy, and murder in the Black Panther's disruption of the Soledad Brothers' trial and subsequent kidnapping and murder of Judge Harold Haley.

Davis was a fugitive for several months before she was detained in New York City. After spending several more months in jail awaiting and standing trial, she was cleared of all charges in 1972.

After she was released, Davis briefly relocated to Cuba. Upon her return to the U.S., she continued a lifetime of teaching and activism. She has been an outspoken opponent of the U.S. prison system and the death penalty, as well as a prominent feminist leader, for several decades. She is a co-founder of Critical Resistance, a grassroots organization dedicated to abolishing the prison-industrial complex. She currently heads the Feminist Studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches mostly graduate level courses. She has also authored several books and speaks widely.

In 1997, Davis came out as a lesbian.

Sources
Wikipedia
About: Women's History
Discover the Networks

Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn in 1897. The Day family moved to Chicago in the mid 1900's. Day's mother was a devout Catholic, and her father, after some time unemployed, was a Chicago newspaperman.

Day entered the University of Illinois at Urbana on a scholarship in 1914. She went for two years, attending more radical functions than she did classes, before she dropped out. She then moved to New York City, where she began writing for the socialist newspaper The Call. She then wrote for The Masses, a magazine opposing U.S. involvement in European war.

In November 1917, Day went to jail with other women for standing in front of the White House to protest women's exclusion from voting. She went with the other women to work camps and participated in hunger strikes until they were freed by presidential order.

Throughout the late teens and early twenties, Day continued to write for newspapers and magazines (as well as write novels), attend protests, and make her way towards the Catholic faith.

In 1927, Day gave birth to her only child, Tamar Theresa Day. She has an abortion several years earlier, for which she felt tremendous guilt and because of which she thought she was unable to conceive, so she considered Tamar's birth a miracle, sealing her faith in God and her commitment to Catholicism. Day both baptized Tamar a Catholic and was received into the Church herself.

In 1932, Day met Peter Maurin, a French immigrant and former Christian brother. It was Maurin's idea to start a newspaper to publicize Catholic teachings as a means of peacefully transforming society. Day ran with this idea, and on May 1, the first copies of The Catholic Worker were distributed.

The Catholic Worker was met with an unusual level of instant success, with a circulation of 100,000 by December 1932. Out of the ideas of kindness, hospitality, and brotherhood featured in the paper, the idea of hospitality houses arose. First Day's own apartment was opened to strangers needing a place to stay, then more apartments were rented for those in need. The number of beds available grew quickly, but, as it was the Depression, there were never enough. What most surprised the people (mostly men) who stayed at the hospitality houses was that nobody tried to reform them or force the faith upon them. There was no idea of deserving poor in the Catholic houses--everyone deserved a roof over his/her head and a hot meal. Everyone deserved a chance.

By 1936, there were 33 Catholic Worker houses spread across the country. There was no time limit for how long people could stay at the Catholic houses--they could stay forever if they wanted to. Once they were there, they were family, Day said.

Even in the times before and during World War II, Day insisted that the paper and the houses remain pacifist--an unpopular position. It took a toll, with 15 houses closing, but Day's program survived. In the 1950's, the houses refused to participate in annual civil defense drills. Day and other dissidents were sent to jail for opposing these drills, for periods of five to thirty days, nearly every year from 1955 to 1960.

The Catholic Workers movement also stressed the importance of civil rights, in keeping with their overall tenants of equality, love, and brotherhood among all people.

Day was last jailed for participating in an illegal protest supporting farm workers in 1973. She was 75 years old.

In her later life, Day was highly regarded, receiving many awards, and visitors such as Mother Theresa. She took communion directly from the Pope in 1967. Many called her a saint. "Don’t' call me a saint," Day said. "I don't want to be dismissed so easily."

Dorothy Day died on November 29, 1980.

Sources
The Catholic Worker

Eve Ensler was born in 1953 to an upper-middle class Jewish family in Scarsdale, New York. She attended Middlebury College, graduating in 1975. She spent much of the 1980s married to Richard McDermott, and is the stepmother of actor Dylan McDermott, who she adopted during the marriage.

