Womanica

Louise Lawrence (1912-1976) was a transgender activist, writer, artist, and educator. She built an international network of trans and gender non-conforming people, creating space for connection and mutual support. She also played a foundational role in launching Transvestia, one of the first magazines by and for trans people.

Transcribed - Published: 25 June 2025

Diamanda Galás (1955-present) is a musician and vocalist whose singular, shocking—and sometimes downright satanic—vocal style has captivated fans and critics alike for decades. Through her music, she seeks to give voice to the suffering of marginalized groups throughout history.

Transcribed - Published: 24 June 2025

Mabel Addis (1912-2004) was a pioneering educator and writer who created the first narrative-driven video game, The Sumerian Game, in 1964. Blending her expertise in history and storytelling with emerging computer technology, she became the first video game writer and the first female game designer. Though largely overlooked in her time, her work laid the foundation for educational games and narrative design in the gaming industry.

Transcribed - Published: 23 June 2025

Alison Bechdel (1960-present) is an American cartoonist and graphic memoirist best known for her groundbreaking comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and her acclaimed graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006).  Bechdel is also known for the "Bechdel Test," a measure of gender representation in fiction. In 2014, she was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Grant for her contributions to literature and visual storytelling.

Transcribed - Published: 20 June 2025

Rosa Bonheur (1822-1899) was a French artist best known for her realist style paintings, mostly focused on animals and rural life in France and Europe. Rosa shattered conventions for women at the time, never marrying, wearing men's clothes, and always advocating for her work as being equal, if not better, than male artists.

Transcribed - Published: 19 June 2025

Siouxsie Sioux (1957-present) is an English musician and cultural icon who helped shape the punk and gothic rock movements with her band Siouxsie and the Banshees. Known for her commanding stage presence, fierce makeup and fashion, and defiant lyrics, she broke boundaries for women in music.

Transcribed - Published: 18 June 2025

Táhirih (c. 1814 - 1852) was a poet, theologian, and revolutionary. Born into privilege in 19th-century Persia, she defied religious and cultural expectations to become a leading voice in the Bábí movement. Her fearless advocacy for women’s equality and her dramatic unveiling at the Conference of Badasht shocked a nation. Though executed for her beliefs, her words and legacy continue to inspire movements for justice and freedom today.

Transcribed - Published: 17 June 2025

Clara Campoamor (1888-1972) was a Spanish politician, lawyer, and writer, considered by some to be the mother of the Spanish feminist movement. She championed the inclusion of women's suffrage in the 1931 Spanish Constitution and was elected to the Constituent Courts in 1931, becoming one of the first women in Spanish parliament.

Transcribed - Published: 16 June 2025

Aouta Kéita (1912-1980) was a Malian midwife, political activist and writer. She was one of the first women in French West Africa to become a professionally trained midwife. She was an activist and supporter of independence and women’s rights, and the first woman to serve in Mali’s National Assembly. Her autobiography is considered a landmark feminist text in African literature.

Transcribed - Published: 13 June 2025

Amy Winehouse (1983-2011) was an English singer-songwriter whose unique vocals and genre mixing made her a household name with just two albums in her career.

Transcribed - Published: 12 June 2025

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was one of the greatest Marxist thinkers of the 20th century. She was an economist, a speaker, socialist party leader, and writer on Marxism, the working class, and freedom. She helped found many socialist newspapers, the Polish Social Democratic Party, and the Spartacus League.

Transcribed - Published: 11 June 2025

Yayoi Kusama (1929 - present) is a contemporary Japanese artist working across painting, sculpture, film, and installation. She has produced a body of work formally unified by its use of repetitive dots, pumpkins, and mirrors. She has been acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, the world's top-selling female artist, and the world's most successful living artist. Her work influenced that of her contemporaries, including Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

Transcribed - Published: 10 June 2025

Joan Clarke (1917-1996) was a codebreaker for the British armed forces during World War II. Her work alongside famous computer scientist Alan Turing was pivotal in decoding Nazi communications and bringing the war to an end.

