The Reconstructionists

French writer, philosopher, cultural critic, and public intellectual Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) is celebrated as the mother of contemporary feminism. Her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a seminal account of woman's role as an "other" in a world dominated and defined by male power, framed much of the dialogue on women's rights and gender equality in the decades that followed, shaping the subsequent work of iconic reconstructionists like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

An intellectually inclined child raised in a borderline bourgeois family, Beauvoir received early encouragement from her father and went on to pursue mathematics and philosophy after high school. In 1929, she met the odd-looking, spirited young man who would eventually become the iconic existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as well as Beauvoir's lifelong lover and intellectual companion. At the time of their first encounter, both were studying for the agrégation in philosophy -- the high French graduate degree -- and Beauvoir placed second in the entrance exam, behind Sartre, though the examination jury reportedly agreed that she was the better philosopher of the two. Only twenty-one, she became the youngest person in history to have passed the exam.

Despite -- or perhaps because of -- their intense love, as evidenced by their letters, Sartre and Beauvoir maintained an open relationship for the half-century that they were together. Each had multiple affairs, but in the context of a French bourgeois society, where the practice appeared to be a mundane male prerogative, their arrangement was much more radical and norm-defiant for Beauvoir, who had a number of both male and female lovers over the years, than it was for Sartre -- it became her way of reclaiming the same equality and freedom in matters of the heart and body that society had afforded to men.

In 1949, Beauvoir published The Second Sex in French -- her landmark conception of feminist existentialism, which not only outlined the systematic moral evolution necessary for true gender equality but also called, in unambiguous terms, for a fundamental moral revolution.

The book was quickly translated into English and published in America under the efforts of Blanche Knopf, the wife of publisher Alfred A. Knopf. But what may at first glance appear an admirable feat was in fact a lamentable and far-reaching cultural mistake: Howard Parshley, the translator Knopf had enlisted in the task, had only basic proficiency in French and hardly any grasp of philosophy, which rendered his translation a travesty of Beauvoir's work -- much was mistranslated, resulting in damaging distortion and loss of meaning, and entire parts were cut. To make matters worse, Knopf deliberately suppressed competing translations for more than a quarter century, which made Beauvoir's seminal treatise largely misunderstood and underappreciated in America. It wasn't until the book's 60th anniversary in 2009 that a complete English translation finally saw light of day, thanks to the combined efforts of translators Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, who not only restored Beauvoir's intended meaning but also salvaged a third of her original work that had been entirely cut.

Lisa Appignanesi writes in her biography of Beauvoir:

Beauvoir was a woman who was ardent for life in its full sensuous possibility. A highly trained intellectual, she was yet intensely aware of her body -- which is what made her such a perceptive observer of women's and her own condition. . . . If she felt her body had left her before the end, not even burial has been able to keep her indomitable spirit down.

Indeed, on April 19, 1986, more than 5,000 mourners of all ages followed Beauvoir's funeral cortège as it traveled to her final resting place, the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. "Women, you owe her everything!" was the phrase that floated through the grieving crowd and echoed across the world.

Beauvoir's legacy permeates the very fabric of modern society and has shaped our understanding of equality, but folded into it is also a subtle reminder that we, as a culture, still have a long way to go: It's been argued -- right here, right now, for instance -- that Beauvoir deserves a Nobel Prize for her work, but, true to the Prize's gender bias, she was never even nominated for one. And yet what greater contribution to global peace and justice than laying the foundation for a model of humanity in which one half is equal to, not lesser than, the other?

Celebrated as "the first lady of Civil Rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement," Rosa Parks (February 4, 1913–October 24, 2005) helped usher in a new era of equality with her iconic act of defiance against injustice: Her refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger on December 1, 1955, became one of the symbolic pillars of the modern Civil Rights movement.

Though Parks, raised by a strong mother and nursed on pride in her heritage, was not the first African American to risk arrest by standing up to segregationist laws -- preceded, most notably, by Irene Morgan in 1944 and Sarah Keys, whose seminal legal battle stretched across nearly three years between early 1953 and the end of 1955, shortly before Parks's arrest -- Parks's brave act of protest came at the right time, when the Civil Rights movement had reached a tipping point of nation-wide restlessness. Her arrest sparked a series of demonstrations and paved the way for court decisions and legislature that subverted and eventually overturned the historical embarrassment known as the Jim Crow system.

The circumstances of Parks's historic protest made her act of defiance particularly poignant: That fateful evening, after a long day at work, she paid her fare and boarded the downtown bus, resting into a seat in the first row of the rear section of the bus, allotted to African Americans and marked "colored." The seats in the front, reserved for white passengers, slowly began filling up, until the section was completely occupied. The bus driver proceeded to move the "colored" sign to the row behind Parks and demanded that she, as well as the other three black passengers, move back to make room for the whites.

It was then that Parks recognized the driver: He was the same man who, twelve years earlier, had demanded that Parks disembark the bus after having paid her fare and boarded, instructing her to follow city rules and re-board from the rear door rather than the front; but when she exited to reenter through the "colored" door, the driver sped off and left Parks to walk home -- at night, in the rain.

So on that December evening in 1955, Parks stood up for her nation, her community, and herself -- despite the clear risk of arrest and the exhaustion of the grueling day at work. The remarks opening her autobiography resound with especial intensity of spirit:

The only tired I was, I was tired of giving in.

