Life
6 Awesome Historical Ladies You Probably Didn't Know About
Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, Rosa Parks. Lucy Parsons, Annette Abbott Adams, Gabriela Mistral. The first three names are probably familiar as famous butt-kicking ladies throughout history, but what about the others? Today, I want to give a little play to some equally-as-awesome women whose names and stories might not be as well-known to you. With a poet, a lawyer, and several activists, there's gotta be someone here whose story will motivate and inspire you (if only for the rest of your Monday afternoon).
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
6 Awesome Historical Ladies You Probably Didn't Know About
Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, Rosa Parks. Lucy Parsons, Annette Abbott Adams, Gabriela Mistral. The first three names are probably familiar as famous butt-kicking ladies throughout history, but what about the others? Today, I want to give a little play to some equally-as-awesome women whose names and stories might not be as well-known to you. With a poet, a lawyer, and several activists, there's gotta be someone here whose story will motivate and inspire you (if only for the rest of your Monday afternoon).
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Lucy Gonzalez Parsons
Lucy G. Parsons was a badass 19th and 20th century socialist and anarchist activist. Devoted to social justice and labor activism, she founded a newspaper in 1892 called Freedom and later went on to become a founding member of International Workers of the World, or IWIW. She was one of the first female minority activists with the American labor movement.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Annette Abbott Adams
Annette Abbott Adams was a lawyer and judge. This smart lady was the first woman to be named United States Assistant Attorney General (she served for a year under Warren Harding), as well as the first woman to sit on the California Supreme Court. She also worked as a teacher and school principal.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Pablita Velarde
Pablita Velarde is heralded as the first Native American woman to pursue a full-time career as a professional artist. From the Santa Clara pueblo in northern New Mexico, her work was known for depictions of Native American life in the Southwest. There's even a museum of Native American women in the arts named after Velarde in Santa Fe. Her daughter, Helen Hardin, and granddaughter, Margarete Bagshaw, are also noted artists.
Photo: Wikipedia via NPS
Caroline Herschel
Did you know that Caroline Herschel was the first woman to discover a comet? She was struck with typhus at age 10, which stunted her growth. Because of this, her family thought she would never marry; instead, she became an astronomer and assistant to her brother, astronomer William Herschel. Between 1786 and 1797, she discovered eight comets.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Ella Baker
Ella Baker was one of the unsung heroes of the Civil Rights movement, despite the fact that she fought fiercely for equality for over fifty years. She worked for the NAACP, ran voter registration drives and worked in the movement on a grassroots level, mentoring young activists and organizing behind the scenes.
Photo: The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights via Wikimedia Commons
Gabriela Mistral
This Chilean poet, whose real name was Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, which she did in 1945. She remains the only Latin American woman to have that distinction. During her life, she worked as a teacher, journalist and eventually, diplomat, all while writing poems evocative poems that made her one of the best-known Latin American poets of the first half of the 20th century.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
