As you probably know, today is international women’s day. So I’m going to go right ahead and tell you that Maria Sibylla Merian is one of my favorite badass ladies of the science/art world.
Born in Germany during the mid 1600s, Merian began her artistic career at a young age, painting her first observations of insects around age 13. She spent most of her life studying and composing beautiful watercolor paintings of her observations of nature and is most noted for being the first person to clearly record the life cycles of moths and butterflies. She made a self-funded expedition to Suriname where she recorded a bunch of previously unknown flora and fauna, she invented a washable fabric cloth, and published several books. Mind you, this was at a time when oil paints weren’t considered lady-like, the western world believed that moths and butterflies spontaneously birthed themselves from mud, and western ladies were advised not to go into tropical climates because it was known that women would furiously menstruate themselves into a hemorrhaging death.
Please do yourself a favor and go read a book about this woman. Thank you for your time.I’ve written a few papers on her, but I don’t have the time to go dig them up right now. I’ll suggest some readings for you when I find them.
(via huliia)
![amordragon:
Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a truly extraordinary woman.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/a267e436b5eda1885acf71d440d4465c/tumblr_mifwcaflht1r50k9co1_400.jpg)
Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a truly extraordinary woman.
(via nogoodturkey)
The mayor of Mississauga, Canada is a badass. via
Hazel McCallion, everbody.
92 years old,
34 years in office,
$0 in debt
$700 million in reserve
Eight prime ministers
One truck.
But women aren’t strong leaders… OH WAIT.
Now I’m sure somebody’s gonna tell me something but
- supports a Palestinian state
- supports Aids CHarities
- told her city well if we cant get money y’all need to pay taxes and maintains a 76 approval rating
- nick named Hurricane Hazel
- and is so boss lady that she don’t run she’ tells folks to give that money to charity
God I want to grow up to be even half as badass
Annemarie Schwarzenbach (1908-1942)
Because when you’re addicted to books you *have to* follow a few bookstores’ blogs, and you keep on discovering new writers you have to give a try. I mean, come on: a woman who was a writer, journalist, photographer, archeologist, morphin addict between the two wars… how am I supposed to resist?
« Ange dévasté » selon Thomas Mann, la Suissesse fut tout à la fois écrivain, voyageuse, journaliste, photographe et archéologue. Sa vie fut marquée par une errance intérieure qu’elle projeta dans les voyages et la morphine, mais aussi par son amitié avec Klaus et Erika Mann, auprès de qui elle s’engagea dans les années 30 dans la lutte contre le nazisme.
Elle mourut à 34 ans, des suites d’une banale chute de vélo.
(via thehappysorceress)
Ireland’s only female patron saint, Brigid of Kildare, celebrates her feast day today, February 1st. A date that is traditionally the first day of spring, and chosen presumably because of the associations St Brigid has with fertility. She was a conglomeration of the pre-Christian goddesses that preceded her – a Celtic figure appropriated by the Church to boost pagan conversion. She was subsequently ousted in favour of the patriarchal figure of St Patrick and the impossible virgin-mother Mary.
While many will know that Brigid is a patron of healing, fertility and learning, the Church are not so quick to tell us she was in fact Ireland’s first recorded abortionist. In 650 AD a biographer of Brigid, Cogitosus, told the story of a young woman who had broken her vow of chastity and fell pregnant as a result. The young woman went to see Brigid, who took care of the problem:
Brigid, exercising with the most strength of her ineffable faith, blessed her, caused the fetus to disappear without coming to birth, and without pain.
Image by Aidan Hart
(via stfuconservatives)
Got A Girl
CrushObsession On: The Forgotten Lumberjills of WWIILike the many other amazing heroines of their time, the ladies of the Women’s Timber Corps, aka the Lumberjills, stepped into unconventional britches in order to keep the industry, and country, moving while the men were off at war. Of course, there was also some major stereotypes being chopped down along the way:
They faced prejudice from the male forestry workers, as this was pure manual labor and they weren’t expected to be tough enough. Needless to say, they proved them wrong. Their hands became calloused, they developed strong muscular arms and legs - not traits of a “real lady” at the time, but they relished the freedom and fresh air even if it did cause many aches and pains! I can imagine that many were unwilling or uncomfortable to return to indoor-domestic lives IF their husbands returned. For those who joined when young, or if widowed and having to start afresh, I believe it gave them a strong core confidence, and the toughness to go on alone.
