Women: In Memory

Barbara Seaman
1935 - 2008

Barbara Seaman was an American author, activist, and journalist, and a principal founder of the women's health feminism movement. Seaman was sensitized at an early age to women's health issues when her aunt Sally died of endometrial cancer in 1959, aged 49. Her aunt's oncologist attributed her death to Premarin, which her gynecologist had prescribed for the relief of menopausal symptoms. When the birth control pill came on the market in 1960, Barbara was writing columns for women's magazines such as Brides and the Ladies' Home Journal. She launched her career as a women's health journalist and brought a new kind of health reporting to the field, writing articles that centered more on the patient and less on the medical fads of the day. Seamen was first to reveal that women lacked the information they needed to make informed decisions on child-bearing, breast-feeding, and oral contraceptives. She even went so far as to alert women to the dangers of the Pill, whose primary ingredient was estrogen (also the active ingredient in Premarin, which had contributed to the death of her aunt). Prolific output and the popularity of her published articles won Seaman membership with the prestigious Society of Magazine Writers. Through this organization she met Betty Friedan, who asked her to cover events such as the founding of NOW (1966), the founding of NARAL (1969), and other similarly important feminist developments. She was also befriended by Gloria Steinem and became a contributing editor at Ms. Magazine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Seaman

Julia May Carson
1938 - 2007

Julia May Porter Carson was a member of the United States House of Representatives for Indiana's 7th congressional district from 1997 until her death in 2007 (numbered as the 10th District from 1997 to 2003). Carson was the first woman and first African American to represent the 7th District. She was also the second African American woman elected to Congress from Indiana, after Katie Hall. Carson was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of Velma V. Porter. She moved to Indianapolis while still a girl and worked in various positions to support her family. She graduated from Crispus Attucks High School in 1955 in Indianapolis. She then attended Martin University in Indianapolis and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. In 1965, while working as a secretary at UAW Local 550, she was hired away by newly elected congressman Andy Jacobs to do casework in his Indianapolis office. When his own electoral prospects looked dim in 1972, he encouraged Carson to run for the Indiana House of Representatives, which she did; she was elected in 1972, serving as a member for four years. In 1976, she successfully ran for the Indiana Senate, where she served for 14 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_May_Carson

Beverly Sills
1929 - 2007

With her brilliant runs and trills, Sills became one of the most beloved and respected sopranos in the 20th century. A famous coloratura soprano singing in opera roles worldwide, she became the general manager of the New York City Opera after retiring from performing. She became the first woman, the first performing artist and the first former head of an arts company to become chair of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and then, of the Metropolitan Opera. Sills used her celebrity to further her charity work for the prevention and treatment of birth defects. Her daughter was born profoundly deaf and her son born with severe birth defects. Barnard College awarded Sills its highest honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction. She will be inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame in 2007 and is a recipient of the highly prestigious Kennedy Center Honors.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beverly_Sills

Cathryn Adamsky
1933 - 2007

Dr. Adamsky was a leader in the second wave of the women's movement and an activist for feminist causes and university women's studies programs. She also founded the Women's Studies Program at Indiana-Purdue University. She was a founding member of the National Women's Studies Association and the Association for Women in Psychology. Passionate in her determination for women's equality , she opened students' eyes to different ways to look at society and earned the love of countless students over the years. Always treating people with respect, with no regard for status, class or position, Cathryn worked indefatigably to make the world a better place for women and children.

http://www.vfa.us/Forget_Them_Not.htm#Passing%20Sisters

Joy Simonson
1919 - 2007

Joy Rosenheim Simonson was in her sixties when she began her career as a feminist activist. "She was one of the women who have broken down every barrier there was for women of my generation." said Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women & Families, which gave Joy it's Foremothers Award in 2005. Joy was executive director of the National Advisory Council on Women's Educational Programs until the Reagan Administration took over in 1982. She was fired and her replacement was a substitute schoolteacher who quickly proposed to abolish the council. Women's groups protested, and in a speech on the House floor, Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) denounced the "purge" of Ms. Simonson. In 1967, she organized the DC Commission for Women. In 1970, she helped set up what is now the National Association of Commissions for Women and served three terms as president. She was a three-term president of the Clearinghouse on Women's Issues and a member of the National Council of Women's Organizations, which protested the exclusion of women from the Augusta National Golf Club which sponsors the Masters golf tournament.