Above all, Parks was driven by the dream of equality in the most human of ways, recounting one of her earliest and fondest childhood memories: the "remarkable time" when a white man had treated her "like a regular little girl, not a black little girl." That mindset remained with Parks as she refused to give up her seat nearly four decades later. She writes:

From the time I was a child, I tried to protest against disrespect treatment. But it was very hard to do anything about segregation and racism when white people had the power of the law behind them. Somehow we had to change the laws. And we had to get enough white people on our side to be able to succeed. I had no idea when I refused to give up my seat on that Montgomery bus that my small action would help put an end to segregation laws in the south. I only knew that I was tired of being pushed around. I was a regular person, just as good as anybody else. There had been a few times in my life when I had been treated by the white people like a regular person, so I knew what that felt like. It was time that other white people started treating me that way.

In her lifetime, Parks witnessed the demise of the Jim Crow system and the blossoming of Civil Rights into the most important cultural movement since Women's Suffrage. She received countless honors, including the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest accolade awarded by the U.S. legislative branch. Exactly three years and ten days after Parks's death in 2005 at the age of 92, the nation elected its first African American president.

When she penned her 1962 book Silent Spring, marine biologist, conservationist and writer Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) loudly, if perhaps unwittingly at the time, announced what's been termed " The Age of Ecology" and became a key figure in pioneering the modern environmental movement.

Today, when sustainability is on every corporate and cultural agenda and the deluge of news of environmental collapse is never-ending, it's hard to appreciate just how radical Carson's tireless advocacy was at the time -- and yet, more than half a century ago, she presaged one of today's most pervasive, inescapable concerns:

We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road -- the one less traveled by -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.

With Silent Spring, which not only was the Inconvenient Truth of its day but also paved the way for the very existence of such contemporary efforts, Carson made more people take environmental concerns to heart than anyone ever had before. Particularly opposed to the use of pesticides, she withstood unrelenting attacks by chemical companies and effected a landmark change in pesticide policy, resulting in a nationwide ban on chemical pesticides like DDT and spurring the grassroots environmental movement that eventually produced the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Environmental historian Linda Lear captures Carson's legacy in all its tragedy and beauty in Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, where she writes:

Rachel Carson was an unlikely person to start any sort of popular movement. She treasured her solitude, defended her privacy, rarely joined any organization; but she meant to bear witness. She wrote a revolutionary book in terms that were acceptable to a middle class emerging from the lethargy of postwar affluence and woke them to their neglected responsibilities. It was a book in which she shared her vision of life one last time. In the sea and the bird's song she had discovered the wonder and mystery of life. Her witness for these, and the integrity of all life, would make a difference.

Sixteen years after Carson succumbed to breast cancer, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom -- the highest civilian honor, also bestowed upon reconstructionsts Margaret Mead and Georgia O'Keeffe -- by Jimmy Carter. So enormous was Carson's cultural impact and so far-reaching her legacy that her story was even adapted in a children's book.

When she was nine years old, Hetty Bower (September 28, 1905–November 12, 2013) saw the wounded veterans returning from the battlefields of WWI and became an unflinching opponent of war. She spent the century that followed fighting for social justice as one of Britain's most unrelenting political activists. Among her last words when she died at the age of 108 was the song she sang with her daughters during those final days, and the refrain to her entire life: "Ban the bomb, for ever more."

Bower, born Esther Rimel, joined the very first women's union, the Association of Women Clerks and Secretaries, in her early twenties. Though she was highly politically engaged her whole life, running a hostel for Czech refugees during WWII, becoming a founding member of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament in 1958, and marching in every demonstration against the war in Iraq, Bower didn't begin her public-speaking career until she was 102, when she addressed the crowds at London's Hiroshima Day Commemoration with her articulate and purposeful message of peace.

After WWII, Bower spent her days working at a London high school, where she championed music education -- she had developed a special love of music during WWI, when her family found comfort in playing piano and singing to override the noise of bomb raids. Her dying words -- a lyric line that bespeaks her two great passions, music and peace -- ring with the undying hope of one day drowning out the sound of war in the world.

By the time she was forty, British social reformer, mathematician, and statistician Florence Nightingale (May 12, 1820 – August 13, 1910) was the second most influential woman in England, after only Queen Victoria.

Nightingale pioneered modern nursing during her time serving as a volunteer nurse in the Crimean War, where she became known as "The Lady with the Lamp" for her nightly visits with the wounded in the wards. In 1854, John MacDonald, commissioner of the Times Crimea Fund, described these midnight vigils memorably:

Wherever there is disease in its most dangerous form and the hand of the despoiler distressingly nigh, there is that incomparable woman sure to be seen. Her benignant presence is an influence for good comfort, even amid the struggles of expiring nature. She is a "ministering angel" without any exaggeration in these hospitals, and as her slender form glides quietly along each corridor, every poor fellow's face softens with gratitude at the sight of her. When all the medical officers have retired for the night and silence and darkness have settled down upon those miles of prostrate sick, she may be observed alone, with a little lamp in her hand, making her solitary rounds.

Nightingale's relentless advocacy brought government attention to the horrific conditions of the wounded. With her staff of 38 women volunteers she had trained as nurses, she worked to dramatically reduce death rates in the clinics. Once the war ended, she returned to Britain and applied her wartime insights to revolutionizing the sanitary design of hospitals. Public recognition of her work during the war led to the establishment of the Nightingale Fund, dedicated to training nurses. In 1860, she used the £45,000 from the fund to found the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas's Hospital, which became the first official nurses training program in the world. By 1865, Nightingale's first class of trained nurses had entered the workhouse system in England and Scotland -- a revolutionary development in healthcare. By the 1880s, a number of her nurses had become matrons of leading hospitals across the United Kingdom.

