Having asserted their presence in Nigeria throughout the best part of the nineteenth century, by the start of the 1900s the British had tightened their grip through indirect rule, whereby the colonies’ indigenous inhabitants were governed not directly by British officials but rather by local representatives appointed by the British. While the strategy underpinning indirect ruling was to use pre-existing indigenous structures to better control the colonies’ inhabitants, in reality local traditions and history were largely ignored and British models were imposed. 

In the area then known as Southern Nigerian Protectorate, the British introduced the Warrant Chiefs System, whereby local men were appointed by the colonisers to exercise authority on their fellow villagers and the Native Courts, where disputes were settled according to British law. Both systems excluded women, who had been active in the political life of precolonial times. 

Resentment increased among women and men alike with the introduction of direct taxation in the 1920s, which was not only financially burdensome, but also considered unethical and a symbol of the submission to a foreign power. Locals were so impoverished that some resorted to mortgaging and selling their children. To make things worse, taxation was implemented by those Warrant Chiefs who were supposed to be on the side of their fellow countrymen but who in fact aligned themselves with the oppressors. For the indigenous inhabitants, the last straw was the introduction of a census which was perceived as a symbol of their objectification into white men’s property. Despite the seething discontent, in 1928, both census and taxation were implemented with few obstacles. But in 1929, when a rumour spread that women were going to be taxed as well, things turned.

Indigenous women had carried on exercising power in their traditional domains: market networks, meetings and kinship groups. During their meetings, the women in the Oloko Native Court had resolved to revolt if taxation was extended to them, which would have brought households to their knees and made life impossible. They agreed to wait until a move was made towards imposing further tax.  

This happened in November 1929 when a Captain John Cook ordered for a new census to take into account each man’s number of wives, children, and animals. Okugo, the Warrant Chief of Oloko, sent an agent to count the members of each household. On 23 November 1929, the agent, Mark Emeruwa, approached a compound where he found Nwanyeruwa, an elder woman, preparing palm oil. When Emeruwa asked her to count her household’s livestock and family members, Nwanyeruwa took it as a sign that women were going to be taxed. She verbally attacked Emeruwa before running to a women’s assembly to announce that the wheels had been set in motion to start taxing women. This was the signal the women of Oloko had been waiting for: they sent out palm leaves, which symbolised a request for help, to the women of the neighbouring villages who in turn sent more palm leaves further out. Women were called on to revolt against the Warrant Chiefs and thus against British rule. This started with “sitting on” Oloko: a practice which entailed making noise and threats outside the Warrant Chief’s house while wearing war attire and make-up. For the following few weeks, over 10,000 women targeted Warrant Chiefs, Native Courts and European factories in their villages, destroying buildings and looting them. A particularly destructive accident took place in the city of Aba, hence the naming of the revolt as Aba Women’s riots, or Ogu Umunwanyi (Women’s War). Women demanded the abolition of taxation and the dismantling of the Warrant Chiefs system, as well as the chiefs’ prosecution. They asked that “all white men go to their country” so that the land could heal and return to what it had been before their arrival. 

The revolt was quelled in January 1930. Between fifty and sixty women were killed, with several more wounded. However, the British agreed to reform both Native Courts and the Warrant Chief systems, taking women into account when it came to legislative decisions. The riots also delayed by some years the taxation of women.

As for Nwanyeruwa, she is only cited on another occasion when, called to testify against Warrant Chief Okugo in March 1930, she answered simply: “We had no money to pay tax. […]I was once a rich woman, but as [Okugo] had been taking money away from me I had now no money.” This sparked the riots.

Even though not much is known about Nwanyeruwa apart from her role in the Aba Women’s War, her voice was fundamental for the construction of the anti-colonial movement, which extended to all of Nigeria and culminated with the country’s independence in 1960. 

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©The Heroine Collective 2020 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include “Continuities, Changes and Challenges: Women’s Role in Nigerian Society” by Christie Achebe // “Perceiving Women as Catalysts” by Felix Ekechi  // Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel by Esi Sutherland-Addy and Aminata Diaw.

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She was born in Hastings in 1830, the eldest child of a wealthy family with several homes and seats in Parliament. Together with her two younger siblings and her parents, she used to divide her time between Hastings, London, Lancashire and Norfolk. While she was growing up, her parents ensured she received the sort of education considered appropriate for a young woman in Victorian times, which included painting and singing. Soon Marianne favoured the former over the latter, and it is thought that her father’s acquaintance with the Director of the Royal Gardens at Kew inspired her to paint exotic plants.