http://www.vfa.us/Forget_Them_Not.htm#Passing%20Sisters

Molly Ivins
1944 - 2007

Ivins was born in Monterey, California and raised in Houston Texas. She studied at Smith College and Columbia University’s school or journalism as well as the Institute of Political Science, Paris. Throughout her career she was know for her spunk, humor and liberal perspective. She was a watchdog and commentator about the decisions and behavior of public figures, contending the Texas legislature to be corrput, incompetent and funny. Her home-spun stories were amusing and always to the point.She was a member of the Texas Democracy Foundation Board and, as an independent journalist, her column appeared in close to 400 newspapers nationally.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Ivins

Eleanor Schetlin
1920 - 2007

Dr. Schetlin won the prestigious S.U.N.Y. State-Wide Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Professional Service in 1985. Schetlin worked in higher education for 42 years, writing numerous articles for professional journals while at the same time being generous in her support of political causes, especially abortion rights for women and equal rights for minorities.

http://www.vfa.us/Forget_Them_Not.htm#Passing%20Sisters

Lorraine Rothman
1932 - 2007

Lorraine was one of the greatest and most innovative heroes of the Second Wave health movement. She was a pioneer in the abortion movement and inventor of the Del'Em menstrual extractor. Lorraine went on to co-found with Carol Downer the Gyn Self-Help Clinics and Feminist Women's Health Centers in Los Angeles and Santa Ana, and helped influence the Supreme Court’s decision to approve abortion. She was a California State professor, a citizen activist and an author of several women's health books.

http://www.vfa.us/Forget_Them_Not.htm#Passing%20Sisters

Jane Matilda Bolin
1908 - 2007

Judge Jane Bolin was sworn in to the bench in 1939 as the first black female judge and the first African-American woman to graduate from Yale Law School. Fiorello LaGuardia, mayor of New York appointed Bolin as judge of the Domestic Relations Court where she served for forty years as an activist in children’s’ rights and education. She was born in Poughkeepsie, New York to a white Englishwoman, Matilda Emery and Gaius Bolin, the first African-American to graduate from Williams College in Massachusetts.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Bolin

Grace Paley
1923 - 2007

The acclaimed writer, poet, feminist, and peace activist Grace Paley died on Wednesday in her home in Vermont at the age of 84 after a long struggle with breast cancer. As a writer, Paley is best known for her short stories examining the ordinary lives of women. Her Collected Stories, published in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and in 1993, she received the Rea Award, referred to as the Pulitzer Prize for short story writers. Paley also published several volumes of poems, and served as a poet laureate of Vermont and the first official New York State Writer. Paley was known as much for her political activism on behalf of peace and women’s rights as her literary accomplishments. In 2003, she contributed an essay called “Why Peace is (More Than Ever) a Feminist Issue” to the anthology Sisterhood Is Forever.

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/grace_paley

Jane Rule
1931 - 2007

Rule met Helen Sontoff in the early 1950’s and fell in love with her. They began living together in 1956 and lived together until Sontoff's death in 2000. Rule published Desert of the Heart in 1964 after 22 rejections from publishers. The novel featured two women who fall in love with each other and caused Rule to receive a flood of letters from "very unhappy, even desperate" women who felt they were alone and miserable. She was sought out by Canadian media and she later wrote, "I became, for the media, the only lesbian in Canada. A role I gradually and very reluctantly accepted and used to educate people as I could." In 1976, she moved to Galiano Island and remained there until the end of her life. In 1985, Rule's novel was made into a movie by Donna Deitch, released as Desert Hearts becoming a lesbian classic. The Globe and Mail said of it, "the film is one of the first and most highly regarded works in which a lesbian relationship is depicted favourably." Rule surprised some in the gay community by declaring herself against gay marriage, writing, "To be forced back into the heterosexual cage of coupledom is not a step forward but a step back into state-imposed definitions of relationship. With all that we have learned, we should be helping our heterosexual brothers and sisters out of their state-defined prisons, not volunteering to join them there."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Rule

Barbara Gittings
1932 - 2007

Barbara Gittings was an unusual lesbian activist: she pre-dated feminism. An early leader of the New York Chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, she edited its publication The Ladder, and moved it to a more militant stance. Throughout decades as an activist, she worked along side gay men to achieve equality. During her time with the American Library Association’s Gay Task Force, she worked successfully to remove homosexuality from the list of disorders of American Psychiatric Association.