Seriously, though. When someone inevitably makes a movie out of this, will someone please get a hold of me? I need to raid the wardrobe (I also can throw a mean knife).
Read more about the Lumberjills here!
Lumberjills! Dang!
Editor’s note: Danielle McGuire is the author of “At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape and Resistance-a New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power.” She is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Wayne State University, and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians. She lives with her husband and two children in metro Detroit.
By Danielle McGuire, Special to CNN
(CNN) - In 2011, Rosa Parks was in the news, six years after her death. An excerpt from a breathtaking essay she wrote in the 1950s about a “near rape” by a white man in Alabama was released to the public. The handwritten narrative detailed Parks’ steely resistance to a white man, “Mr. Charlie,” who attempted to assault her in 1931 while she was working as a domestic for a white family.
It was late evening when “Mr. Charlie” pushed his way into the house and tried to have sex with her. Having grown up in the segregated South, she knew all too well the special vulnerabilities black women faced. She recalled, for example, how her great-grandmother, a slave, had been “mistreated and abused” by her white master.
Despite her fear, she refused to let the same thing happen to her. “I knew that no matter what happened,” she wrote, “I would never yield to this white man’s bestiality.” “I was ready to die,” she said, “but give my consent, never. Never, never.” Parks was absolutely defiant: “If he wanted to kill me and rape a dead body,” she said, “he was welcome, but he would have to kill me first.”
Does that sound like the Rosa Parks we know?
Some of the guardians of Parks’ legacy have said it is not, and insist the essay was fiction. But by dismissing the writings as fiction, it retains the popular image of Rosa Parks as a simple seamstress whose singular and spontaneous act launched the civil rights movement that brought down the walls of segregation.
This popular presentation of Parks as a quiet but courageous woman, whose humble righteousness shamed America into doing what was right has become a mythic fable present in nearly every high school history textbook, museum exhibit, and memorial.
She has been imprisoned by this tale, frozen in time as a silent and saintly icon whose only real action was to stay seated so that, in the words of her many eulogists, “we could all stand up.”
This overly simplistic story makes it impossible to imagine her essay about Mr. Charlie as anything but fiction.
But what if we knew more about the real Rosa Parks—a militant race woman and sharp detective whose career as a human rights activist spanned seven decades?
It’s time to free Rosa Parks from the bus.
Rosa Parks had a history of being defiant, and her fierce response to Mr. Charlie in the essay echoes her lifelong history of resistance to white supremacy. She learned about racial pride and self-defense at her grandfather’s knee in the 1910s.
Sylvester Edwards was a fan of the Jamaican-born black nationalist, Marcus Garvey, and delighted young Rosa with stories of Garvey’s greatness. She was especially proud of her grandfather’s willingness to defend himself and his family from the daily terror of the Ku Klux Klan in Pine Level, Alabama.
“Whatever happened,” she said, “I wanted to see it … I wanted to see him shoot that gun. I wasn’t going to be caught asleep.” This spirit of defense and defiance, she said later, “had been passed down almost in our genes’ that a proud African-American can not accept “bad treatment from anybody.”
In the 1930s, Rosa Parks joined her husband Raymond and others in secret meetings to defend the Scottsboro boys—nine young African-American men accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. In the 1940s, they hosted Voter League meetings, where they encouraged neighbors to register even though it was a dangerous task. In 1943, she joined the Montgomery NAACP and was elected branch secretary. The job required Parks to investigate and document acts of racist and sexist brutality.
It was in this context, in 1944, that Rosa Parks investigated the brutal gang-rape of Recy Taylor, a black woman from Abbeville, Alabama.
Parks took Taylor’s testimony back to Montgomery, where she and other activists organized the “Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor.” They launched what the Chicago Defender called the “strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade.” In 1948, she gave a fiery speech at the state NAACP convention criticizing President Harry Truman’s civil rights initiatives. “No one should feel proud,” she said, “when Negroes every day are being molested.”
Foot fatigue played no role when she refused to relinquish her seat on December 1, 1955. “There had to be a stopping place,” she said, “and this seemed to be the place for me to stop being pushed around. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama.”
