Dr Mona Chalmers Watson

In July 1917, Mona Chalmers Watson was named the first Chief Controller of Britain’s Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) when it was formed. The thousands of WAACs worked as cooks and waitresses, clerks, communications operators, drivers, and more. She was already noteworthy as a suffragist, physician, and the first woman to receive her MD from the University of Edinburgh.

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Trinidad Tecson

Philippine revolutionary who joined the revolutionary nationalist army Katipunan in 1895 to fight for her country’s independence from Spanish colonizers.

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Harriet Nahanee

Pacheedaht activist Harriet Nahanee made headlines in 2006 when the septuagenarian was arrested by Vancouver police protesting a highway expansion that would damage Eagleridge Bluffs land and ecosystems, in preparation for the 2010 Olympics.

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Hattie Canty

In 1990, Hattie Canty was elected the first African American, first woman, and first guest room attendant to be president of the Las Vegas Hotel and Culinary Workers Union Local 226, a role in which she improved conditions for tens of thousands of workers.

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Jayne Rowse

In 2012, April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse filed a lawsuit challenging Michigan’s ban that prevented same-sex couples like DeBoer and Rowse from jointly adopting their children.

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Laurel Hester

A New Jersey police lieutenant, Hester died in 2006 at age 49 after a prolonged battle with lung cancer. At the same time, she had been battling another force: the Ocean County freeholders, who held Hester’s pension in their hands, and were refusing to allow her domestic partner, Stacie Andree, to receive those benefits when Hester inevitably succumbed to her cancer.

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Lillian Moyer

Tahltan elder Lillian Moyer was 67 when she was arrested in 2006 in northern British Columbia and a First Nations blockade that had been preventing a mining company from exploring the Todagin Plateau for copper and gold.

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