In Memory

Miep Gies
1909 - 2010

Born Hermine Santrouschitz in Vienna, Miep Gies was transported to Leiden in December 1920 to escape the food shortages prevailing in Austria after World War I. In 1922, she moved with her foster family to Amsterdam. In 1933, she met Otto Frank when she applied for the post of temporary secretary in his spice company. She became a close friend of the Frank family, as did Jan Gies, whom she married in 1941 after she refused to join a Nazi women's association and was threatened with deportation back to Austria. Her knowledge of Dutch and German helped the Frank family assimilate into Dutch society, and she and her husband became regular guests at the Franks' home. With her husband, and colleagues, Miep Gies helped hide Edith and Otto Frank, their daughters Margot and Anne, Hermann and Augustan van Pels, their son Peter, and Fritz Pfeffer in a secret upstairs room that was not used in the spice company's office building on Amsterdam's Prinsengracht from July 1942 to August 4, 1944. In theory, Miep and the other helpers could have been shot if they had been caught hiding Jews. Before the hiding place was emptied by the authorities, Miep retrieved Anne Frank's diaries and saved them in her desk drawer for Anne's return.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miep_Gies

Mary Daly
1928 - 2010

The leading feminist philosopher and theorist died January 3. Here, her friend and former student explains the extraordinary reach of Mary Daly’s fierce intelligence and strong will.

January 11, 2010

In the seventies some of Mary Daly’s graduate students began calling her Doctors Daly because she had three doctorates, one from Notre Dame, and two, in theology and in philosophy, from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. At the uber-catholic and overwhelmingly male Fribourg, she was treated like a pariah. In the library she would put her things down on a table, and the male seminarians sitting there would move en masse to another table. No one sat next to her in the classroom. But she stayed, standing up to that misogynist treatment to get the training she wanted. Those who loved her knew the steel in Daly that enabled her to withstand anything in order to hone her towering intelligence to a fine edge, which would soon dissect the patriarchal infrastructure that had blighted women’s (and children’s, men’s and the biosphere’s) lives for millennia.

womensmediacenter.com/blog/2010/01/mary-daly-1928-to-2010/

Mary Travers
1936 - 2009

Mary Allin Travers was an American singer-songwriter and member of the folk, pop group Peter, Paul and Mary, along with Peter Yarrow and Noel "Paul" Stookey. Peter, Paul and Mary was one of the most successful folk-singing groups of the 1960s. Unlike most folk musicians who were a part of the early 1960s Greenwich Village music scene, Travers actually grew up in that New York neighborhood. Her parents were journalists and active organizers for The Newspaper Guild, a trade union.In 1938, the family moved to Greenwich Village in New York City. She attended the Little Red School House there, but left in the eleventh grade to pursue her singing career. While in high school, she joined The Song Swappers, which sang backup for Pete Seeger when Folkways Records reissued a union song collection, Talking Union, in 1955. The Song Swappers recorded a total of four albums for Folkways in 1955, all with Seeger. Travers regarded her singing as a hobby and was shy about it, but was encouraged by fellow musicians.Travers also was in the cast of the Broadway-theatre show, The Next President. The group Peter, Paul and Mary was formed in 1961, and they were an immediate success. The group's first album, Peter, Paul and Mary came out in 1962 and immediately scored hits with their versions of "If I Had a Hammer" and "Lemon Tree". The former won them Grammys for best folk recording and best performance by a vocal group. (photo credit: Kevin Mazur)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Travers_(singer)

Eunice Kennedy Shriver
1921 - 2009

Eunice Mary Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, the fifth of nine children of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.She was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Roehampton, London, England; and Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York and Stanford University . She worked for the Special War Problems Division of the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Justice Department as executive secretary for a project dealing with juvenile delinquency, as a social worker at the Federal Industrial Institution for Women, the House of the Good Shepherd women's shelter, Chicago and the Chicago Juvenile Court. On May 23, 1953, she married Sargent Shriver in a Roman Catholic ceremony at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, New York. Sargent Shriver was U.S. Ambassador to France 1968 - 1970 and was the 1972 Democratic U.S. Vice Presidential candidate. The Shrivers had five children.

