Anna Maria Garthwaite: Successful Silk Designer
She turned observations of flowers and plants into intricate textile designs, building a successful creative career and leaving rare evidence of women’s work in the industry.
Women worth knowing
All Stories
Extraordinary women, overlooked stories, and a more complete history. Explore the lives, ideas, and achievements that changed the world.
Artists
Louise-Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette’s favorite portraitist
She built a celebrated portrait career despite barriers to formal training, using artistic skill and determination to earn recognition across courts and countries.
4 Famous Black Women Of the Harlem Renaissance
Black women’s writing and art helped drive a cultural movement, bringing new voices into public life and influencing how communities understood and represented themselves.
Anita Berber: The Naked Dancer of Weimar Berlin
Her daring performances pushed dance beyond conventional respectability, bringing provocative expression to the stage and challenging how women’s bodies and sexuality could be represented.
Harriet Powers: A Sermon in Patchwork
She stitched religious stories into quilts of extraordinary imagination, preserving her voice through fabric and creating artworks that expanded the possibilities of visual storytelling.
Gertrude Bell, Al Khatun: Queen of the Desert
Her expertise in the region carried her from archaeology into wartime intelligence and state-building, where her political influence and museum work helped shape a country’s future.
Fay Kellogg, ambitious architect
She built an ambitious architectural career and pushed for women’s place in the profession, combining design talent with a determination to see buildings completed.
Esther Howland, the Mother of the American Valentine
Esther Howland turned paper lace and an upstairs workshop of women into a thriving valentine business, helping Americans send their love.
Rose-Adélaïde Ducreux, French painter, composer, and musician
Her self-portrait captures an artist who understood music as intimately as painting, preserving the skill and ambition of a woman working across creative disciplines.
Suzanne Valadon, self-taught artist of Bohemian Paris
She learned to paint while modeling for other artists, then built a celebrated career of her own with bold work that challenged artistic conventions.
Edmonia Lewis, African-American & Native American sculptor of international fame
She built an internationally celebrated sculpture career despite racism and sexism, creating art that inspired other Black and Indigenous artists to pursue their ambitions.
Alice Austen, photographer
Her photographs preserved everyday life that might otherwise have disappeared. Their rediscovery brought recognition and helped lift the photographer herself out of poverty.