Straddling both the practical and the theoretical, Nightingale also authored numerous books and papers on nursing and healthcare reform, including her seminal 1860 book Notes on Nursing, in addition to more subtle meditations on feminism and women's emancipation, like her essay "Cassandra," critiquing culture's tendency to align feminine ideals with idleness and near-helplessness.

With a strong inclination for mathematics and statistics, she also pioneered the use of graphical representations at a time when the pie chart, so tediously ubiquitous today, was a curious novelty that hardly any scientists and journalists used for presenting statistical information.

Underpinning all of Nightingale's endeavors was her tireless hunger for progress and the betterment of life's challenging givens. In an 1884 letter to her sister Parthenope, she encapsulated her the impetus at the core of her spirit:

What is life? It cannot be merely a gaining of experience -- it is freedom, voluntary force, free-will, & therefore must be a hard fought battle -- in order to make a choice, there must be evil & good to choose from.

Nightingale declined several marriage overs and never wed nor had a public relationship. While some biographers have painted her as a sexless do-gooder who remained chaste her entire life due to a religious calling to her work, it is quite possible that she was a queer woman who either never identified as such under the cultural and religious constraints of her era, or only did so in private -- she frequently referred to herself in the third-person masculine, using such phrases as "a man of action" and "a man of business" called to "a man's work." She once wrote of her cousin, Marianne Nicholson:

I have never loved but one person with passion in my life, and that was her.

In 1837, she met Mary "Clarkey" Clarke -- an Englishwoman twenty-seven years her senior, who went on to become the single most important confidante in Nightingale's life and with whom she exchanged hundreds of letters over the decades that followed.

In 1883, Queen Victoria awarded Nightingale the Royal Red Cross. In 1907, at age eighty-seven, Nightingale became the first woman to receive the Order of Merit. In 1912, the International Red Cross instituted the Florence Nightingale Medal, bestowed upon nurses or nursing aides for outstanding service. Since 1965, International Nurses Day has been celebrated around the world on Nightingale's birthday.

During the Civil War, women weren't allowed to vote or have bank accounts, were still subject to Victorian ideals of homemaking and motherhood as the sole purpose of female existence, and had little personal or political agency. And yet hundreds of them served in the war undocumented, dressed as men. Singular among them was the surgeon, feminist, and abolitionist Mary Edwards Walker (November 26, 1832 – February 21, 1919), who is to this day the only woman awarded the Medal of Honor, the highest accolade of the American military, and one of only eight civilians to have ever received it.

Walker, who first became interested in medicine through her father's collection of anatomical books, paid her way through medical college by teaching at the local elementary school and received her medical doctor degree as the only woman in her class. Shortly before she turned twenty-four, she married her college classmate Albert Miller while wearing pants and a man’s coat. The two opened a medical practice together, but general distrust in female physicians' competence caused the practice to peter out. When the marriage failed due to Miller's infidelity four years later, Walker opened a practice on her own and it thrived, both as a business and as a social statement. One of her newspaper ads read:

Those … who prefer the skill of a female physician … have now an excellent opportunity to make their choice.

When the Civil War began, Walker volunteered as a civilian in the Union Army, but was only allowed to practice as a nurse despite her training -- the American army had no female surgeons. A suffragette and actively invested in women's rights, she eventually made her way to working as an unpaid field surgeon on the front lines and even applied to the Secret Service in 1862, offering to spy on the enemy. She was rejected. A year later, however, she was appointed as "Contract Acting Assistant Surgeon (civilian)" in the Army of the Cumberland and thus became the first-ever female surgeon employed by the American military.

In the spring of 1864, she was captured by the Confederate army and spent four months as a prisoner of war in Virginia, until she was released in a prisoner exchange.

Once the war ended, Walker became a writer, lecturer, and vocal proponent of women's rights and dress reform. At a time when women wore dresses, Walker walked in pants and proudly declared:

I wear this style of dress from the highest, the purest, and the noblest principle!

In 1865, Walker was recommended for the Medal of Honor by two army generals and President Andrew Johnson signed a bill to present her the medal, citing her “valuable service to the government,” her devotion "with much patriotic zeal to the sick and wounded soldiers, both in the field and hospitals, to the detriment of her own health,” and her having endured “hardships as a prisoner of war.”

In 1917, however -- two years before her death -- a review board checked the eligibility of medal recipients and revoked 911 of those awarded, including Walker's, on the ground that she wasn't actually a member of the military. Walker, eighty-five at the time, refused to give her medal back. While the army never asked the unfortunate 911 non-honorees -- who included Buffalo Bill -- to actually return their medals, their names were erased from the Army Medal of Honor Roll.

Six decades later, and fifty-eight years after Walker's death, president Jimmy Carter reinstated her medal, citing her “distinguished gallantry, self-sacrifice, patriotism, dedication and unflinching loyalty to her country, despite the apparent discrimination because of her sex.” In 1982, the U.S. Postal Service commemorated with a stamp -- but depicted her in a lavish dress, with curls, even though she took great pride in wearing only men's clothes and rejecting the era's dress norms for women. Whether the error is an example of institutional laziness, historical ignorance, or a posthumous form of oppression remains a matter of interpretation.

It was under the male pseudonym George Eliot that Mary Anne Evans (November 22, 1819 – December 22, 1880) became one of the most revered voices in literary history -- a choice dictated as much by the biases of the Victorian era, in which women writers tended not to be taken seriously for anything beyond romance novels, as it was by Evans's desire to keep the turbulence of her private life out of the public eye.