Eunice Shriver is likely best known as the Founder of The Special Olympics, now The Special Olympics World Games, an international sporting competition for athletes with intellectual disabilities. The first games were held in Chicago, 1968.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_Kennedy_Shriver

Marilyn French
1929 - 2009

Marilyn French was an American author. She was born in Brooklyn, New York and attended Hofstra University where she received a master's degree in English in 1964. She married Robert M. French Jr. in 1950; the couple divorced in 1967. She later attended Harvard University, earning a Ph.D in 1972. In her work, French asserted that women's oppression is an intrinsic part of the male-dominated global culture. Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals (1985) is a historical examination of the effects of patriarchy on the world. French's 1977 novel, The Women's Room, follows the lives of Mira and her friends in 1950s and 1960s America, including Val, a militant radical feminist. The novel portrays the details of the lives of women at this time and also the feminist movement of this era in the United States. At one point in the book the character Val says "all men are rapists". This quote has often been incorrectly attributed to Marilyn French herself. French's first book was a thesis on James Joyce.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_French

Beatrice "Bea" Arthur
1922 - 2009

Beatrice "Bea" Arthur was an American actress, comedian, and singer. In a career spanning seven decades, Arthur achieved success as the title character Maude Findlay on the 1970s sitcom Maude, and as Dorothy Zbornak on the 1980s sitcom The Golden Girls; she won Emmys for both roles. Also a stage actress, she won the Tony Award for her performance as Vera Charles in the original cast of Mame. In 1971, Arthur was invited by Norman Lear to guest-star on his sitcom All in the Family, as Maude Findlay, the cousin of Edith Bunker. An outspoken liberal feminist, she was the antithesis to the bigoted, conservative Archie Bunker, who decried Maude as a "New Deal fanatic. The show simply titled Maude. debuting in 1972, garnered Arthur an Emmy Award in 1977. It would also earn a place for her in the history of the women's liberation movement. The groundbreaking series didn't shirk from addressing serious sociopolitical topics of the era that were fairly taboo for a sitcom, from the Vietnam War, the Nixon Administration and Maude's bid for a Congressional seat to divorce, menopause, drug use, alcoholism, nervous breakdown, spousal abuse and abortion. (Photo by Alan Light)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Arthur

Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges
1942 - 2009

An American historian and human rights activist specialized in the African Great Lakes region, particularly the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. At the time of her death, she was a senior advisor for the African continent at Human Rights Watch. She earned her B.A. in history from Radcliffe College in 1964, and her M.A. and a Ph.D. in the same discipline from Yale University in 1966 and 1972. Her master's thesis and doctoral dissertation both addressed the impact of European colonialism on Rwanda. She specialized in the African Great Lakes region and studied the Rwandan Genocide and was also an authority on human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Burundi. Des Forges left academia in 1994 in response to the Rwandan Genocide to work full time on human rights. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1999, and became the senior advisor at Human Rights Watch for the African continent. In April 1994, she was one of the first outsiders to claim that a full-blown genocide was under way in Rwanda, and afterwards led a team of researchers to establish the facts. She died on February 12, 2009, in an air crash, en route from Newark to Buffalo.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_L._Des_Forges

Constance E. Cook
1919 - 2009

An American Republican Party politician who served in the New York State Assembly, she co-authored a bill signed into law that legalized abortion in New York three years before the Roe v. Wade decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1973 that legalized the practice nationwide. She attended Cornell University, receiving her undergraduate degree in 1941, before being awarded a law degree from Cornell Law School in 1943. She was appointed to serve as Cornell's vice president for land grant affairs, making her the first female vice president in Cornell history. She served in the New York State Assembly rom 1963-1974 and was an advocate for the expansion of the State University of New York. In 1976, she extended her support to the Rev. Betty Bone Schiess who had been ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church by a reformist bishop, but had been one of 11 women who were not granted a license by the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York. Cook took the matter to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC/EEO) who issued a decision favoring Schiess. The General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America passed a resolution in July 1976 that "no one shall be denied access" to ordination in the church based on gender. In November 1976, Ned Cole, the Bishop who had blocked Schiess' ordination, indicated that he would have her ordained in ceremonies to be held in January 1977.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constance_Cook#Death

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
1950 - 2009

An American theorist in the fields of gender studies, queer theory (queer studies), and critical theory. Influenced by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, feminism, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, her works reflect an abiding interest in a wide range of issues and topics, including queer performativity and performance; experimental critical writing; the works of Marcel Proust; non-Lacanian psychoanalysis; infibulation; artists' books; Buddhism and pedagogy; the affective theories of Silvan Tomkins and Melanie Klein; and material culture, especially textiles and texture. Eve Kosofsky received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University and her Ph.D from Yale University. She taught writing and literature at Hamilton College, Boston University, and Amherst College. She held a visiting lectureship at UC Berkeley and taught at the School of Criticism and Theory when it was located at Dartmouth College. She was also the Newman Ivey White Professor of English at Duke University. Sedgwick published several books considered groundbreaking in the field of Queer Theory, including Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), and Tendencies (1993). Additionally, Sedgwick coedited several volumes (see below) and published a book of poetry Fat Art, Thin Art (1994) as well as A Dialogue on Love (1999), and a revised version of her doctoral thesis The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (1986). Her last book Touching Feeling touches upon her continuing interest in affect, pedagogy, infibulation, and performativity.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Kosofsky_Sedgewick