Constant death threats forced her to leave Alabama in 1957. When she arrived in Detroit she continued working as an activist. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, she worked to secure “Black Power,” fought for open housing and against police brutality, railed against the war in Vietnam, and campaigned for George McGovern. She was an ardent fan of Malcolm X and Robert F. Williams, a militant NAACP leader from North Carolina who advocated “armed self-reliance.” She admired Williams so much that she delivered the eulogy at his funeral in 1996.
Given Parks’ history, her defiance of “Mr. Charlie” in 1931 makes perfect sense and fits within a larger context of resistance to the inhumanity of racism and sexism. Instead of a tired seamstress who tiptoed into history, Rosa Parks was a woman who marched proudly with strength, conviction, and purpose.
It is this Rosa Parks that we ought to celebrate and honor. Her history as an active citizen engaged in the most pressing issues of her time - especially racial and sexual violence –can teach us how to do the same in ours.
Sarah Robles: Why she kicks ass
- She is an American weightlifter.
- She has been called ‘the strongest woman in America’.
- She was a top-ranked shot putter which earned her scholarships to the University of Alabama and Arizona State University. As part of her shot put training she began Olympic style lifts and after only three months of weight lifting she qualified for nationals.
- She won the silver medal at a 2010 Pan American competition and is a three time national champion.
- At the 2011 World Championships, she finished in eleventh place in her weight class but first place among American woman weightlifters.
- Robles has qualified as one of two American women to compete in the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
- Even though she was the highest-ranked weightlifter in the United States she lived on less than $400 a month leading up to the London Olympics which was attributed to a lack of popular attention to the sport and due to the discrimination she faced for not having the female athlete body type that is traditionally portrayed in mass media, which meant she had difficulty finding sponsorships. But as of July 16, 2012, a company called Solve Media sponsors her.
- She has Madelung’s deformity in her arm, which leads to significant pain during lifts; although she she is extremely dedicated to weightlifting and treats the pain with wrist wraps and warming creams.
- When she isn’t weightlifting she enjoys blogging and crafting and she hopes to teach P.E. when she retires.
(via seriouslyamerica)
Tulsi Gabbard becomes first Hindu-American in US Congress
Washington, Nov 7 — While all five Indian-American candidates hoping to enter the US Congress lost out, Tulsi Gabbard today created history by becoming the first Hindu-American to enter the US House of Representatives.
An Iraq war veteran, 31-year-old Gabbard defeated K. Crowley of the Republican Party with a handsome margin in Hawaii’s second Congressional district. Her victory has been cheered by the Hindu-American community across the country.
The heavily Democratic district also elected one of two Buddhists to have ever served in the Congress, Mazie Hirono, who won her seat in 2006 but is now running for the US Senate.
Born in American Samoa to a Catholic father and a Hindu mother, Gabbard moved to Hawaii when she was two. In 2002, at age 21, she was elected to the Hawaii state legislature.
The next year, she joined the Hawaii National Guard, and in 2004 was deployed to Baghdad as a medical operations specialist. After completing officers’ training, she was deployed to Kuwait in 2008 to train the country’s counter-terrorism units.
“Although there are not very many Hindus in Hawaii, I never felt discriminated against. I never really gave it a second thought growing up that any other reality existed, or that it was not the same everywhere,” Gabbard said in a statement soon after she took an unbeatable lead over her Republican challenger.
“On my last trip to the mainland, I met a man who told me that his teenage daughter felt embarrassed about her faith, but after meeting me, she’s no longer feeling that way,” Gabbard said.
“He was so happy that my being elected to Congress would give hope to hundreds and thousands of young Hindus in America, that they can be open about their faith, and even run for office, without fear of being discriminated against or attacked because of their religion,” Gabbard said.
At 21, Gabbard became the youngest person elected to the Hawaii legislature. At 23, she was the state’s first elected official to voluntarily resign to go to war. At 28, she was the first woman to be presented with an award by the Kuwait Army National Guard.
Keep the good news coming <3
Putting Women on the Map: New Women’s History Collections on Historypin
March is Women’s History Month and March 8 is International Women’s Day! To celebrate, the National Archives has created four new collections focusing on women of the past in on Historypin.
The Women at Work collection depicts the role of women in the workforce throughout our national life – in farms, shipyards, hospitals, manufacturing plants, markets, and in the aviation industry - including “Mrs. William Wood manages a one hundred and twenty acre farm in Coloma, Michigan, with little male assistance.”
