Activism Archives - Page 119 of 120

Myra Davis Hemmings

Delta Sigma Theta, a service sorority for black women, was founded at Howard University in Washington, DC in 1912, with Myra Davis Hemmings of San Antonio elected as its first president. At the time she was also president of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Greek-named sorority for African American women.
Hemmings was active in amateur theater and directed productions for the San Antonio Negro Little Theater. She and her husband helped to organize the city’s Phyllis Wheatley Dramatic Guild Players. In addition to acting on stage, she appeared in three films: 1941 tragic drama film Go Down Death: The Story of Jesus and the Devil, starring as the martyr Sister Caroline (she also co-produced and co-directed the film), Marching On (1943) and In Girl in Room 20 (1946).
As a drama teacher, Hemmings directed plays from the 1920s through the 1950s at San Antonio’s Carver Community Cultural Center. She taught in San Antonio for more than 50 years. Hemmings was elected as the national vice-president of Delta Sigma Theta in 1933 and became the organization’s historian in 1948. She was also a member of the NAACP, the National Council of Negro Women[13] and the Alpha Phi Literary Society.

Urani Rumbo

Urani Rumbo was an Albanian feminist, playwright and teacher who founded several associations promoting Albanian women’s rights, including the Lidhja e Gruas (English: Woman’s Union), one of the country’s first major feminist organizations. In 1919, while teaching at the De Rada school of Gjirokastër, she started an initiative against female illiteracy and the tradition of restricting women to certain parts of the household. In 1920 she opened the Koto Hoxhi school, a five-year primary school for girls from all parts of Gjirokastër and of all religions. There is an elementary school in Gjirokastër named after her. On March 1, 1961, she posthumously recieved the Mësuese e Popullit (Teacher of the People) medal.

Komako Kimura

Born: July 29 1887, Japan Died: 10 July 1980 Country most active: Japan Also known as: 木村駒子, Komaku Kimura or Komago Kimura (misspellings in American newspapers) Komako Kimura was […]

Minnie Fisher Cunningham

Born: March 19 1882, United States Died: 9 December 1964 Country most active: United States Also known as: NA Minnie Fisher Cunningham was an American suffrage activist, who was the […]

Mary Applebey

Mary Frances Applebey was an English civil servant and mental health activist. She was an early director of the National Association for Mental Health (NAMH), now called Mind. In 1969, Scientologists joined the the National Council for Mental Hygiene (NCMH) – one of NAMH’s member organisations – and tried to ratify as official policy numerous points concerning the treatment of psychiatric patients. When their identity was discovered they were expelled from the organisation en masse. in what became a notable case in British charity law, the Church of Scientology unsuccessfully sued the NAMH over the matter in the High Court, with Appleby one of the NCMH’s strongest defenders. She was involved with the formation of Christian Aid, a relief and development agency that works to support sustainable development, eradicate poverty, support civil society and provide disaster relief in South America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. She was also instrumental in implementing the Care in the Community policy of deinstitutionalisation, treating and caring for physically and mentally disabled people in their homes rather than in an institution.

Nancy Tyson Burbidge

Nancy Tyson Burbidge AM was an Australian systemic botanist, conservationist and curator of the CSIRO herbarium. From 1946 to 1973, she worked at CSIRO, the Australian government agency for scientific research, where she worked on organising and extending the herbarium, first as a research scientist and then as curator; she was responsible for laying the foundations of the Herbarium Australiense, later the National Australian Herbarium. From 1973 to 1977 she was the scientific leader of the Flora of Australia project. Burbidge also published several books on Australian plants, wrote mroe than 50 papers on phytogeography, ecology, botanical history and Australian plant genera, and edited the publication Australasian Herbarium News until 1953, when she went to the UK to be the Australian Botanical Liaison Officer at the Kew Gardens herbarium for a year. There, she photographed and indexed specimens of Australian plants and made microfilm copies of botanist Robert Brown’s notebooks for Australian herbaria. Returning to Australia in 1954, she wrote extensive academic works and earned her doctorate from the University of Western Australia in 1961.
A conservationist, Burbidge was a founding member of the National Parks Association of the Australian Capital Territory in 1960 and served as its president twice. She was a major advocate for establishing national parks in the ACT, including Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and Namadgi National Park (both were established after her death).
She was awarded the 1971 Clarke Medal for her achievements in taxonomic botany and ecology by the Royal Society of New South Wales and was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1976. The Nancy T. Burbidge Memorial, an amphitheatre in the Australian National Botanic Gardens in Canberra, is named in her honour, as is Mount Burbidge, a peak in Namadgi National Park, and the Acacia burbidgeae, also known as Burbidge’s wattle. The Australian Plant Name Index is dedicated to her memory and the Nancy T. Burbidge medal is presented annually by the Australian Systematic Botanists Society for outstanding contribution to taxonomic and systematic botanical work in Australia.

Abigail Bush

Abigail Norton Bush was an American abolitionist and women’s rights activist in Rochester, New York. She served as president of the Rochester Women’s Rights Convention, held in 1848 immediately after the Seneca Falls Convention. As such, Bush became the first woman to preside over a public meeting composed of both men and women in the U.S.

Susan Fowler

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.

Pat Parker

Pat Parker was an American poet and activist who drew from her experiences as an African-American lesbian feminist. Her poetry spoke to her difficult childhood growing up in poverty, coping with sexual assault, and the murder of her sister.

Luisa Moreno

Luisa Moreno was a labor organizer and civil rights activist in the United States.