dykestowatchoutfor.com/barbara-gittings-1932-2007

Judith Meuli
1938 - 2007

An integral part of the backbone of the women's movement's Second Wave Jude was a leader of NOW from the time she joined in 1967. She served on the National NOW board from 1971-1977, was coordinator of the Hollywood NOW chapter in 1976, and later was president of Los Angeles NOW. The co-editor of NOW's national newsletter/newspaper for 15 years, Jude then founded the Feminist Majority with Eleanor Smeal, Toni Carabillo, Peg Yorkin, and Katherine Spillar, and worked there until her death. She and Carabillo met in 1963 and were partners until Toni’s death. Jude co-authored The Feminization of Power and The Feminist Chronicles, a detailed history of the modern women's movement. She co-founded the Women's Heritage Corporation, a publishing company that produced the Women's Heritage Calendar and Almanac and a series of paperbacks on such figures as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone. A graphic designer, she formed Women's Graphic Communications, which produces and distributes books, newspapers, political buttons, and pins and designed many of the symbols and logos of the women's movement.

http://www.vfa.us/Forget_Them_Not.htm#Passing%20Sisters

Tillie Olsen
1912 - 2007

Labor activist and author Tillie Olsen was born to Jewish Russian immigrants seven years after the Russian revolution. She wrote from her own experience about the lives of working-class women and was a great influence on young women writers. In 1934 she organized the packinghouse workers’ union. She and her life partner, Jack Olsen, raised four daughters and lived in San Francisco’s Mission District.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillie_Olsen

Tee A. Corinne
1943 - 2006

Native Floridean and former North Carolina resident Tee Corinne forever changed the lesbian and women's communities through her forthright visual presentation of sexuality. Originally creating a sensation through her release of the Cunt Coloring Book (1975), she went on to create timeless photographs through the use of solarization and mandala presentation. Shortly thereafter, she found her voice in print as well, writing both fiction and nonfiction. She was a driving force in the presentation of women of all races, and disabled as well as able-bodied. In her later years, when her lover was diagnosed with cancer, she strove to find a way to incorporate cancer into her visual images. Her papers and photographs were bequeathed to the University of Oregon, which holds copyright on all images, including this one, used with permission.

libweb.uoregon.edu/speccoll/mss/tee.html

Arlene Raven
1944 - 2006

Arlene Raven, an art historian, critic, and educator helped transform feminist outrage into the Woman's Building, an iconoclastic Los Angeles institution that was a magnet for women seeking to produce art on their own terms. She founded the Woman's Building in 1973 with artist Judy Chicago and graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville. The three women also launched the Feminist Studio Workshop, a training program that sought to merge consciousness-raising with practical art education. For most of its existence, the Woman's Building was a source of often outlandish creativity, where painters, poets, performance artists, and others turned out work on subjects as mundane as waitressing and as disturbing as rape. Ms. Raven also co-founded and edited Chrysalis, an avant-garde feminist journal that attracted writers including Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, and Susan Griffin. ``She was one of the very earliest women . . . to begin to write women back into art history," said Terry Wolverton, a Los Angeles writer and former director of the Woman's Building.

http://www.vfa.us/Forget_Them_Not.htm#Passing%20Sisters

Ann Richards
1933 - 2006

Dorothy Ann Willis Richards, Governor of Texas 1991-1995
During her governorship, Richards appointed the first black University of Texas regent, the first disabled person on the human services board, the first teacher to lead the State Board of Education, the first crime victim on the state Criminal Justice Board, and the first black and female Texas Rangers.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Richards

Mary Condon Gereau
1916 - 2006

Mary Condon Gereau served as president of the Equal Rights Ratification Council. She was also vice president of the National Woman's Party from 1984 to 1991 and president of the Woman's Party Corporation from 1990 to 1996. She was elected Montana's Superintendent of Public Education in the 1950s, then worked for 15 years in the National Education Association's legislative division in Washington. She was Assistant Executive Director of the White House Conference on Education in 1960, president of the Burro Club, an organization of Democratic staffers on Capitol Hill founded by then staff member of the House of Representatives, Lyndon Johnson, from 1983 to 1986. Her rich background included time spent with the Red Cross in India and Sri Lanka in the 1940.s. In Washington, D.C. this granddaughter of Irish immigrants was well known. The phrase among the national education community was, "Go see Mary." When Congress was considering the Equal Rights Amendment, Mrs. Gereau served as the president of the Equal Rights Ratification Council.