Transcribed - Published: 9 June 2025

Hipparchia of Maroneia (c.300 BCE) was a Greek philosopher and one of the few women known to have actively participated in ancient philosophical discourse. A member of the Cynic school, she rejected wealth, societal expectations, and traditional gender roles to live a life of radical simplicity and public defiance alongside her husband, Crates of Thebes.

Transcribed - Published: 6 June 2025

Annie Hindle (c. 1840s - c. 1900s) was an actress, comic, and performer who was famous in American variety circuits in the late 1800s. Born in England, and making her name in the Music Hall scene there, she was known mainly as a male-impersonator, becoming the first to bring this performance style to American variety theaters. Annie was also much discussed in newspapers for her multiple marriages, both to men and women. Her marriages to women involved her cross-dressing as a man, under the name Charles E. Hindle.

Transcribed - Published: 5 June 2025

Ōtake Kōkichi (1893-1966) was a feminist writer, artist, and activist in early 20th century Japan. She was a member of the Japanese Bluestocking Society, which aimed to promote women’s rights through literature and education. She is regarded as a pioneer for queer feminism in Japan.

Transcribed - Published: 4 June 2025

Patti McGee (1945-2024) a pioneering American skateboarder who became the first female professional in the sport during the 1960s. She gained national fame after winning the 1964 National Skateboard Championship. In 1965, Patti appeared on the cover of LIFE magazine riding a skateboard in her signature move – a handstand – helping to popularize the sport.

Transcribed - Published: 3 June 2025

Toyen (1902-1980), born Marie Čermínová, was a gender-nonconforming Czech surrealist painter. They blurred boundaries not only of gender but of artistic form, producing erotically charged, dreamlike images that challenged both political oppression and societal taboos.

Transcribed - Published: 2 June 2025

Dolores Huerta (1930-present) is one of the most influential labor activists of the 20th century and a leader of the Chicano civil rights movement. She helped found the organization now known as United Farm Workers and helped organize the Delano grape strike in 1965. She is credited for coming up with the rallying cry “Sí, se puede,” which means “yes, we can” in Spanish.

Transcribed - Published: 30 May 2025

Jean Harlow (1911-1937) was an American actress known as the original “Blonde Bombshell.” She grew to stardom as an extra in silent films and early talkies, captivating audiences with her appearance. Her role as Lola in the 1933 film “Bombshell” popularized the term in Hollywood and the use of it to refer to a striking woman. This was a forerunner to the term "sex symbol,” specifically in Hollywood.

Transcribed - Published: 29 May 2025

Kerima Polotan-Tuvera (1925-2011) was a Filipino fictionist, essayist, and journalist who coined the term “mani-pedi.” Her influence is felt in the Philippines as a writer and award-winning author, and worldwide through her work in shaping Philippine English.

Transcribed - Published: 28 May 2025

Kasturba Gandhi (1869-1944) was an Indian political activist and leader in the movement for Indian Independence during British Colonial rule. She was married to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi). During her life participated in many civil disobedience campaigns and marches and did work to support women’s welfare throughout her life. She is said to have been a key inspiration for Gandhi’s Satyagraha, a form of nonviolent resistance or civil resistance.

Transcribed - Published: 27 May 2025

Malak Hifni Nasif (1886-1918) was an Egyptian feminist, writer, and educator, known for her advocacy work for women's rights and education in the early 20th century. Often referred to as "The First Feminist of Egypt," she wrote about the importance of female education and the empowerment of women.

Transcribed - Published: 26 May 2025

Loretta Ross (1953 - present) is an activist who has dedicated her life to advancing women’s rights. She helped coin the terms “women of color” and “reproductive justice,” providing the language that has allowed women across racial and ethnic backgrounds to organize collectively for their human rights and reproductive freedoms.

Transcribed - Published: 23 May 2025

Enheduanna was a high priestess, poet, and princess of ancient Mesopotamia. She is widely considered the world’s first known author by name. Her deeply personal hymns and poems, many dedicated to the goddess Inanna, mark the first time an author writes using the pronoun I.