Odetta
1930 - 2008

Odetta Felious Holmes, born in Birmingham, Alabama, was an African-American singer, actress, guitarist, songwriter, and a human rights activist, often referred to as "The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement". Her musical repertoire consists largely of American folk music, blues, jazz, and spirituals. An important figure in the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, she was influential musically and ideologically to many of the key figures of the folk-revival of that time, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mavis Staples, and Janis Joplin. She grew up in Los Angeles, California, and studied music nights at Los Angeles City College while employed as a domestic worker. She had operatic training from the age of 13. Her mother hoped she would follow Marian Anderson, but Odetta doubted a large black girl would ever perform at the Metropolitan Opera. Her first professional experience was in musical theater in 1944 alongside Elsa Lanchester; she later joined the national touring company of the musical Finian's Rainbow in 1949 where she "fell in with an enthusiastic group of young balladeers in San Francisco" and after 1950 concentrated on folk singing. She made her name by performing around the United States. In 1961, Martin Luther King, Jr. anointed her "The Queen of American folk music". In the same year the duo Harry Belafonte and Odetta made #32 in the UK Singles Chart with the song There's a Hole in My Bucket. Many Americans remember her performance at the 1963 civil rights movement's march to Washington where she sang "O Freedom.".

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odetta

Miriam Makeba
1932 - 2008

Born in Johannesburg, her mother was a Swazi sangoma and her father, who died when she was six, was a Xhosa. Her professional career began in the 1950s with the Manhattan Brothers and her own group, The Skylarks, singing a blend of jazz and traditional melodies of South Africa. Makeba then travelled to London where she met Harry Belafonte, who assisted her in gaining entry to and fame in the United States. She released many of her most famous hits there including "Pata Pata". The album dealt with the political plight of black South Africans under apartheid. She discovered that her South African passport was revoked when she tried to return there in 1960 for her mother's funeral. Her marriage to Trinidadian civil rights activist and Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee leader Stokely Carmichael in 1968 caused controversy in the United States, and her record deals and tours were cancelled. Nelson Mandela persuaded her to return to South Africa in 1990. In January 2000, her album, Homeland was nominated for a Grammy Award in the "Best World Music" category. In 2001 she was awarded the Gold Otto Hahn Peace Medal by the United Nations Association of Germany (DGVN) in Berlin, "for outstanding services to peace and international understanding".

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Makeba

Nuala O'Faolain
1940 - 2008

Irish journalist, TV producer, book reviewer, teacher and author. She became internationally well-known for her two volumes of memoir, Are You Somebody? and Almost There, a novel, My Dream of You, and a history with commentary, The Story of Chicago May. The first three were all featured on the New York Times Best Seller list. Her posthumous novel Best Love Rosie was published in French by Sabine Wespieser, Editeur in September 2008.

O'Faolain was born in Dublin, the second eldest of nine children. Her father was a well-known Irish journalist, writing the Dubliners Diary social column under the pen name Terry O'Sullivan for the Dublin Evening Press. She was educated at University College Dublin, the University of Hull, and Oxford University. She taught for a time at Morley College, and had worked as television producer for the BBC and Radio Telefís Éireann. O'Faolain was engaged at least once,[3] but she never married. In Are You Somebody?, she speaks candidly about her fifteen-year relationship with the journalist Nell McCafferty, who published her own memoir, Nell.[4] From 2002 until her death, O'Faolain lived much of the time with Brooklyn-based attorney John Low-Beer and his daughter Anna. They were registered as domestic partners in 2003.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuala_O%27Faolain