Evans received little formal education after the age of sixteen, but thanks to her father's position as manager of the Arbury Hall Estate, she was permitted to use the local library. There, with her voracious appetite for reading, she gave herself a makeshift classical education. From a young age, she had learned to escape into her own head for refuge. In an 1839 letter to a friend, she wrote:

When I was quite a little child I could not be satisfied with the things around me; I was constantly living ina world of my own creation and was quite contented to have no companions that I might be left to my own musings and imagine scenes in which I was chief actress. Conceive what charater novels would give to these Utopias. I was early supplied with them by those who kindly sought to gratify my appetite for reading and of course I made use o the materials they supplied for building my castles in the air.

Evans was not considered beautiful by common standards -- so much so that the unusual size of her head was often remarked upon -- and this was something of which she was exceedingly aware and painfully self-conscious. A former schoolmate once described her as "keenly susceptible to what she thought her lack of personal beauty, frequently saying that she was not pleased with a single feature of her face or figure," but was quick to acknowledge her "intellectual power … capable of any effort" and "the great charm of her conversation." In fact, this notion of her intellect as a counterpoint to her perceived physical shortcomings was a recurring theme both in the impressions of others and in Evans's own self-assessment. Herbert Spencer noted her intellect's "latent power," writing that her ideas were "the products of a large intelligence working easily" -- but he, too, made a note of her awkward appearance and especially her head, "larger than is usual in women."

Still, Evans was not the type of person who found relief for her insecurities in trying to lift herself up by lowering others down. To the contrary, alongside her intelligence was also enormous generosity of spirit. The famed British social reformer Charles Bray, who grew to be a close friend of Evans's for many years, captured this quality of hers beautifully:

She had little self-assertion; her aim was always to show her friends off to the best advantage -- not herself. She would polish up their witticisms, and give the credit to them.

Bray also remarked upon the two faces of Evans's genius, its "sunny and shady side," noting -- as many others who knew her did -- that she was frequently depressed. And yet Evans understood that happiness is a skill to be learned and actively cultivated, not a state to be passively beheld. She wrote in a letter to a friend at the age of twenty-five:

One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy. I am just beginning to make some progress in the science.

Above all, however, stood Evans's formidable literary talent -- a product of the confluence of that enormous intellect and those all-too-human insecurities. Legendary critic Martin Amis famously proclaimed her "the greatest writer in the English language ever" and her 1872 novel Middlemarch "the greatest novel."

The first daughter in a Wisconsin family of dairy famers with seven children, Georgia O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) had decided she wanted to be an artist by the age of ten. What she did become -- what she made herself with the sheer power of passion and grit -- was not merely an artist, but an art pioneer celebrated as the Mother of American Modernism.

O'Keeffe pursued her childhood vision with unrelenting focus and dedication, from her early instruction by a local watercolorist to her studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to her participation in New York's Art Students League, where she was mentored by William Merritt Chase. But her journey wasn't a straight upward trajectory to success. In the autumn of 1908, shortly after winning the Art Students' League's William Merritt Chase still-life prize for an oil painting titled Dead Rabbit with Copper Pot, she became disillusioned with the art world, believing she'd never be able to set herself apart from the sea of sameness under the mimetic tradition, which had been the basis of her training. She abandoned painting altogether and spent four years as a commercial artist in Chicago, but eventually returned to painting, in large part thanks to the influence of Arthur Wesley Dow's radical ideas about making art.

In the autumn of 1915, O'Keeffe created a series of charcoal drawings, which captivated photographer Anita Pollitzer. Pollitzer took them to New York to show them to her good friend, the prominent photographer and modern art champion Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz fell in love with the paintings, which he exhibited in his legendary 291 gallery, then fell in love with O'Keeffe. The two, twenty-three years apart in age, began living together in New York in 1918, married in 1924, and remained together until Stieglitz's death in 1946. Their magnificent love letters are among history's greatest romantic correspondence.

In 1929, O'Keeffe started spending her summers painting in New Mexico and became intensely interested in the local landscape and culture, which began dominating her art and went on to inspire some of her most famous paintings. She moved there permanently in 1949 and continued working for more than three more decades, even after she suffered macular degeneration, which left her nearly blind.

More than a century after reconstructionist Maria Mitchell became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, O'Keeffe became an Academy Fellow. She received the prestigious National Medal of the Arts, which reconstructionist Adrienne Rich is the only person to date to have declined), as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor bestowed upon an American citizen, one also awarded to reconstructionist Margaret Mead.

O'Keeffe lived to be ninety-eight, sustained by an ethos perhaps best captured in a 1922 New York Sun article that quoted her:

It is only by selection, by elimination, and by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things.

When pioneering chef Julia Child (August 15, 1912--August 13, 2004) was finally able to publish her landmark labor-of-love magnum opus Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961, it wasn't just a seminal introduction of French cuisine to America -- it was a pioneering feat of entrepreneurship for Child, who had faced rejection after rejection, struggling for nearly a decade to surmount the oppressive greed of the publishing industry and bring her vision to life in its original creative integrity.

When Knopf finally greenlit the 726-page first volume, the book swoon swelled into the status of a cultural classic and was followed by a second volume in 1972. By then, Child had become not only a legendary chef, but also an influential media personality with her own television shows in an era when few women graced the airwaves -- heartening redemption for a woman who, upon finding out she was too tall to enlist in the Women's Army Corps, had spent her late twenties and early thirties as a typist and an advertising copywriter. Indeed, over the course of her life, Child received numerous awards for her work -- a Peabody and three different Emmys for her TV shows and a National Book Award for Julia Child and More Company.