Travelling was a permanent fixture of Marianne’s life. She travelled with her family throughout her childhood, including on a three-year trip around Europe. When her mother died, in 1855, Marianne was asked to promise that she would never leave her father’s side. Frederick North was an MP, but every summer, after Parliament closed, he would travel to Europe with his daughters Marianne and Catherine. Together they went to Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Italy and Greece, and on one of these trips, Marianne painted her first watercolour. In 1864 Catherin married, and in 1865 Frederick retired from Parliament, which left him and Marianne even more time to travel. They went to Syria, travelled along the Nile and then headed to Switzerland and the South Tyrol. Here, Frederick became ill, and Marianne took him back to Hastings, where he died in 1869. 

Marianne was devastated by the loss of her father, whom she considered her one “idol and friend” throughout her life. She was now nearly forty years old and unmarried, but the conventional lifestyle of Victorian women, revolving around the home and supporting their husbands and children, remained unappealing to her. Instead, she returned to her desire to paint exotic plants. 

Armed with cardboard, oils and brushes, Marianne set off for Sicily first, and then, much to her family’s consternation, to America, where she visited Canada and the United States before heading to Jamaica and further south to Brazil. A great conversationalist and brilliant guest, Marianne was well trained in the art of socialising and managed to travel from country to country with letters of introduction, each new friend suggesting new countries to explore and hosts that she could spend time with. This nomadic lifestyle suited Marianne, whose mood was only dampened by the restrictions imposed on her gender and class, and by the dull company of “proper” young women. 

Above all, Marianne cherished freedom: the freedom to explore, travel, and paint whatever she liked. Her style was influenced by her nomadic lifestyle: unlike other botanical artists, Marianne painted plants not against plain backgrounds but in their environment. Her flowers and leaves and plants are not flat green silhouettes but breathing organisms growing out of water, at the foot of trees, or in the desert, featuring the insects or birds that would feed off or near them. She also painted landscapes and monuments as a way to document her trips and show these faraway lands in England. As per her style, it has been pointed out that her colour palette was limited to a small number of colours: this, as well as her choice of painting on cardboard, was determined by her need to pack and travel light.

After Brazil, Marianne visited the Canaries, Japan, Singapore, Borneo, Java, Ceylon and India. Because of the impossibility of travelling with photographic equipment at the time, many plants were first made known to botanists by Marianne’s paintings. Among these, the carnivorous Nepenthes northiana, or Miss North’s pitcher-plant,  painted in Borneo and named after Marianne.

In 1879, North returned to England. She offered to build a gallery at Kew Gardens to house hundreds of her paintings and drawings, which she also offered. Her offer was accepted, and Marianne commissioned architect James Fergusson to construct her gallery. 

The following year, upon Charles Darwin’s suggestion, Marianne travelled to Australia and New Zealand, where she lived and painted for a year before returning to England and showing Darwin her Australian work. While still in her home country, she realised she had never been to Africa, and so, after her gallery opening, Marianne took off again, heading to South Africa and then to the Seychelles.

She was in Chile, painting the desert’s flora, when she fell ill and begrudgingly returned to England in 1885. She retired to Alderley, in Gloucestershire, where she spent her last years writing her autobiography. She died in 1890. The Marianne North Gallery is still at Kew Gardens, and, in 2004, a grant was awarded to restore both the building and Marianne’s work. 

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©The Heroine Collective 2020 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include Recollections of a Happy Life, Being the Autobiography of Marianne North, MacMillan and Co 1892 // “Marianne North in India: travels of a pioneering Victorian artist” by Nancy Lyons // “Marianne North: pioneering botanical artist” by Zoe Wolstenholme.

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I had two choices: I could become a writer or I could die really young” a middle-aged Butler pondered in an interview. “Cause there wasn’t anything else that I wanted.

Octavia Estelle Butler was born in 1947 in Pasadena, California and raised in a racially-integrated community by her mother and her grandmother. 

Known as Junie when she was growing up, Octavia was a shy, dyslexic child. She recalls looking different, being a 6ft tall teenager, and feeling different. She was bullied at school and took refuge in books: first in the ones her mother brought home from work and then in the Pasadena Public Library. 

Butler enjoyed writing as much as reading: at ten she started writing stories about horses, and the following year she moved onto romance, despite knowing nothing about either subject. She was twelve when she started writing science fiction. Her interest in the genre was first piqued when she watched Devil Girl From Mars. The movie, she recalled years later, was so bad that it made her realise she “could write a better story than that” and be paid for it. 

And so she started trying: with the help of a teacher at school, she would type her manuscripts and submit them for publication, but it would be ten more years before her work was published. 

