Victorian English feminist and social reformer who campaigned for women’s suffrage, the right of women to better education, the end of coverture in British law, the abolition of child prostitution, and an end to human trafficking of young women and children into European prostitution.
Carol June Young Specht was a Past President of the local League of Women Voters, President of Women Against Rape (WAR), and co-founder of the Coles County Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She advocated with a passion for victims of rape and domestic violence during the mid-twentieth century.
Although it was very dangerous for African Americans to speak out against white people during the Jim Crow era, Recy Taylor refused to remain silent about sexual violence. She bravely testified against the group of white men that kidnapped and raped her.
Model, author, actor and activist Waris Dirie worked for the United Nations from 1997 to 2003 as a Special Ambassador for the Elimination of Female Genital Mutilation. She had written several books on the subject, and in 2002 launched her own non-profit, the Desert Flower Foundation, which raises money to increase awareness about FGM and to help those affected.
Susan Joy Fowler is a writer and software engineer known for influencing institutional changes in how Uber and Silicon Valley companies respond to sexual harassment. Fowler worked at two technology startup companies before joining Uber in late 2015. In early 2017, her blog post on sexual harassment at the company went viral and ultimately led to the removal of Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick. She runs a science book club and has written a book on microservices, a style of constructing applications as a collection of loosley coupled services. Fowler served as editor-in-chief of a quarterly publication by the payment processing company Stripe, and as a technology opinion editor at The New York Times.