So monumental is Child's legacy and so enduringly uplifting her story that she has even inspired a delightful illustrated children's book and a rose species was named after her.

Few artists have captivated audiences with equal enchantment in coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, have sung for prisoners and for presidents, have come to be known by first name only and to speak for millions at the same time, becoming the voice of a movement that shaped the course of history. But singer, songwriter, and activist Odetta Holmes (December 31, 1930--December 2, 2008), better-known simply as Odetta and widely celebrated as the "voice of the civil rights movement," did just that.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. revered her as the "queen of American folk music." The New York Times anointed her a "mother goddess" of folk and blues. The Washington Post called her a "matriarch for a generation of folk singers." Reconstructionist Maya Angelou proclaimed that "if only one could be sure that every 50 years a voice and a soul like Odetta's would come along, the centuries would pass so quickly and painlessly we would hardly recognize time."

Odetta's influenced fueled a remarkable creative lineage that stretches across Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Paul Simon, Carly Simon, Tracy Chapman, Nick Cave, Jewel, and Nellie McKay. In Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, Dylan cites her 1956 album Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues -- the same record that inspired young Janis Joplin to become a singer -- as a key turning point in his musical career:

The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta. . . . I heard a record of hers in a record store. . . . Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar.

So monumental was Odetta's cultural impact that her life was even adapted in a children's book.

Above all, however, Odetta considered herself a "musical historian" who brought back to life -- to new, more dimensional life, thanks to her remarkable vocal range of soprano-to-baritone -- the forgotten songs of chain gangs, cowboys, and the working poor, which she herself excavated from the archives of the Library of Congress. She saw in that music a way to deconstruct the conceits of culture, something she articulated beautifully in a 1965 New York Times interview:

In folk music, complex emotions are spoken about with such simplicity that it's the highest form of art to me. You can unclutter things.

Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901--November 15, 1978) intended to make a life out of painting. Instead, she became the world's best-known cultural anthropologist, becoming the discipline's most revered patron saint.

A 1959 audio interview captured Mead's deceptively ordinary extraordinariness:

Doctor Mead is of small build, she has blue eyes, she's plain folks -- there are no wares about her. You get the impression that she'd be at home anywhere -- in an igloo, a native hut, or a Park Avenue penthouse.

And, indeed, she did. Mead dedicated her life to the study of indigenous societies and the translation of those observations into invaluable insights on Western culture. Through her tireless work and its eloquent articulation in her books -- including her now-legendary volumes Sex and Temperament and Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization -- as well as in her mass media appearances, she popularized modern anthropology, giving it shape and cultural credibility both as a field of practical study and as an area of intellectual inquiry.

Mead is credited as the originator of the viral aphorism "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Though the authorship of the now-ubiquitous quote has never been ascertained, it endures as a beautiful and fitting meta-testament to Mead's studies of how ideas spread and are assimilated in a culture.

Mead opposed the over-academization of anthropology and its preoccupation with terminology rather than crisp, plain insight. She wryly admonished in her 1979 volume Some Personal Views:

If one cannot state a matter clearly enough so that even an intelligent twelve-year-old can understand it, one should remain within the cloistered walls of the university and laboratory until one gets a better grasp of one's subject matter.

Both her anthropological observations and her personal experience led Mead to defy a number of Wester conventions, instilling in her the conviction that one's sexual orientation can evolve over the course of a lifetime and that it is possible for a person to have more than one beloved at the same time. In a collection of Mead's letters, published in 2006 with her daughter's permission, she writes:

[I believe] that one can love several people and that demonstrative affection has its place in different types of relationship.

Mead also objected to the limiting social structures and labels of Western society, especially those that confined sexual identity and behavior to artificial categories, including those of "heterosexual" and "homosexual." Mead herself had three marriages to men -- all anthropologists -- and a daughter with her third husband, the renowned British anthropologist Gregory Bateson. She also had two long-term romantic relationships with women: One with her mentor Ruth Benedict, fourteen years her senior, who died in 1948, and another with the prominent anthropologist Rhoda Metraux, thirteen years her junior, who edited much of Mead's work and with whom Mead spent the last 23 years of her life.

Several weeks after her death, in January of 1979, Mead was posthumously awarded the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom, which cited her far-reaching and inextinguishable legacy:

Margaret Mead was both a student of civilization and an exemplar of it. To a public of millions, she brought the central insight of cultural anthropology: that varying cultural patterns express an underlying human unity. She mastered her discipline, but she also transcended it. Intrepid, independent, plain spoken, fearless, she remains a model for the young and a teacher from whom all may learn.

A generation before reconstructionist Berenice Abbott took her camera to the streets, pioneering female photographer and photojournalist Frances "Fannie" Benjamin Johnston (January 15, 1864--May 16, 1952) revolutionized the cultural impact of the photographic image.

The only surviving child in a well-to-do family, Johnston was raised by intelligent, connected, and progressive parents -- her mother was a female congressional journalist and drama critic, an occupation as uncommon for a woman in the mid-nineteenth century as they come. From a young age, Frances was heavily engaged in public life and unafraid to have a voice. After receiving her education at the Académie Julian in Paris and graduating from the Notre Dame of Maryland Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies in 1883, she began writing critical essays and articles for print publications, until she received her first camera as a gift from George Eastman, inventor of the legendary Eastman Kodak cameras and a close family friend. Young Frances fell instantly in love with photography and found in the burgeoning medium an outlet for her creative restlessness and her intense interest in social commentary.

