
This is a serious story about a unique woman — Filipina food technologist, pharmaceutical chemist, humanitarian, and war hero – that starts with ketchup.
Continue reading “María Ylagan Orosa – Filipina War Hero and Banana Ketchup Queen”Remarkable Women You Have Not Heard Of
Wednesday’s women profiles
Killed by U.S. Friendly Fire, She Left a Legacy Including Much of What Filipinos Eat Today
This is a serious story about a unique woman — Filipina food technologist, pharmaceutical chemist, humanitarian, and war hero – that starts with ketchup.
Continue reading “María Ylagan Orosa – Filipina War Hero and Banana Ketchup Queen”Rising to Stage and Film Fame Despite Racism and Red Baiting
Gertrude Jeannette was a true trailblazer as the first woman to get a motorcycle license in Manhattan and The Big Apple’s first licensed female cabdriver. Perhaps her more important accomplishments were as an actor, director and playwright who mentored a generation of Black actors in New York. But none of that would have happened were it not for a persistent childhood stutter and a man named Joe Jeannette who loved to dance.
Continue reading “Gertrude Jeannette – Actress, Playwight, Motorcyclist, and Cultural Star”An early female pilot and promoter who claimed several aviation “firsts” that weren’t
Blanche Stuart Scott couldn’t stand the thought of “being a nobody and a nothing in New York’s millions.” So this only child, spoiled by wealthy parents and described as stubborn, adventurous, competitive and fiercely determined, became somebody, racking up a slew of firsts along the way. Unfortunately, some of those firsts weren’t. Some were more like close, but no cigar.
Continue reading “Blanche Scott: America’s First Female Aviator… or Was She?”Caves Beneath Her Bronx Mansion Were Packed With Guns and Explosives
The future Emilia Casanova de Villaverde was a willful, headstrong teenager and never one to hold her tongue. She lacked the “coquettish manners believed to be natural in young women.” But what she had was a fire in her belly for Cuban independence in the late 19th century when Cuba was still governed by Spain. So much so that at a convivial banquet attended by Spanish authorities, she rose to lift her glass in a very public toast “to the freedom of the world and the independence of Cuba.” Talk about knowing how to clear a room.
Continue reading “Emilia Casanova de Villaverde: Firebrand of The Cuban Revolution”Music gave us The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, The Duke and, of course, The Boss. But long before Elvis swiveled his pelvis, Ellington tickled the ivories and Springsteen picked up the guitar, the music world was captivated by The Valkyrie of the Piano.
Continue reading “The Valkyrie of the Piano: Teresa Carreño”Her Opera “The Sun Dance” Made Stage History
Zitkála-Sá (pronounced Zitkála Shá), also known as Gertrude Evaline Simmons, was born in 1876, year of the Battle of Little Bighorn, on South Dakota’s Yankton Sioux Reservation. Her mother was a full-blooded Dakota Sioux named Ellen Tatiyahewin (“She Reaches for the Wind”) Simmons, her father a white man about whom little is known. We do know he abandoned the family, leaving her mother to raise their children in traditional Sioux ways.
Continue reading “Zitkála-Sá: A 20th-Century Champion of Native American Activism”