women in history

Here are some cool gals looking mighty dapper! You can click on each photo for names and here’s some info on each fabulous woman:

Lily Elsie: English actress during Edwardian era, famous for being in many musicals and operettas

Josephine Baker: French bisexual actress, singer, and dancer who rose to prominence in the 1920s, refused to perform for segregated audiences, active with the French Resistance during WWII and the Civil Rights movement in the 50s

Dorothy Arzner: American lesbian film director who was the only female director in Hollywood during the 1930s, created the first boom mike for the Clara Bow film “The Wild Party” (1929)

Dorothy Mackaill: British-American actress who was involved in the Ziegfeld Follies, also notable for her silent-film roles

Daphne du Maurier: English bisexual author and playwright, famous for her works like Rebecca and “The Birds”

Frida Kahlo: Mexican bisexual painter, known for the feminist and nationalist themes in her paintings, created 55 self-portraits and once stated “I paint myself because I am so often alone and because I am the subject I know best.”

Hannah Gluckstein, known as “Gluck”: British lesbian artist known for her evocative Modernist paintings, adopted the name “Gluck” because she thought the sex of a painter is irrelevant

Olive Thomas: American silent-film actress, involved in the Ziegfeld Follies, possibly the first “Vargas Girl” after posing for pinup artist Alberto Vargas

Jessie Matthews: English actress, singer, and dancer who rose to prominence in the 1920s and 30s

Alberta Virginia Scott, Class of 1898, first African American graduate of Radcliffe College - courtesy of Schlesinger Library.

This is what a real, qualified OBGYN will tell you about what women feel when they get an abortion

“When you’re getting ready to launch into space, you’re sitting on a big explosion waiting to happen.”

Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1823-1893)

“The crowning glory of American citizenship is that it may be shared equally by people of every nationality, complexion, and sex…”

Mary Ann Shadd Cary was born in 1823 to parents dedicated to the abolition of slavery.  Her parents taught her much about fighting for equality and often provided shelter for fugitive slaves.  Cary moved to Canada with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 where she founded an antislavery newspaper in Canada.  After she was widowed during the Civil War, Cary moved to Washington, DC where she taught at public schools and lectured around the country on women’s rights and the women’s suffrage movement.  She studied law at Howard University and graduated in 1883 as one of the first black female lawyers in the country. 

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)

“Now is the time for our women to begin to try to lift up their heads and plant the roots of progress under the hearthstone.”

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an early abolitionist and women’s suffrage leader.  She was one of the few African American women present at conference and meetings about these issues between 1854 and 1890.  Harper was also a well-known author whose poetry and essays focused on issues of slavery, gender and racial discrimination. Her writings and lectures made Harper one of the first major popularizers of African American protest poetry.    

Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954)

“Lifting as we climb…we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance.“ 

Marry Church Terrell attended Oberlin College as a young woman where she became one of the first African American woman to earn a college degree.  After moving to Washington, DC, Terrell became involved in the women’s rights movement.  She focused much of her efforts on securing women’s right vote, touring the country to lecture on the issue.  In 1896, she and fellow activists founded the National Association of Colored Women and Terrell served as the association’s first president.  After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Terrell turned her attention to civil rights and helped bring about the desegregation of restaurants in Washington, DC.

Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961)

“When the ballot is put into the hands of the American woman the world is going to get a correct estimate of the Negro woman. It will find her a tower of strength of which poets have never sung, orators have never spoken, and scholars have never written.“ 

A prominent African American educator, church leader and suffrage supporter, Nannie Helen Burroughs devoted her life to empowering black women.  Burroughs helped establish the National Association of Colored Women in 1896 and founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC in 1909.  She was outspoken on issues she considered important to African American interests and wrote many articles for leading African American newspapers and magazines.  She used these articles to attack injustices endured by African Americans and encourage readers to take responsibility for changing their own conditions.  

Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin (1884-1965)

“You cannot be neutral. You must either join with us who believe in the bright future or be destroyed by those who would return us to the dark past.”

Daisy Elizabeth Adams Lampkin dedicated her life to supporting women’s and civil rights.  Lampkin began hosting local suffragette meetings at her home near Pittsburgh and organizing African American women to engage in consumer groups in 1912.  Much of her efforts centered on the organization of women’s groups and her leadership earned her the position of president of the Lucy Stone Woman Suffrage League in 1915. Later in life she also served as a field secretary and fundraiser for the NAACP.

During the Middle ages, and even in the Renaissance and until the 18th century, eyelashes were not styled. Women, in general, removed eyelashes and eyebrows in order to give more importance to the forehead, which was the most important feature in females’ faces at that time.

Women were not supposed to exhibit their hair in public, and by several ecclesiastical edicts, the Catholic Church condemned that practice as an offense to God and the church, and a sin. It obviously included eyebrows and eyelashes.

“Dresses proved to be a difficult hurdle for early female mountaineers, who were expected to wear respectable attire despite the challenges and dangers presented by it.”

Among these women was Lucy Walker, of whom it was said that she “lived on a diet of sponge cake, champagne and Asti Spumante while on expedition.”

But the best has to be Annie Smith Peck, who, after scaling Peru’s Mount Coropuna at the age of 61, hoisted a “Votes for Women” flag at its summit.

Letters between the artists Beatrice Fenton (1887-1983, top right) and Marjorie Martinet (1886-1981, bottom left), lovers of fifty years. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian.

“… I would pour out to you the tenderest and the most fervent love I know if you were here to-night, Beloved. I wish I could do more than write it, or that I could write poetry …” (undated)