She began with portraits of family and friends, and by the 1890s was already touring Europe as a freelance photographer. An 1895 Washington Times article described Johnston as “the only lady in the business of photography in the city,” admiringly adding that “in her skillful hands it has become an art that rivals the geniuses of the old world.”

She photographed many of the era's most celebrated public figures, including Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Roosevelt, Admiral Dewey, and the famed African-American educator, author, orator, and presidential adviser Booker T. Washington, who also asked Johnston to take portraits of Hampton Institute's black students in a seminal 1899 exhibition aimed at celebrating African Americans' positive contributions to society. The six-week assignment paid her $1,000 plus living expenses for herself and her assistant -- an astonishing sum at the time, and doubly so for a woman running her own business, in a creative field no less. At the Pan-American Exposition of 1901, Johnston took the last portrait of President William McKinley shortly before his assassination.

Bettina Berch writes in the excellent biography The Woman behind the Lens: The Life and Work of Frances Benjamin Johnston:

By the standards of the day, Johnston was a “self-made” woman. Far from identifying with the poor or the working class, she focused on cultivating the upper class, whose commissions were her mainstay.

Johnston's seminal 1897 article titled “What a Woman Can Do With a Camera,” published in Ladies' Home Journal, included the following advice:

Photography as a profession should appeal particularly to women, and in it there are great opportunities for a good-paying business—but only under very well defined conditions. The prime requisites -- as summed up in my mind after long experience and thought -- are these: The woman who makes photography profitable must have, as to personal qualities, good common sense, unlimited patience to carry her through endless failures, equally unlimited tact, good taste, a quick eye, a talent for detail, and a genius for hard work. In addition, she needs training, experience, some capital, and a field to exploit. This may seem, at first glance, an appalling list, but it is incomplete rather than exaggerated; although to an energetic, ambitious woman with even ordinary opportunities, success is always possible, and hard, intelligent and conscientious work seldom fails to develop small beginnings into large result.

Perhaps most timeless of all, however -- and timelier than ever, in our age of aesthetic consumerism where everyone is a photographer -- is Johnston's admonition in the article:

Any person of average intelligence can produce photographs by the thousand, but to give art value to the fixed image of the [camera] requires imagination, discriminating taste, and, in fact, all that is implied by a true appreciation of the beautiful. For this reason it is wrong to regard photography as purely mechanical. Mechanical it is, up to a certain point, but beyond that there is great scope for individual and artistic expression.

In 1913, Johnston and her lover, Mattie Edwards Hewitt, opened a studio together in New York City, where she lectured on women's entrepreneurship at NYU and began documenting the city's architecture in the 1920s. The experience further kindled her interest in architecture and its role as a bastion of social status. In 1928, she exhibited a pioneering series of photographs, ranging from the abandoned mac-mansions of the wealthy to the dilapidated dwellings of the poor -- a powerful foreboding of the Great Depression and America's growing income inequality, which influenced photojournalists for generations to come and inspired similar contemporary projects that contrast poverty and privilege in everything from children's bedrooms to daily diets around the world.

Johnston moved to New Orleans in 1940 -- a vibrant city of boundless visual stimulation for the creative artist -- and died there in 1952, at the age of 88. She continued to photograph until her final days.

Janette Sadik-Khan (b. 1960) has done for the practical advancement of urbanism what Jane Jacobs has done for the theoretical. Since her appointment as commissioner of New York City’s Department of Transportation in 2007, she has championed a number of initiatives that, beyond transforming Gotham into a more livable and sustainable metropolis, have inspired cities around the world to undertake their own projects cultivating robust urban life.

From converting car-space into people-space and seeding the city with public plazas to exponentially expanding the New York's network of bicycle paths and championing its first public bike-share program to implementing intelligent traffic redesigns that have resulted in both more efficient traffic and dramatic drops in pedestrian deaths, Sadik-Khan has made city streets safer, more walkable, and more palpably joyful, bringing William “Holly” Whyte's vintage urban ideals to modern life. Her Summer Streets initiative has become one of the most anticipated collective experiences of the year, and her tireless crusade for public space has helped improve happiness and improve business, protect pedestrians and protect the city, enhance sanity and enhance speed.

A master-choreographer of what she has called the “complicated ballet on the streets of New York,” Sadik-Khan is a kind of modern-day patron saint of the city -- a visionary woman in a man's administrative world, who has filled the streets with people and the urban soul with sunshine. And if the age-old stereotype of the hurried and brash New Yorker were ever to dissolve, chances are, Janette Sadik-Khan would be to blame and bless.

The longest-serving American First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884--November 7, 1962) endures as one of the most remarkable luminaries in modern history -- a relentless champion of human rights, an advocate for working women, and a tireless supporter of underprivileged youth.

At the age of seventy-six, Roosevelt collected her life's wisdom in You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life -- an elegant and timeless manual of personal exploration emanating universal insight, which went on to inspire generations and influence entire genres, from political memoirs to spiritual life-guides. Above all, however, the book was and remains a testament to Roosevelt's extraordinary generosity of spirit, her clarity of purpose, and her unflinching integrity. She writes:

Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product. Paradoxically, the one sure way not to be happy is deliberately to map out a way of life in which one would please oneself completely and exclusively. After a short time, a very short time, there would be little that one really enjoyed. For what keeps our interest in life and makes us look forward to tomorrow is giving pleasure to other people.

