Susette La Flesche Tibbles
Susette La Flesche Tibbles, an Omaha woman, spent her entire life tirelessly campaigning for Native American rights as a speaker, activist, interpreter, and writer.
Category Archives: Writer
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Colette
Writer, performer and journalist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette is best known for her 1944 novella Gigi.
Dr Teodora Krajewska
Dr Teodora Krajewska was a physician, writer and teacher who was one of the first women to practice medicine in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Austria-Hungary.
Rasuna Said
Hajjah Rangkayo Rasuna Said was a major figure in Indonesia’s struggle for independence against the country’s Dutch colonisers.
Said was politically active from a very young age, and founded a political party – the Indonesian Muslim Association (PERMI) – in her early 20s.
An electrifying speaker who delivered speeches “like lightning during the day” according to one biography, her challenge to Dutch colonial authorities earned her the nickname Lioness. The Dutch often halted her speeches, and even imprisoned her in 1932 for 14 months.
When the Japanese invaded Indonesia during World War II in 1942, Said joined a pro-Japanese organisation, but used it to continue her independence activities.
After the Japanese were defeated, the Dutch returned to try to reimpose their control, initially with British help, and a brutal four-year conflict began, until the Dutch finally recognised Indonesian sovereignty in 1949.
Said was declared a National Hero of Indonesia by president Suharto in 1974. One of Jakarta’s main arteries is named for her (Jalan H.R. Rasuna Said) and Padang, West Sumatra.
Božena Němcová
Božena Němcová was a Czech writer during the final phase of the Czech National Revival movement and has been called the founder of modern Czech prose. She is also considered the country’s first feminist writer. Her grandmother Magdalena Novotná played an important part in her life, and Němcová would later write her most famous novel, 1855’s Babička (The Grandmother), featuring a title character inspired by her grandmother. She also published another novel that year, Pohorská vesnice (The village under mountains) and her popular short story Divá Bára the following year, as well as several collections of fairy tales and legends. Her first poem, To the Czech Women, was published April 5, 1843. Her image is featured on the 500 CZK denomination of the banknotes of the Czech koruna.
Elvy Kalep
Alviine-Johanna “Elvy” Kalep was an Estonian aviator and the country’s first female pilot, as well as an artist, toy designer and children’s author.
Kalep grew up in Estonia and Russia, and later moved to China due to the Russian Civil War, before settling in Paris to study art. In 1931, she qualified as a pilot in Germany, becoming the first Estonian female pilot. Befriending American aviator Amelia Earhart, she joined the Ninety-Nines, an international organisation for women pilots, and took up the cause of encouraging other women to take up aviation. She wrote and illustrated a children’s book about flying, Air Babies, first published in 1936. The book’s 1938 reprint included a foreword from Earhart, who embarked on her last flight three days after writing the piece in 1937.
After moving to the United States, Kalep founded a toy manufacturing business in New York in 1939, where she produced a doll she had designed – when thrown into the air, Patsie Parachute would fall down slowly as a parachutist would. Although she had to close the business in 1946 due to her poor health, she made a living through the 1950s by selling patents to toy designs to larger companies. This included the successful Scribbles Dolls, which had blank faces that could be individually decorated by children, inspired by the 50,000 doll heads she had left over from the closure of the Patsie Parachute factory. In the 1960s and 1970s, she created three-dimensional paintings made out of small pieces of coloured leather, which she sold to support herself and exhibited across the United States.
Augusta Gregory
Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager who co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote several short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced several books retelling stories from Irish mythology.
Waris Dirie
Model, author, actor and activist Waris Dirie worked for the United Nations from 1997 to 2003 as a Special Ambassador for the Elimination of Female Genital Mutilation. She had written several books on the subject, and in 2002 launched her own non-profit, the Desert Flower Foundation, which raises money to increase awareness about FGM and to help those affected.
Vida Ognjenović
Vida Ognjenović is a Serbian theater director, writer, professor and diplomat.
Beate Klarsfeld
Beate Auguste Klarsfeld is journalist who, with her husband, became famous for investigating and documenting Nazi war criminals, including Kurt Lischka, Alois Brunner, Klaus Barbie, Ernst Ehlers, Kurt Asche, among others. From the time she was about 14 years old, Beate began to frequently argue with her parents, because they did not feel responsible for the Nazi era, focused on the injustices and material losses they suffered, and blamed the Russians, expressing no sympathy for other countries. Moving to Paris in 1960, she was confronted with the consequences of the Holocaust. In 1963, she married French lawyer and historian Serge Klarsfeld, whose father was a victim of the Auschwitz concentration camp exterminations. Beate has said that her husband helped her become “a German of conscience and awareness”.