Del Martin
1921 - 2008

Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were an American lesbian couple known as feminist and gay-rights activists. Martin and Lyon met in 1950, became lovers in 1952, and moved in together on Valentines Day 1953 in an apartment on Castro Street in San Francisco. They had been together for three years when they founded the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in 1955, that became the first social and political organization for lesbians in the United States. They published The Ladder until 1963 and then became the first lesbian couple to join the National Organization for Women (NOW). Both women worked to form the Council of Religion and Homosexuality (CRH) in northern California to persuade ministers to accept homosexuals into churches, and use their influence to decriminalize homosexuality in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They became politically active in San Francisco's first gay political organization, the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, influenced Dianne Feinstein to sponsor a citywide bill to outlaw employment discrimination for gays and lesbians. Both served in the White House Conference on Aging in 1995. They were married on June 16, 2008 in the first same-sex wedding to take place in San Francisco after the California Supreme Court's decision legalized same-sex marriage in California.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del_Martin

Irena Sendler (Sendlerowa, also Krzyzanowska)
1910 - 2008

Irena Sendler was a Polish Catholic social worker. During World War II she was an activist in the Polish Underground and the Zegota Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw. She helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto by providing them with false documents and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes outside the Ghetto. During the World War II German occupation of Poland, Sendler lived in Warsaw while working for urban Social Welfare Departments. As early as 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland, she began helping Jews by offering them food and shelter. Irena and her helpers created over 3,000 false documents to help Jewish families, prior to joining the organized resistance of Zegota and the children's division. In December 1942, the newly created Children's Section of the Zegota (Council for Aid to Jews), nominated her (under her cover name Jolanta) to head its children's department. As an employee of the Social Welfare Department, she had a special permit to enter the Warsaw Ghetto, to check for signs of typhus, something the Nazis feared would spread beyond the ghetto. During the visits, she wore a Star of David as a sign of solidarity with the Jewish people and so as not to call attention to herself. She organized the smuggling of Jewish children from the Ghetto, carrying them out in boxes, suitcases and trolleys. In 1943, Sendler was arrested by the Gestapo, severely tortured, and sentenced to death. Zegota saved her by bribing German guards on the way to her execution. She was left in the woods, unconscious and with broken arms and legs.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irena_Sendlerowa

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Clare Boylan
1948 - 2006

An Irish author, journalist and critic for newspapers, magazines and many international broadcast media, Clare was born in Dublin, and began her career as a journalist at the (now defunct) Irish Press. In 1974 she won the Journalist of the Year award when working in the city for the Evening Press. Later in her career she edited the glossy magazine Image, before largely giving up journalism to focus on a career as an author.

Her novels are Holy Pictures (1983), Last Resorts (1984), Black Baby (1988), Home Rule (1992), Beloved Stranger (1999), Room for a Single Lady (1997) (which won the Spirit of Light Award and was optioned for a film) and Emma Brown (2003). The latter work is a continuation of an 20-page fragment written by Charlotte Brontë before her death.

Her short stories are collected in A Nail on the Head (1983), Concerning Virgins (1990) and That Bad Woman (1995). The film Making Waves, based on her short story Some Ladies on a Tour, was nominated for an Oscar in 1988. Her non-fiction includes The Agony and the Ego (1994), and The Literary Companion to Cats (1994). Her work has been translated as far afield as Russia and Hong Kong. In later life, she lived in County Wicklow with her husband Alan Wilkes. She died after a lengthy struggle with ovarian cancer, aged 58.

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

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

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

Molly Yard
1912 - 2005

Mary Alexander "Molly" Yard was an American feminist.Through service as an assistant to Eleanor Roosevelt and later work as a U.S. administrator, social activist, and feminist who served as National Organization for Women (NOW)'s eighth president from 1987 to 1991, connected first-wave with second-wave feminism. Yard was born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, China, the daughter of Methodist missionaries. She graduated in 1933 from Swarthmore College, a coeducational college that was also the alma mater of Alice Paul. Yard led a successful drive to eliminate the sorority system after a Jewish student was denied admission. She became active in Democratic Party politics and in the late 1940s.She headed the Western Pennsylvania presidential campaigns of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and George McGovern in 1972 and headed the unsuccessful campaign to get NAACP President Byrd Brown the Democratic nomination to Congress. She helped found Americans for Democratic Action, America's oldest independent liberal lobbying organization. As NOW's political director from 1985 to 1987, she was instrumental in the successful 1986 campaign to defeat pro-life referendums in Arkansas, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Oregon.In 1991, Yard was honored in Paris by the French Alliance of Women for Democratization for her work on reproductive rights. She received the Feminist Majority Foundation's lifetime achievement award.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Yard

Rosa Parks
1913 - 2005

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an African American civil rights activist whom the U.S. Congress later called "Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement". 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. Parks's act of defiance created the modern Civil Rights Movement and Parks became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation. She organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders, including boycott leader Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to launch him to national prominence in the civil rights movement.

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