Transcribed - Published: 22 May 2025

Judith Butler (1956-present) is a renowned philosopher and gender theorist best known for their groundbreaking work on gender performativity, introduced in the influential 1990 book Gender Trouble. Their ideas have shaped the fields of queer theory, feminist thought, and critical theory, challenging traditional notions of identity, power, and the body.

Transcribed - Published: 21 May 2025

Laura Mulvey (1941-present) is a British film theorist, professor, filmmaker, feminist thinker, and writer. She is best known for her 1975 piece, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, which coined the term “the male gaze.”

Transcribed - Published: 20 May 2025

Elinor Glyn (1864-1943) was a British novelist, screenwriter, and filmmaker known for her romantic fiction and contributions to early Hollywood cinema. She popularized the concept of "It" (a magnetic, irresistible quality) and is credited with creating the modern romance novel.

Transcribed - Published: 19 May 2025

Arlie Hochschild (1940 - present) is an American sociologist known for her coining of the term “Emotional Labor.” In her 1983 book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, she first coined the term "emotional labor" to describe the process in which workers manage their emotions to fulfill the emotional requirements of their jobs. She also coined terms like “deep story” and the “pride paradox” in her books about what motivates right wing voters. She continues to write and research to this day.

Transcribed - Published: 16 May 2025

Rābiʻa al-ʻAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya or Rabiʿa al-Basri (717-801 C.E.) is a highly regarded Sufi saint born in Basra, Iraq. Oral traditions and later written records suggest that she was also a poet. She is thought to be one of the first female Sufi saints and a key figure in developing Ishq-e-Haqeeqi or “divine love,” a central tenet in Sufism.

Transcribed - Published: 15 May 2025

Jane Austen (1775-1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her novels which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment on the English landed gentry during the Regency era. She had a great influence on the first Oxford English Dictionary published in 1928 and is quoted over 1,600 times.

Transcribed - Published: 14 May 2025

The Heroines of Jiangyong were women in rural China who made a secret language – Nüshu – to communicate with each other. Nüshu translates directly to “women’s writing” and is a series of phonetic scripts. The practice is estimated to go back as far as the Shang Dynasty 1600 to 1046 BCE. For centuries it was the language of female defiance to the Chinese patriarchy, legitimizing the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of rural women who had been denied access to an education.

Transcribed - Published: 13 May 2025

Myra Laramee is a Cree/Métis teacher and Elder based in Winnipeg, Canada. She introduced the term Two-Spirit to better define queer identity under Indigenous people’s terms.

Transcribed - Published: 12 May 2025

Ruth Glass (1912-1990) was a British sociologist and urban planner known for coining the term “gentrification” in 1964 to describe the transformation of working-class neighborhoods by middle-class newcomers. Her work focused on urban change, housing policy, and social inequality, particularly in London.

Transcribed - Published: 9 May 2025

Pauline Rose Clance (1938 - present) is a psychologist most famous for co-authoring the research paper that first coined the term “imposter phenomenon.” Commonly known as “imposter syndrome” today, the phenomenon Pauline discovered has helped countless women better identify and navigate their feelings of inadequacy in academic and professional settings.

Transcribed - Published: 8 May 2025

Marcela Lagarde (1968 - present) is a Mexican anthropologist, author, politician and feminist scholar who is credited with coining the term “feminicidio,” first to denote mass killings of women in Juárez, which had begun in the early 1990s. The term was taken up by Latin American feminists, particularly in Mexico and Guatemala, as well as governments, to address the targeted violence towards and murder of women.

Transcribed - Published: 7 May 2025

Josephine Starrs and Virginia Barratt were among the creators of the VNS, an Australian feminist art collective born in the early days of the world wide web in the 1990s. The group is credited with coining the term "cyberfeminism."

Transcribed - Published: 6 May 2025

Alice Walker (1944-present) is novelist, poet and essayist, best known for her novel The Color Purple, published in 1982, which won the Pulitzer Prize and made Alice  the first Black woman to win the prize for fiction. Walker is also credited with coining the term Womanist in her 1983 collection of essays In Search of our Mother’s Gardens.