In 1996, Ensler wrote The Vagina Monologues, a (originally) one-woman play which channels the voices of women of various ages, sexualities, and races, all talking about their relationships with their bodies, particularly the parts that women have traditionally been ashamed of and afraid to talk about. Since Ensler's original performance of the play in SoHo, it has become an international success, translated into over 35 languages and performed by women as noted as Jane Fonda, Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, and Oprah Winfrey. The Vagina Monologues won the Obie Award for Best New Play in 1996, and in 1999 Ensler was presented with the Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting.

As amazing as the play itself is, out of it grew something even bigger, V-Day. V-Day is "a global movement to stop violence against women and girls." V-Day takes place on February 14, traditionally Valentine's Day, and includes performances of Ensler's play as well as various other anti-violence and pro-woman activities, in cities around the world. The V-Day foundation also provides cash assistance to local level organizations working against violence towards women.

Though it is her most famous, The Vagina Monologues is not Ensler's only play. She is actually the author of more than nine plays and five books. Recently, she has been touring performing her more recent work, The Good Body, which also deals with women's body image. Another newer play, The Treatment, debuted in New York City in September 2006. It deals with the psychological trauma of war.

Ensler's pro-woman and anti-violence activities are not limited to her writing and performing. She is a dedicated activist. Aside from founding the V-Day foundation, she is also involved in the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) and other organizations to support women abroad. She also leads a writing group for incarcerated women at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women.

Sources
Wikipedia
Amnesty International
Mother Jones
V-Day

Ellen DeGeneres was born in 1958 in a New Orleans suburb. She was raised as a Christian Scientist until the age of 13, when her parents divorced. After the divorce, Ellen and her brother, Vance, moved with her mother and new stepfather to Atlanta, Texas.

Ellen attended the University of New Orleans, where she majored in communications. She left school with one semester left and took a series of jobs (clerk, waitress, oyster shucker), none of which she stuck with. In the early 1980s, she began doing stand-up comedy. In 1982, she was chosen by Showtime as the funniest person in America. Shortly after, she appeared on The Tonight Show, where she was the first woman ever to be asked to chat with Johnny after her first visit.

In 1994, Ellen's stand-up was turned into a sitcom, Ellen. The show ran from '94-'98. In 1997, Ellen used her character on the show to come out as a lesbian. This made Ellen one of the first openly gay performers playing one of the first openly gay characters on network television.

After Ellen was cancelled, DeGeneres returned to stand-up. She also briefly appeared in another sitcom, The Ellen Show. In 2001, she also served as the host of the Emmy awards, for which she garnered mostly good reviews.

In 2003, Ellen started a new venture, a talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show. The talk show's following has steadily grown and it has become quite successful. DeGeneres has also lent her voice to the animated film Finding Nemo, written a book, and appeared in advertisements for American Express. She will also be hosting the Academy Awards in 2007.

DeGeneres is currently partnered with another lesbian celebrity, Portia di Rossi. They have been together since 2004.

Sources
Wikipedia
Infoplease
About: Talk Shows

Madame CJ Walker was born Sarah Breedlove in 1867 on a Louisiana Delta plantation. She was the daughter of former slaves and was orphaned at seven. She spent her early years working in cotton fields and married at 14 in order to escape an abusive brother-in-law.

Walker's only daughter, A'Leila, was born in 1885. Two years later, Walker was widowed. She then moved to St. Louis to join her four brothers, who were working as barbers. Earning as little as $1.50 a day as a laundrywoman, Walker still managed to save enough money to educate her daughter.

In the 1890s, Walker began to suffer a scalp condition that caused her to lose most of her hair. After experimenting with several things that were already on the market, Walker began concocting her own creation to cure this ailment. In 1905, she changed her name to "Madame" CJ Walker and began to market Madame Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower.

Walker traveled extensively to promote her product, finally settling in Indianapolis in 1910. There, she built a factory, training school, and salons. In 1913, she went international, traveling to South America and the Caribbean to promote her products. At one point, Madame Walker employed more than 3,000 people.

