United States Navy nurse Margaret Nash was a woman of resilience and courage. Captured and held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese during World War II, she neglected her own health to nurse hundreds of her fellow prisoners suffering from disease and near-starvation in the Philippine Islands. She was still struggling to survive […]
Gertrude Bell, Al Khatun: Queen of the Desert
British-born Gertrude Bell, also referred to as the female Lawrence of Arabia, was an adventurer, spy, archaeologist and powerful political force who travelled into the uncharted Arabian desert and was recruited by British Military Intelligence to help reshape the Middle East after World War I. She drew the borders of Iraq, helped install its first […]
Daphne du Maurier, English writer
Daphne du Maurier was an English writer, most famous for her novel Rebecca. Other significant works include My Cousin Rachel, The Scapegoat, and The House on the Strand. Several of her stories have been made into films, most notably Hitchcock’s Rebecca and The Birds, and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. Du Maurier came from an […]
Fay Kellogg, ambitious architect
Fay Kellogg (1871–1918) was an American architect and suffragette who helped to open the field of architecture to women who followed. She was described in her own time as “the foremost woman architect in the United States”, and known for staying on the job site “until the last brick is laid and the last nail […]
Morrnah Nalamaku Simeona, Hawaiian healer
Morrnah Nalamaku Simeona, a native Hawaiian Kahuna and gifted healer, developed a new system of healing based on the ancient spiritual tradition, Ho’oponopono. An indefatigable educator, Simeona was honored as a Living Treasure of Hawaii. Editor’s Note: There is some controversy over the claims in this guest article – see this comment for details. To […]
Huda Shaarawi, Egyptian feminist & activist
Huda Shaarawi (1879–1947) was an Egyptian feminist who influenced not only women in Egypt but throughout the Arab world. She was a pioneer in feminism, and brought to light the restrictive world of upper-class women in her book The Harem Years, published in 1987. Huda Shaarawi (also spelled Hoda Shaarawi or Sha’arawi) was raised in […]
Qiu Jin, Chinese feminist & revolutionary martyr
Qiu Jin (1875–1907) was a Chinese writer & poet, a strong-willed feminist who is considered a national hero in China. Also called “Jianhu Nüxia” (Woman Knight of Mirror Lake”), she was executed after participating in a failed uprising against the Qing Dynasty. Qiu Jin was born in 1875 to a family of the gentry, and […]
Indra Devi, Mother of Western Yoga
Indra Devi was not only a female pioneer in the field of yoga; she helped spread the ancient discipline to Western civilization. Yoga was the domain of men from its inception. The earliest visual evidence of yoga comes from about 2500 BC. Men were the teachers and practitioners of yoga from that point until the […]
Miss Florence Smith, factory manageress at Tate & Lyle
Researching my book The Sugar Girls, about female workers at Tate & Lyle’s East End sugar and syrup factories in the years during and after the Second World War, I met many remarkable women, and heard about many more. But one character stood out – a legendary figure to all the women I interviewed, remembered […]
Katharine McCormick, biologist & millionaire philanthropist
Katharine Dexter McCormick is a name that every woman today should know, because your life would probably be very different today if it wasn’t for her. Katharine funded what The New York Times called the “most sweeping sociomedical revolution in history. . . [whose] impact on the United States and other nations [is] almost too […]