Transcribed - Published: 5 May 2025

Sylvia Wright (c. 1916-1981) was a writer and humorist who coined the term “Mondegreen,” a noun used to describe the result of mishearing a word for another word or phrase. During her career she was an editor for “Harper’s Bazaar,” and published several works of her own.

Transcribed - Published: 2 May 2025

Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was a groundbreaking writer and the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Her works, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved—where she coined the word "rememory"—explore race, identity, and the legacies of slavery. Morrison’s profound storytelling has made her one of the most influential voices in American literature.

Transcribed - Published: 2 May 2025

E. K. Janaki Ammal (1897-1984) was a botanist and cytogenecist, referred to as India’s first woman botanist. She gained expertise in crossbreeding hybrid species of plants while studying at the University of Michigan, where she became the first Indian woman to earn a Ph.D in botany in the U.S. She is best known for her work to improve India’s native sugarcane, which led to India ending its imports of the crop and becoming independent. She went on to fight for the preservation of India’s indigenous plants and end deforestation as a part of the 1970s Save Silent Valley movement.

Transcribed - Published: 30 April 2025

Berta Isabel Cáceres Flores (1971-2016) was a Honduran environmental activist who spent decades leading various land and water struggles in western Honduras. In 1993 she helped found and coordinate the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, known by its Spanish acronym COPINH. In the late 2000s, Berta organized a lasting resistance to the construction of the Agua Zarca Dam on the Gualcarque River, whose construction violated the rights of indigenous peoples, and would have effectively cut them off from important resources. She was awarded the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize (the highest honor in the field) for her success in stopping the dam’s construction through grassroots movements.

Transcribed - Published: 29 April 2025

Rahibai Soma Popere (1964 - present) is an Indian farmer known for her work preserving indigenous seed varieties and promoting sustainable agriculture. She is often referred to as the “Seed Mother” for her commitment to protecting biodiversity and traditional farming practices in India.

Transcribed - Published: 28 April 2025

Aino Henssen (1925-2011) was a globally recognized lichenologist. Her interest in the organism advanced the study and understanding of lichen and actinomycete taxonomy. She wrote over 100 papers on lichen and had several named after her.

Transcribed - Published: 25 April 2025

Margaretta Morris (1797-1867) and Elizabeth Carrington Morris (1795-1865) were sisters from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who worked in botany, entomology, and the natural sciences. They have been credited with helping transform American science in the 19th century, but their impact has been largely forgotten.

Transcribed - Published: 24 April 2025

Margaret S. Collins (1922-1996) was a pioneering entomologist and civil rights activist, known for being the first African American woman to earn a PhD in entomology. Specializing in termites, she conducted significant research, including field studies in Guyana, and contributed to both science and social equality, becoming a prominent figure in both the scientific and civil rights communities.

Transcribed - Published: 23 April 2025

Ch’en Shu (1660–1736) was a Chinese painter from the Qing dynasty, known for her exquisite flower-and-bird paintings that blended precision with delicate beauty. As one of the few recognized female artists of her time, she mastered traditional painting techniques while incorporating her own refined sense of composition and color.

Transcribed - Published: 22 April 2025

Winona LaDuke (1959-present) is an environmental activist, economist, and writer of Ojibwe descent. Winona has dedicated her life to working on issues of land reclamation and food sovereignty, as well advocating for the rights of Native women, and participating in decades of protest against oil pipelines encroaching on and destroying native land.

Transcribed - Published: 21 April 2025

Buffalo Bird Woman (c. 1839-1932), also known as Maxidiwiac, was a Hidatsa woman whose recollections on traditional Hidatsa culture, customs, and especially agricultural knowledge, were written down and preserved through interviews at the turn of the 20th century.

Transcribed - Published: 18 April 2025

Hattie Carthan (1900-1984) was a community activist and environmentalist from Brooklyn, New York. She led efforts to preserve trees, revitalize public parks, and improve her Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, most notably saving a Southern magnolia tree. She received a distinguished service medal from the city and was elected to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's governing committee.

Transcribed - Published: 17 April 2025