Activism Archives - Page 4 of 317

Harriett Jenkins

Harriett Jenkins did her part to diversify NASA as the assistant administrator for equal opportunity programs from 1974 to 1992.

Helen Gwynne-Vaughan was an acclaimed mycologist, King’s College graduate, and Head of the Botany Department (as well as first female professor) at Birkbeck College long before she joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps during World War I, and was made chief controller of the women deployed to France.

Jessica Mitford

Jessica Mitford was born in 1917, one of the six renowned Mitford sisters from an aristocratic English famil, and would go on to become the “queen of the muckrakers.”

Edwina Brocklesby

Edwina Brocklesby, who would go on to be the U.K.’s oldest Ironman triathlete and founder and director of Silverfit, which promotes physical activity among older people, “didn’t do any exercise at all until I was 50.”

Estella Mims Pyfrom

Estella Mims Pyfrom was 72 when, in 2009, she founded Estella’s Brilliant Bus with $900,000 of her retirement savings. The mobile learning lab was equipped with more than a dozen computers and travels to underserved and under-resourced Florida communities, providing residents with access to technology and education.

Eve Ensler

Playwright Eve Ensler, who would later go by V, debuted her ground-breaking The Vagina Monologues in 1996.

Frances Keegan Marquis

Prior to volunteering for the U.S. Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps at age 45 in 1942, Frances Keegan Marquis had been an active suffragist who managed the Franklin Square House, a residential hotel in Boston offering housing and social services for around 700 women students and wage earners.

Gisèle Pelicot

Gisèle Pelicot was in her late 60s when police revealed that her husband of 50 years had been drugging, raping, and allowing other men to rape her for almost a decade. By declining the option of a closed-door trial with full anonymity and no media, she ensured that the dozens of men who assaulted her would have to face the public, at the cost that she would as well.

Alva Myrdal

Swedish diplomat, government minister, and author Alva Myrdal received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 for her work advocating for nuclear disarmament.

Barbara Deming

American writer and activist for peace, human rights, and related causes.