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.
Playwright Eve Ensler, who would later go by V, debuted her ground-breaking The Vagina Monologues in 1996.
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 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.
Swedish diplomat, government minister, and author Alva Myrdal received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 for her work advocating for nuclear disarmament.
American writer and activist for peace, human rights, and related causes.
American-Canadian environmentalist
Founder of The Gray Panthers
American suffragist
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.