Historical photographs and documents reveal the struggle for woman suffrage in the collection of the same name, including women protesting at the White House in 1917.
Two more collections include Women in the military and famous women from National Archives holdings.
via NARAtions » Putting Women on the Map: New Women’s History Collections on Historypin »
Courtney Gillette (via The real lives of celesbians | AfterEllen.com)
Way before Janelle Monae made cute suits her signature, or Lady Gaga was flaunting her alter ego Jo Calderone, there was Gladys Bentley, flirting and singing the blues in men’s clothing during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance.
Why no one has paid Betley homage with a proper documentary or biography is baffling to me. She wasn’t just into women (gossip columns were all a twitter when Bentley married a white woman in Atlantic City), she was an openly lesbian performer, who sang the blues not only at rent parties and speakeasies but at well known gay establishments. As for her style and preference for suits (and top hats! Homegirl rocks a top hat like nobody’s business!), she later told Ebony magazine, “It seems I was born different. At least, I always thought so….From the time I can remember anything, even as I was toddling, I never wanted a man to touch me…Soon I began to feel more comfortable in boys clothes than in dresses.”
The sad ending, though, came when Betley caved to the conservative pressures of the McCarthy era and “reformed,” marrying a dude, donning dresses, and saying she’d been cured. She also denounced her former ways as an effort to gain a mainstream audience, but that flopped. Gossip, style, blues, speakeasies, love affairs: Gladys Bentley’s life has the makings of some killer nonfiction. Who’s game?
Legendary 1930s blues singer Gladys Bentley. Openly lesbian, Bentley was the headliner at the Clam House, a gay and lesbian club on 133rd street in Harlem where she performed popular songs with double-entendre lyrics in top hat and tuxedo.
(via cwnerd12)
![knowhomo:
LGBTQ* People You Should Know
Dorothy Thompson
* American Journalist
* Time magazine named her one of the two most influential women in America in 1939 (the other was E. Roosevelt)
* Known for her column “On the Record”
—> printed thrice-weekly nationally
—> was read by millions and one of the most popular columns of it’s time
* Thompson interviewed Adolf Hitler in 1931 (for Cosmopolitan)
—> first reporter to write about the threat of Hitler
* Though married to Sinclair Lewis, it was well known that their marriage was not a happy union and Thompson had many affairs with women.
—> including writer Christa Winsloe and Gertrude Tone
No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of]the Incorporated National Will. When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say “Heil” to him, nor will they call him “Führer” or “Duce.” But they will greet him with one great big, universal democratic, sheeplike bleat of “OK, Cheif! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh, Kaaaay!” — Thompson, 1935
some information taken from the text: Queers In History: The Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Historical Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqw3zx7cYA1qghfy5o1_400.jpg)
LGBTQ* People You Should Know
Dorothy Thompson
* American Journalist
* Time magazine named her one of the two most influential women in America in 1939 (the other was E. Roosevelt)
* Known for her column “On the Record”
—> printed thrice-weekly nationally
—> was read by millions and one of the most popular columns of it’s time
* Thompson interviewed Adolf Hitler in 1931 (for Cosmopolitan)
—> first reporter to write about the threat of Hitler
* Though married to Sinclair Lewis, it was well known that their marriage was not a happy union and Thompson had many affairs with women.
—> including writer Christa Winsloe and Gertrude Tone
No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of]the Incorporated National Will. When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say “Heil” to him, nor will they call him “Führer” or “Duce.” But they will greet him with one great big, universal democratic, sheeplike bleat of “OK, Cheif! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh, Kaaaay!” — Thompson, 1935
some information taken from the text: Queers In History: The Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Historical Gays, Lesbians and Bisexuals
Mary Seacole,
or Mother Seacole,
a Jamaican nurse best known for her involvement in the Crimean War.After hearing of poor medical provisions for wounded soldiers during the Crimean War she traveled to London to volunteer as a nurse. She applied to the War Office and asked to be sent as an army assistant to the Crimea. She was refused, mainly because of prejudice against women’s involvement in medicine at the time.
The British Government later decided to permit women to travel to the affected area, but she was not included in the party of nurses chosen by Florence Nightingale. Instead, she borrowed money to make the 4,000-mile journey by herself. She distinguished herself treating battlefield wounded, often nursing wounded soldiers from both sides while under fire.
Read more about Mary Seacole here.