In 1916, Walker left the day-to-day operations of her business and moved to New York City. There, she participated in many social and political causes. She was especially active in the NAACP's anti-lynching movement. In 1917, she was one of a group of African-American citizens who visited the White House to present the president with a petition for federal anti-lynching legislation.

Madame CJ Walker died in 1919 at her New York estate.

Sources
Official Website of Madame CJ Walker
About: Inventors
Wikipedia

Ani DiFranco was born in 1970 in Buffalo, New York. Her mother Jewish American and her father is Italian-American. DiFranco became an emancipated minor when she was 15.

At the age of 18, DiFranco moved to New York City and started her own record company, Righteous Babe Records, under which she put out her debut album, Ani DiFranco. She built interest in her music through constant playing at local gigs and touring, and spent many years touring constantly on her own.

Over the course of over fifteen years, DiFranco's own career and the popularity of her label has grown exponentially. She has released 18 studio albums and 12 live albums, as well as several EPs and a couple of videos. She has also added other artists to her label, including Utah Phillips, Andrew Bird, and Toshi Reagon. She has also been heavily involved in city renewal in her home town of Buffalo, New York, including buying and renovating a church that was scheduled for demolition and giving it a new life as her record company headquarters and a 1,200 seat music venue. She also started the Righteous Babe Foundation, which backs various grassroots political organizations.

DiFranco uses her position as a musician and a celebrity (at least to her fan base) to encourage political involvement and activism. She is outspoken both in her music and in her comments about anti-racism, peace, and feminism. In 2006, she received NOW's Woman of Courage Award. She is the first musician to have received the award.

In 1998, DiFranco, who is openly bisexual, married her sound technician. The marriage lasted five years. Recently, she has announced she is expecting a baby in early 2007.

Sources
Wikipedia
About: Folk Music
Alternet

The U.S. Women's National Soccer Team was founded in 1985, the first ever women's soccer team made up of professional, full-time athletes. The team has won two Women's World Cups (1991 and 1999), two Olympic women's tournaments (1996 and 2004), and four Algarve Cups (2000, 2003, 2004, 2005). It is considered one of the most sucessful women's or men's national soccer teams in history.

In 2004, two retired Women's National team players, Mia Hamm and Michelle Akers, were the only two women included in the FIFA 100, a list compiled by soccer legend Pelé of the greatest living footballers.

Sources
Wikipedia
U.S. Soccer Network
United Soccer Athletes

Isadora Duncan is considered by many to be the mother of modern dance.

Duncan was born in San Francisco in 1877. Her birth name was Dora Angela. She was raised by her mother, her father having left when she was a small child. Both of Duncan's parents were artists, her mother a musician and her father a poet. Duncan's mother supported her family by giving piano lessons, and both Duncan and her sister supplemented the family income by giving dance lessons.

Duncan began her dancing career in Chicago in 1895, where she was rejected by many theaters, who said her style of dancing would never be suitable for the stage, before finding work dancing in a saloon. After being seen in the saloon, Duncan was cast in a small role in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and her family settled in New York.

After enjoying brief and fleeting fame in New York, Duncan and her family moved to London in 1898. After some lean months, Duncan was "discovered" in a park by a London stage star, and her European career was born.

In 1909, Duncan opened a dancing school in Paris, while continuing to perform throughout Europe. She created her own style of bohemian dance, rejected the disciplined postures of ballet as "ugly and unnatural."

Both Duncan's work and her personal life were very controversial. Not only did she expose more of herself on stage and dance in more provocative ways than were considered appropriate at the time, she also bore two children out of wedlock, each with different fathers. (Sadly, both of her children were killed in a car accident with their nanny in 1913.) Finally, Duncan was openly bisexual. Though her life and work were, at least in some circles, accepted and embraced in Europe, she was never lauded in the United States.

In 1922, Duncan, who was sympathetic to the communist experiment, moved to the Soviet Union. She then married a Russian poet 17 years her junior. Her husband was mentally unstable and abusive, and they parted after about a year. He committed suicide in 1925.