While a beloved and celebrated public figure, however, Roosevelt was also undeniably controversial, both politically and personally. She was unafraid to publicly disagree with some of her husband's politics, pushing for improving women's rights in the workplace and civil rights for African American and Asian American families. In 1928, she met journalist Lorena "Hick" Hickok, with whom the first lady embarked on a thirty-year relationship peppered with some extraordinarily intimate letters. In one, Roosevelt writes:

Hick, darling

Ah, how good it was to hear your voice. It was so inadequate to try and tell you what it meant. Funny was that I couldn’t say je t’aime and je t’adore as I longed to do, but always remember that I am saying it, that I go to sleep thinking of you.

And in another:

I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms.

That Roosevelt chose to life as she did -- a life of enormous public good and service to others, and yet one undeterred by other people's standards -- is the ultimate embodiment of one of her most poignant points in You Learn by Living:

The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

And what a monumental human being Roosevelt was.

When Amelia Earhart (b. July 24, 1897) disappeared over the Pacific on July 2, 1937, she left behind a legacy shrouded in legend, glory, and modern-day mythmaking. Celebrated as a pioneering aviator and the first woman to cross the Atlantic on a solo flight, she was also a smart businesswoman, a generous caretaker, and a relentless champion of education. She applied her remarkable tenacity to everything she took on, demanding a great deal of herself and never failing to live up to it, in public or in private.

Though she grew up in a troubled home, financially strained and with an alcoholic father, that tenacity would come to define Amelia from a young age. Firmly set on getting an education, she saved up money and eventually sent herself to the Ogontz School, a junior college in Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1916. She was twenty-one, significantly older than her classmates, but she compensated for the missed years by taking on an exceptional amount and array of academic work. In her correspondence with her mother, young Earhart outlines her scholarly voraciousness, which would later translate into her drive for aviation:

I am taking Modern Drama Literature, German and German Literature outside. French three and five in which latter we are reading Eugénie Grandet. And Senior arithmetic and logic if I can. Besides reading a good deal and art, Bible, etc. etc. I am elected to write the senior song, but you know the more one does the more one can do. […] Despite my unusual activity I am very well organized to do more the more I do.

But during her Christmas vacation in 1917, Earhart was moved by the wounded soldiers returning from WWI and decided to volunteer at a military hospital, performing arduous nursing duties after receiving training as a nurse's aid from the Red Cross. She found a profound calling in the life of service and, having received her mother's permission to leave college without graduating, she returned to the hospital in 1918 to nurse the war wounded full-time. In the fall of 1919, she enrolled in Columbia University as a premed student.

But Amelia soon found her faith in the skies. In 1920, she fell in love with flying and the rest, as they say, is history. Eight years later, in June of 1928, made her first transatlantic flight as a passenger, and four years after that, she flew across the Atlantic as a solo pilot.

One of the most astonishing, little-known facts about Earhart's life -- a testament to her tenacious spirit and capacity for self-transcendence -- is that she accomplished all of her feats despite debilitating chronic sinus pain, for which she was hospitalized multiple times and which was only exacerbated by the open-air cockpits that exposed her to harsh winds, high pressure, and extreme cold. Still, like fellow reconstructionist Frida Kahlo who made art history despite severe chronic pain, frequent hospitalizations, and more than thirty operations, Earhart achieved what she did without complaint or cry for pity, driven by optimism and dedication to her calling.

Despite her passion for the skies,however, Earhart always kept education, especially the education of women, a primary focus of her relentless dedication, lecturing in universities around the world and even inspiring a course in “household engineering” at Purdue University, where 1,000 of the 6,000 students were women. She also counseled young women on their careers. At Purdue, she advised graduating girls to try a certain job but not be afraid to make a change if they found something better, adding:

And if you should find that you are the first woman to feel an urge in that direction, what does it matter? Feel it and act on it just the same. It may turn out to be fun. And to me fun is the indispensable part of work.

(Fittingly, she titled her memoir The Fun Of It: Random Records of My Own Flying and of Women in Aviation.)

Her views on marriage, too, were incredibly ahead of her time and would be considered progressive even today -- yet another expression of Earhart's singular gift for navigating new cultural territory with courage and conviction.

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) has been called an "addict of experience," a tragic literary blonde, a victim of her generation and her medication. Beneath these partly true yet invariably reductionist labels, however, lies the immutable fact that she was, above all, one of the most celebrated and influential poets of the twentieth century, with a remarkable gift for moving the hearts of millions while struggling to still her own.

From an early age, Plath embodied a chronic osmosis of profound melancholia and boundless literary talent. Her dissonant relationship with life bursts open in her journal from age eighteen, where she writes:

With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand… hopeless from the start. A story, a picture, can renew sensation a little, but not enough, not enough. Nothing is real except the present, and already, I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.

In another diary entry, she laments:

Life is a gentleman’s agreement to grin and paint your face gay so others will feel they are silly to be unhappy.

Yet even in the face of debilitating mental illness throughout her life, Plath maintained an astonishing daily routine, fueled in part by her anxious insomnia and in part by the very creative restlessness that lent her her poetic prowess.

In 1950, Plath enrolled in Smith College. It was there that she, an excellent student, formally submerged herself into the literary world. After editing The Smith Review, she was invited to serve as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine the summer before her senior year -- a prestigious assignment that precipitated her notorious month in new York City. She graduated from Smith with honors and moved to Cambridge, England, to continue her studies at Newnham College on a Fulbright scholarship.

There, Plath met fellow poet Ted Hughes in February of 1956. It was one of literary history's steamiest encounters, but only four months later, they wed and embarked upon a marriage that would be at once a famed partnership at the intersection of literature and love and a highly controversial dynamic that continued until death did them part in 1963, when Plath took her own life by sticking her head in oven and turning on the gas. She was only thirty.

