Among the Press staff ‘Miss E.’ was known for her professional thoroughness, enthusiasm, vitality, generosity and patience. She held firm convictions about the role women should play in society, and set a sterling example by being associated with nearly 250 social welfare and women’s organisations during her career.
Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark was a pathbreaking psychologist whose research helped desegregate schools in the United States. Over a three-decade career, Dr. Clark researched child development and racial prejudice in ways that not only benefitted generations of children but changed the field of psychology.
At the tender age of six, Ruby Bridges advanced the cause of civil rights in November 1960 when she became the first African American student to integrate an elementary school in the South.
Ashton-Warner’s fiction was autobiographical and her autobiographies often fictional. Her educational theory was expressed in the form of novels (Spinster, Bell call) or as autobiography (Teacher, Spearpoint: ‘teacher’ in America).
During her lifetime, and especially in the twenty years following her death, Kent’s work never quite worked its way into the mainstream. Being a female artist and a nun, she did not fit into the detached, jaded aesthetic narrative of Pop.
Te Arawa woman of mana, teacher, warrior, interpreter
Also known as Umm al-Banayn, Fatima bint Muhammad Al-Fihriyya is credited with founding the al-Qarawiyyin mosque in 859 AD in Fez, Morocco. The mosque later developed a teaching institution, which became the University of al-Qarawiyyin in 1963.
Dominican poet Salomé Ureña was an early advocate for women’s higher education in the Dominican Republic.
In 1892 Ada Wells, with Professor Alexander Bickerton, founded the Canterbury Women’s Institute, of which she was president for many years. This was one of many offices she was to hold. In 1896 she became the first national secretary of the National Council of Women of New Zealand, and in 1898 she helped to spearhead the campaign for the formation of the Canterbury Children’s Aid Society. In 1899 she became one of the first two women to be elected to the Ashburton and North Canterbury United Charitable Aid Board, serving as a member until 1906 in spite of the antagonism of male members of the board to her presence. In addition to this she was associated with the Prison-gate Mission, an organisation engaged in the rehabilitation of prisoners. She was a member of the National Peace Council of New Zealand and worked with groups providing aid to conscientious objectors during the First World War.
Unlike many conservative supporters of sex-differentiated education, Boys-Smith saw the study of home science at university level as ‘a great force in the education of women’ – specifically, the higher education of women. She believed that because of changing social patterns domestic skills had increasingly come to be seen as menial. The educational programme set up by her for the School of Home Science sought to lift the status of the domestic arts by providing a strong scientific education, augmented with technical instruction. An emphasis on science, particularly chemistry, also served to silence those critics who believed that the School of Home Science belonged in a technical institute, not a university.