http://www.vfa.us/Forget_Them_Not.htm#Passing%20Sisters

Richard A. Graham
1920 - 2006

Richard Graham was an original member of the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and help found the National Organization for Women because of what he saw as the commission’s intransigence on sex-discrimination issues. At the time a Republican, Mr. Graham was one of the inaugural group of five commissioners appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1965. Born out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the commission was created to address issues of discrimination in the workplace. He quickly came to feel that while the commission was willing to tackle issues of race discrimination, it concerned itself far less with those of sex discrimination, despite the inclusion in the Civil Rights Act of Title VII, which specifically prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion or sex. In news accounts of the NOW’s founding in 1966, Mr. Graham was said to have quietly told several of the organization’s founders, among them Betty Friedan, that to truly advance the cause of gender equality, American women would need a political lobby on a par with the N.A.A.C.P.

http://www.vfa.us/Forget_Them_Not.htm#Passing%20Sisters

Alida Walsh
1933 - 2006

A feminist activist, involved since the late 60's in the women’s movement, Alida worked in sculpture, film, video and multimedia and used her art in feminist demonstrations. Her best known works include the "Earth-Mother Goddess" and "Women Bound and Unbound" a multimedia performance presented at the National Women's Conference in Houston. One of the founding members of Women/Artist/Filmmakers, Inc. Alida was an Assistant professor at Montclair State University for 26 years, teaching film and video as an art form, and film history.

http://www.vfa.us/Forget_Them_Not.htm#Passing%20Sisters

Lawrence Lader
1919 - 2006

Lawrence Lader,a writer who so successfully marshaled his literary and political efforts in support of abortion rights, was called the father of the feminist movement by Betty Friedan. Mr. Lader was a major voice in the abortion debate for four decades, becoming a lightning rod for its critics as well as a beacon for its proponents. He wrote influential books and articles on the subject, organized ministers to refer women wanting abortions to doctors as well as referring 2,000 himself, helped found what was long known as the National Abortion Rights Action League and helped win New York State's repeal of abortion restrictions in 1970. He unsuccessfully sued the Internal Revenue Service to end the Roman Catholic Church's tax exemptions on the ground that its opposition to abortion had veered into the political arena. He successfully challenged some restrictions on the drug RU-486, known as the morning-after pill, and arranged to manufacture a version of it in the United States.

http://www.vfa.us/Forget_Them_Not.htm#Passing%20Sisters

Wendy Wasserstein
1950 - 2006

Wendy’s parents had come to America from central Europe as children in the 1920s. Her maternal grandfather Simon Schleifer was a Yiddish playwright who settled at Patterson, New Jersey. As a child, Wendy demonstrated her enthusiasm for show business straight away, attending dance lessons Saturday mornings before going to the matinee on Broadway. She went on to Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, attended summer school in playwriting at Smith College, and then enrolled at Yale's School of Drama. She graduated with a Master's degree, for which the thesis was a one-act version of what became her first play, Uncommon Women and Others. It opened off-Broadway in 1977 at the Marymount Manhattan Theatre. An account of the choices presented by feminism to a group of women at an elite women's college in the early 1970s, it starred Glenn Close and when filmed for television the following year, Meryl Streep. The play is still regularly revived in regional theatre in America, and won several awards. Wendy was then commissioned by the Phoenix Theatre to write Isn't It Romantic, about a friendship between two women, which became a box-office hit. Her greatest success came with The Heidi Chronicles which, after workshops in Seattle the previous year, opened in New York on December 11 1988, before transferring. It starred Joan Allen as an art history professor, and cuts from the growth of the women's movement in the 1960s to late 20th-century themes such as Aids, single parenthood and yuppies.

http://www.vfa.us/Forget_Them_Not.htm#Passing%20Sisters

Judith Lightfoot Cormack
1937 - 2006

Judith Gumpert [Lightfoot] Cormack’s involvement in the Women's Movement began in 1969 when she joined the newly-formed Atlanta branch of National Organization for Women (NOW). Through her activities with NOW, Cormack became a significant figure in the Women's Movement both in Georgia and nationally. She was a founding member of the Georgia Women's Political Caucus (1971), a member of the 1972 Georgia Commission on the Status of Women, and served as a member, southern regional director, and chair of the board during NOW's split in the 1970s. In 1978 Cormack returned to Australia where she has lived for over twenty years.