In 1924, Duncan returned to Paris. She suffered financial difficulties and alcoholism. In 1927, she was killed in a freak accident when her scarf caught in the open-spoked wheel of an automobile.

Duncan's legacy has lived longer than she did. During her lifetime, she opened two more dancing schools, in Germany and the Soviet Union. In her last years, she wrote an autobiography, Ma Vie, that was published posthumously to very good reviews. Two films, Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (1967) and Isadora (1968), immortalized Duncan decades after her death.

Sources:
Wikipedia
Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco
Women in History

In 1797, Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree on a Dutch settlement in upstate New York. She was one of thirteen children born to slave parents.

Truth was sold at age nine to an abusive slaveholder. She increasingly turned to religion to comfort her as her situation worsened. She was then sold to a tavern owner, a safer situation, then to another abusive plantation family.

In 1815, Truth fell in love with a slave at another plantation. When their forbidden affair was discovered, her lover was beaten and taken away. She never saw him again, but bore a daughter. Shortly thereafter, she was forced to marry another slave on the plantation where she was held and she had four more children between 1822 and 1826.

During the early 1800s, the state of New York was slowly phasing out slavery. The man who owned Truth promised her emancipation in 1826, a year before the final abolition if she continued to work hard for him, but then reneged on his promise. When Truth felt she had fulfilled her commitment, she escaped the plantation with her infant daughter.

Immediately after her escape, Truth began work to rescue her son, who at the age of five had been illegally sold into slavery in Alabama. After legal proceedings, he was returned to her. At this time, Truth became devotedly religion, attending a Methodist church. In 1829, she left upstate New York with an evangelical teacher.

During the early 1930s, Truth was involved in a religious organization called The Kingdom. She worked as their housekeeper, but continued to preach. The group's activities were increasingly bizarre until they disbanded in 1834.

After her affiliation with The Kingdom, Truth resolved to make her way as a traveling preacher. She changed her name to Sojourner Truth in 1843 and traveled around the East, mostly alone, mostly depending on the kindness of strangers to sustain her. In 1844, she joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a 210 person cooperative labor and farming organization in Massachutes. During her time there, she worked with famous abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison.

When the community disbanded in 1846, Truth went to live with one of its founders, George Benson. During this time, she dictated her memoirs, which became The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave (published privately in 1850). The book's success gave Truth the opportunity to support herself with speaking engagements, including her most famous speech, made at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in 1854, Ain't I a Woman?

Truth then became involved with the Quaker offshoot group Progressive Friends, who worked against slavery and towards non-violence. She spoke on behalf of the Union during the Civil War. In 1870, she began to advocate for the federal government to deed land parcels in the West to freed slaves, work she continued for many years, though it never came about.

Sojourner Truth died in 1883, at the age of 86.

Sources:
Women in History
Sojourner Truth Institute
About: Women's History

Amelia Earhart was born in 1897 in Kansas. Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother left him and moved to Chicago, taking Amelia and her sister, in 1914.

Earhart graduated from high school in 1915, then received training as a nurse's aide and worked in nursing in Toronto until the end of World War I. In 1919, she enrolled in the pre-med program at Columbia University, but she quit and moved to California before she graduated.

In California, Earhart saw a stunt flying show and immediately decided to learn to fly. She worked at the telephone company and drove a truck to earn money for flying lessons. In 1923, Earhart became the sixteenth woman ever to be issued a pilot's license by the FAI.

Not able to make a living as a high-altitude flyer, Earhart moved to Boston in 1925, where she began working as a social worker. She also wrote columns for local papers on flying and specifically on encouraging women to fly, and she became somewhat of a local celebrity.

After Charles Lindbergh's history-making flight across the Atlantic in 1927, a wealthy American expatriate living in London, Amy Guest, offered to sponsor a woman to do the same. In 1928, this project was offered to Earhart. For this first flight, however, she was a passenger, not the pilot. Still, the flight made history and made Earhart a bit more of a celebrity.

In 1929, Earhart began to support herself with competitive flying and endorsements. She was dubbed "Lady Lindy" (a reference to Lindbergh) and broke altitude records. In 1931, she married her publicist.

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