In 1982, her Collected Poems earned Plath one of the few posthumous Pulitzer Prizes ever awarded. She was also a woman of multiple, if lesser-known, talents, from her surprisingly deft drawings and her children's books -- including one posthumously illustrated by the great Sir Quentin Blake -- originally written for Plath's own children, Frieda and Nicholas.

But despite her eye for beauty and quiet capacity for whimsy, Plath never exorcised the demons that haunted her formative years. In another diary entry, 18-year-old Plath presages the enduring open question of her life, so violently shut with her untimely, unspeakably heartbreaking death:

Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I’ll laugh. And then I’ll know what life is.

"The Cuba swim is the greatest endurance feat in human history, but if anyone can do it, I can," Diana Nyad (b. August 22, 1949) told a New York Times reporter in 1978, shortly after she captured the world's attention by swimming around the island of Manhattan. She was 28.

This declaration of courageous bravado is something one would expect from Thomas Edison or Muhammad Ali, but 35 years later, after four failed attempts and a lifetime of resilience in the face of great emotional and physical strain, Nyad made good on her word. In 2013, the 64-year-old author, journalist, and world-class endurance swimmer became the first person to swim the 110 miles between Cuba and Florida unprotected by a shark cage -- a remarkable testament to the relentlessness of the human spirit, 53 hours in the doing and 53 years in the making.

Nyad took her very first swim just after she turned 10. After her coach marveled at her natural gift and told her she would be the best swimmer in the world, the young girl latched onto the sport with fervent grit, practicing for five hours a day for years. The pool became at once a calling and a refuge -- in it, Nyad found safety from the sexual abuse she endured between the ages of 14 and 17, and a solitary petri dish for cultivating her own strength of character. Perhaps understandably, young Nyad developed a fascination with the survival stories of explorers, in which, as she writes in her 1978 memoir Other Shores, she sought to find the key to "[digging] deeper and deeper into your gut until you arrive at that same core of pride and dignity that the survivors know.”

Though Nyad has referred to endurance swimming as “the loneliest sport in the world,” ever since that first lap, it held singular mesmerism for her. When she first attempted that epic Cuba-to-Florida swim at the age of 28, she was swept by violent currents into Gulf of Mexico. After 41 hours and 49 minutes of swimming, a soul-crushed Nyad realized reaching land would be impossible and exited the water. Determined not to fail at something she wanted so badly, so desperately, so wholly, she broke the world record for swimming the somewhat gentler route from the Bahamas for Florida the following year.

But, then, Nyad entered a self-induced dry spell, not taking another swim for three decades. Occupying herself as a TV sportscaster, public speaker, and author, she remained active -- regularly cycling for 100 miles a day -- but out of the water. In 1994, her 10-year relationship with the woman Nyad still calls the love of her life crumbled. Facing the devastating death of a romance and the lament over her failed romantic dream of completing the Cuba-to-Florida swim, Nyad found herself with only one choice in living a life of fulfillment: She must return to the water and train tirelessly to master the epic feat.

In her New York Times Magazine profile of Nyad, Elizabeth Weil notes Nyad's unusual anchor of sanity in the face of impossible physical and mental demands:

When Nyad swims in a pool, she counts in her head, ticking off laps, first in English, then in German, then in Spanish, then in French. (Nyad is fluent in all but German.) The goal is to focus her mind on repetitive thought, as a yogi does with a mantra. But when Nyad swims in the ocean for a long time -- 8 or 10 or 12 or even 24 hours -- she doesn’t just count, she sings. She’ll do “It Ain’t Me, Babe” 10 times, interspersed with the quatralingual counting, then sing “Paperback Writer,” 10 times, followed by quatralingual counting again. Nyad keeps in her head a playlist of 65 songs. Some are for daytime swimming; others for nighttime. Nyad knows each one intimately, how many seconds each takes, how many strokes. “When I complete 2,000 ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’s, Bob Dylan version, I know I’ve gone 4 hours and 45 minutes exactly,” Nyad says. “I never lose track.”

After three more attempts -- two in 2011 and one in 2012 -- Nyad finally attained her life's dream, emerging victorious on the shores of Key West on September 2, 2013, having entered Cuba's waters on August 31.

In Other Shores, Nyad writes:

My pride lies in my courage. Churchill said that "courage is the highest of all human virtues." I am proud to have developed both the courage to attempt difficult feats and the courage to persevere through difficult months and years en route to those feats.

The root of that pride, however, is only amplified rather than diminished by the years. Nyad tells Weil:

Endurance is not a young person’s game. I thought I might even be better at 60 than I was at 30. You have a body that’s almost as strong, but you have a much better mind.

And still, Nyad's incredible fortitude of character shines through even in her childhood self. That fateful year when she took her first swim, she wrote a short essay, included in Other Shores:

WHAT I WILL DO FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE My mother says that her father lived to be 79. Her mother is still living. And my father’s parents are still living. It would probably be a good guess that I will live to 80 years. Which means I have 70 years left to go. I want to see all the countries of the world and learn all the languages. I want to have thousands of friends, and I want all my friends to be different. I want to play six instruments. I want to be the best in the world at two things. I want to be a great athlete and I want to be a great surgeon. I need to practice very hard every day. I need to sleep as little as possible. I need to read at least one major book every week. And I need to remember that my 70 years are going to go by too quickly.

To have lived long is certainly a triumph, but to have lived widely and at great depth is what Nyad has to look forward to when she eventually does turn 70.

Her ageless courage is perhaps best-captured by the words of fellow reconstructionist Gertrude Stein, who famously observed that "we are always the same age inside."