http://www.vfa.us/Forget_Them_Not.htm#Passing%20Sisters

June Bundy Csida
- 2006

Author, feminist leader, and former Hollywood publicist. In the early '70s, when discussing rape was still taboo and few victims reported the crime, feminist Csida and her husband wrote Rape: How to Avoid It & What to Do If You Can’t. June Bundy Csida was a member of Los Angeles NOW since 1970 when she coordinated a search for surviving pre-World War I suffragists to participate in NOW's historic Women's Strike for Equality celebration on August 26. The event marked the 50th anniversary of the day women won the right to vote. Ms. Csida is also the author of: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The 19th Century Renaissance Woman

http://www.vfa.us/Forget_Them_Not.htm#Passing%20Sisters

Betty Friedan
1921 - 2006

Betty Friedan, author of the book The Feminine Mystique that helped initiate the contemporary women's movement. Her book clearly described the lesser status of women and talked about the lives of women in industrial society as well as women who were full-time homemakers. She courageously started an organization, the national Organization for women and launched an entire movement at the same time.

en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Betty_Friedan

Coretta Scott King
1927 - 2006

Coretta King was known as an important activist in her own right. She became and international advocate for human rights and founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change. She was a long-time advocate for peace and human rights. The American Library Association gives the Coretta Scott King award to African American writers and illustrators for outstanding educational contributions to children’s literature.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coretta_King

Rosa Parks
1913 - 2005

Rosa Parks was the dignified African American seamstress who refused to surrender her bus seat to a white man. She was arrested and tried for civil disobedience. Her action launched Montgomery Bus Boycott and the modern civil rights movement and inspired generations of activists. She died at her home in Detroit.

en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Rosa_parks

Molly Malone Cook
1925 - 2005

Molly Malone Cook , born January 5, 1925, was a great Bohemian American, photographer, gallerist, literary agent and bookseller. She set up the first photographic gallery on the East Coast, was sometime assistant to the writer Norman Mailer, and lived with Mary Oliver, perhaps America's best-loved living poet. Even in the last decade of her life Cook remained a fearless spirit of immaculate taste and fierce opinions, stocky of build, with a shock of white hair. "She could be acerbic, but underneath it, she was the warmest woman I've ever met," as her friend the publisher Helene Atwan observed. Cook lived with Oliver in the Bohemian enclave of Provincetown, at the end of Cape Cod's outstretched arm.; a place historically home to artists, writers and, latterly, tourists and gays.

Shirley A. Chisholm
1924 - 2005

Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm, born November 30, 1924 was an American politician, educator and author. She was a Congresswoman, representing New York's 12th District for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1968, she became the first African-American woman elected to Congress. On January 23, 1972, she became the first major party African-American candidate for President of the United States. She won 152 delegates. Other women who ran for President of the United States in 1972 include Linda Jenness and Evelyn Reed. Mrs. Chisholm was an outspoken, steely educator-turned-politician who shattered racial and gender barriers as she became a national symbol of liberal politics in the 1960's and 1970's. Her slogan was "unbought and unbossed".

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/shirley_chisholm

Andrea Dworkin
1946 - 2005

Andrea Dworkin, a radical feminist whose early activism included working tirelessly against the Vietnam War. She was a strong voice against pornography that she described as a tool by which society controls, objectifies, and subjugates women. With Catharine MacKinnon, she helped draft a Minnesota ordinance that allowed victims of rape and other sexual crimes to sue pornographers for damage, under the logic that the culture created by pornography supported sexual violence against women.

en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Andrea_Dworkin

June Jordan
1936 - 2002

One of the most widely published African-American writers. she provided a constant challenge to oppression. Poet, essayist, journalist, dramatist, academic, teacher, cultural and political activist. Among African-American writers, she was undoubtedly one of the most widely published, the author of well over two dozen books of non-fiction, poetry, fiction, drama and children's writing. She emerged onto the political and literary scene in the late 1960s, when the movements demanding attention were for civil rights and women's liberation, and anti-war. Her battles were for freedom, whether that involved planning a new architecture for Harlem with her mentor Buckminster Fuller, or speaking out on the Palestinian cause. She spoke out against, or did something about, oppression wherever it was to be found.

www.wikipedia.org/wiki/JuneJordan

Kay Louise Gardner
1941 - 2002

Kay was a musician, composer, author, and musical producer involved in using music for creative and healing purposes. Her compositions include works for chamber orchestra, symphony orchestra, choir, flute, voice and piano. She was very active in promoting the work of contemporary female musicians and composers. Born in Freeport, New York, Gardner wrote and performed her first piano composition at the age of four. Gardner is considered a founder of the women's recording industry, and founded her own independent record label, Ladyslipper Records. Gardner produced 17 albums and composed works for piano, orchestra, and choir.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kay_Gardner