By Jo Salas | On September 8, 2020 | Updated November 2, 2023 | Comments (0)
I first heard about Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (1876 – 1963) when I fell in love with her grandson, a visiting American graduate student at my university in New Zealand.
I knew of the great German novelist Thomas Mann but had not read his novels, and certainly had never wondered about how they came to appear in English.
“My grandmother was Mann’s translator,” my new boyfriend informed me. I was mildly impressed. He told me a little about her: how forbiddingly intellectual she was, how un-grandmotherly. Read More→
By Miki Pfeffer | On August 15, 2020 | Updated August 28, 2022 | Comments (2)
Julia Ward Howe (1819 – 1910) was an American poet, essayist, editor, speaker, and activist extraordinaire, especially in the causes of abolition, suffrage, and the advancement of women everywhere.
Although her iconic “Battle Hymn of the Republic” is ubiquitous in patriotic, inspirational, and popular settings, its author is far less known. Let’s look at 10 fascinating facts about the woman behind the verses.
Howe was born on Bond Street and Broadway in New York City to an affluent, Calvinist family; when she was five, her mother died in childbirth. She was educated in a home with its own library and art gallery and well-propertied for a secure future. Her heroic but controlling husband stymied her spirit and mishandled her land holdings. Read More→
By Beatrice Ricketts | On June 20, 2020 | Updated September 5, 2022 | Comments (0)
At the age of eleven, Françoise d’Eaubonne (March 12, 1920 – August 3, 2005) wrote on a convent wall, “Vive le féminisme!”
This was just the start of what would be a radical life as a member of the French Communist Party, writing more than fifty novels and essays and, most importantly, coining her defining theory: ecofeminism.
One of the best-known leaders of the French feminist movement, d’Eaubonne’s most famous work was her essay “Le Féminisme ou Le Mort” (Feminism or Death), published in 1974. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On March 1, 2020 | Updated September 2, 2022 | Comments (0)
Shirley Chisholm may have been the first woman to seek the presidential nomination from one of the two major political parties — that was in 1972 — but exactly one hundred years before that, Victoria Woodhull (1838 – 1927) was the first woman to launch a national presidential campaign. She did so under the banner of the Equal Rights Party.
And running for president long before women even had the right to vote was just one chapter in an incredibly colorful, yet largely forgotten American life.
Victoria was a suffragist, publisher, stockbroker, orator, and agitator. She was also accused at various points of being a bigamist, prostitute, spiritual charlatan, and adulteress. Read More→
By Skyler Gomez | On December 8, 2019 | Updated August 16, 2023 | Comments (2)
Presented here are twelve African American suffragists whose contributions shouldn’t be overlooked, a mere fraction of those who should be acknowledged and honored.
The women’s suffrage movement in the United States led to the establishment of the legal right for women to vote nationally when the 19th amendment was ratified in 1920.
As the women’s suffrage movement gained momentum in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Black women often were marginalized. Yet despite the odds, these suffragists made important strides in the fight for voting rights. Read More→
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