Brenda Berkman was in her apartment in Brooklyn the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 when she got a call from a friend in Kentucky telling her to turn on her TV. That was the moment that Brenda, one of the first female firefighters in New York City, knew something catastrophic …
Let’s take a trip to Hawaii today, where this week native Hawaiians honored Queen Lili´uokalani, the first woman and the last monarch to rule the islands. The chain of islands that would become America’s 50th state was originally established as a monarchy by King Kamehameha I, who conquered the islands …
In January of 1958 a gardener and birdwatcher in Massachusetts sent Rachel Carson a letter describing the dead birds she kept finding in her back yard. She believed they were dying from chemical exposure, specifically the pesticide DDT. Prompted by the letter and her decades of work with the Fish …
The first American woman to become a self-made millionaire started out with a simple wish: to earn enough money to give her only daughter the formal education she herself never received. What she did instead was prove the ability of women to succeed on their own terms. Madam C.J. Walker’s …
Edith Rockefeller McCormick helped establish Chicago’s Lyric Opera, lent support to Carl Jung, underwrote a young James Joyce and founded Brookfield Zoo. Only now is her unconventional and uncompromising story being told.
Her image of a Depression era migrant mother is one of the most iconic photos in American history and arguably Dorothea Lange’s most famous photograph. What’s lesser known is the story behind the image (more on that later) and all the ways in which Lange made her mark on America. …
They stood in front of the White House all day, every day (except for Sundays) for two and a half years, bearing silent witness to women’s voting rights denied. Dressed in white, with purple and gold sashes draped over their shoulders, the Silent Sentinels, as these women were known, stood …
Fannie Lou Hamer was an American civil rights activist who first learned she had the right to vote in 1962, more than 40 years after passage of the 19th Amendment. Her courageous fight to register to vote in Montgomery County, Mississippi led to a lifetime of civil rights work that …
The crowd inside the Tennessee State Capitol on Aug. 18, 1920 was colorful, to say the least. Men, mostly state legislators, sported red roses pinned to the lapels of their black suits; women wearing suffragette white filled the visitor’s gallery, yellow roses pinned to their hats, their dresses, even carried …
