Remarkable Women You Have Not Heard Of
Although robbed of the credit for her greatest astronomical accomplishment and subjected to nonstop gender discrimination during the rest of her academic career, Cecelia Payne was finally recognized as “the greatest female astronomer in history.” This Wednesday’s Woman’s story is one of brilliance, tenacity and extraordinary scientific achievement in the face of persistent obstructions.
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Marguerite de Angeli, this Wednesday’s Woman, was born in a small town where “we’d had no library.” But in her later years, as the beloved best-selling author and illustrator of books that influenced the values of generations of children, she returned to that same town to read her books to children at the library named in her honor.
During her long publishing career, de Angeli excelled at depicting the traditions and cultural diversity of people often overlooked in children’s literature of the time — a Great Depression family, African-American children experiencing racism, Polish miners whose dreams took them beyond Pennsylvania’s coal mines, the disabled, 19th-century Quaker abolitionists, native Americans and immigrants.
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Happy Valentine’s Day! We’ve all been there. You stare at racks of valentines, reading and replacing card after card. This one’s too schmaltzy; that one’s not romantic enough. Just go with cute and funny? If you suffer valentine anxiety, blame today’s Wednesday’s Woman: Esther Howland, “Mother of the American Valentine.
Continue reading “Esther Howland: Business Women Who Turned Valentine Card Art Into a Fortune”
A century before civil rights icon Rosa Parks kept her seat at the front of an Alabama bus, a 24-year-old African American woman was forced off a New York City streetcar and jeeringly told to seek redress if she could. She could, and she did, ultimately desegregating New York City’s public transportation system. She is this Wednesday’s Woman, Elizabeth Jennings.
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Pair the feminist ideals of Susan B. Anthony with a half-baked scheme hatched by a failed Arizona gold miner with the implausible name Joe Boot, and you have the story of this Wednesday’s Woman. She is Pearl Hart, 28-year-old “Bandit Queen” of the Old West.
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Over her lifetime, Dorothea Lynde Dix became a famed advocate for more humane and effective treatment of mental illness in the United States and Europe. When she began her life’s work in the first half of the 19th century, victims of mental illness were viewed with fear and annoyance; the only solution was to “put them away” in hellish lunatic asylums. By the time she died in 1887, Dix had touched countless lives with campaigns that moved state and federal governments to begin recognizing mental illness as an illness rather than a moral weakness.
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