After graduating from Pasadena City College in 1968, Butler went on to study creative writing at California State University while working a number of menial and alienating jobs, from clerk typist to potato chip inspector, which allowed her to wake up at two or three in the morning and write before heading to work. At the same time, in 1969-1970, she attended the Open Doors programme run by the Screen Writers’ Guild of America. There, she became friends with novelist Harlan Ellison, who suggested she attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, a six-week course that led to the publication of Butler’s story “Crossover” in the 1971 Clarion anthology. This was the first time Butler had any of her work published, but she was to endure five more years of rejections before seeing her novels printed. 

Publication finally arrived with the first novel of her Patternist series: Patternmaster, which was published in 1976, Mind of My Mind (1977)and Survivor (1978). Butler was among the first African-American women to publish science fiction, and she was the first Black American woman to become a prominent writer in the genre. Even though she was hesitant to have the label applied to her work because of the stereotypes associated with the genre (it’s best liked by teenagers, it features bug-eyed aliens, it’s Star Trek), Butler turned to science fiction because it allowed her to explore all themes dear to her: power structures, race, sex, politics, and so on.

Kindred, one of her best-known novels, is a case in point: in order to save her life in the present, the protagonist has to travel back in time to save the life of a slave owner so that he can go on and assault her slave ancestor – an act of violence without which the heroine would not be alive. Partly drawing on the memories of the humiliation her mother had to endure while working as a maid for a white family, Butler was moved to write Kindred “to make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.” 

Science fiction was for Butler a means rather than an end, yet her name and literary success are inextricably linked with the genre: her short stories (“Speech Sounds”), novelettes (Bloodchild) and novels (Parable of the Talents) won major science fiction awards such as the Hugo Award and Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula Award. In 1995 Butler made the headlines for becoming the first writer of science fiction to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

A prolific writer throughout her life, Butler died in 2006, aged 58, following a fall which might have been caused by a stroke. She had been suffering from deteriorating health for a couple of years leading up to her death. A once-shy, dyslexic, reclusive lesbian, Butler left a legacy that encompasses much more than a seminal body of work: she is considered the grandmother of Afrofutursim, she set up bursaries to allow young African Americans to study creative writing and go to college, she has both a mountain on a moon of Pluto and an asteroid named after her. Many of her novels and short stories have been adapted for stage and screen. Dawn, the first book of the Xenogenesis series, is currently being adapted as a TV show produced by Ava du Vernay. 

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©The Heroine Collective 2020 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include Inside my 90-Minute Visit with Octavia Butler by Tananarive Due// Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 58, New York Times// Octavia Butler Obituary, The Guardian. 

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Waters then began dreaming of becoming a maid to a wealthy white woman who would take her travelling around the world. She did indeed go on to work as a chambermaid in Philadelphia. It was while working there that she was noticed by two vaudeville producers when she sang in public.

This marked the beginning of Waters’ music career.

By the age of seventeen, she was singing professionally in Baltimore under the stage name ‘Sweet Mama Stringbean’, and from there she moved to New York City. Soon she would leave the vaudeville scene for the Harlem nightclubs. By 1925 she was performing at Harlem’s well-known Plantation Club. 

Her singing encompassed both the raw tones of the Baptist songs and a more refined, enunciated style. This combination made Waters a unique singer. Because of her technique, she could sing different genres of music, from classic blues to jazz to musical theatre. Her nightclub gigs led to her Broadway debut: in 1927, she performed in the all-black revue Africana. By that point, she was dividing her time between theatre, nightclubs and eventually, cinema. Between 1930 and 1931, she performed in the Broadway musicals Blackbirds and Rhapsody in Black. 

Her appearance in the 1933’s musical As Thousands Cheer marked her first role in a cast which wasn’t all-black. It sealed her success as a jazz and blues singer, with composers writing songs especially for her, or coming to associate pieces from the canon specifically with her, including Dinah and Stormy Weather.

In the following decade, Waters’ success on Broadway continued as she appeared in both musicals and drama, including the musical Cabin in the Sky, in which she acted alongside Lena Horne, and a stage adaptation of Carson McCullers’s novel The Member of the Wedding for which she won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.

In 1939 Waters had a dramatic role in DuBose and Dorothy Heyward’s Mamba’s Daughters, which premiered at New York’s Empire Theatre; it was said to have earned Waters seventeen curtain calls.

Waters was not afraid of challenging the roles she was cast in; she was especially keen to show that big African American women could be seductive, playful, and not only suitable to play mammies. She was an inventive, talented performer, but some said she was a difficult artist to work with. She, perhaps fairly or unfairly, developed an increasingly bad reputation, which left her with little work for the best part of the mid-1940s.

By the time she was cast as the mammy in Elia Kazan’s Pinky in 1948, she was almost begging for work. But once again, Waters picked herself up and her performance earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination. It was the first time a back actress was nominated since Hattie McDaniel won an Academy Award for her supporting role in Gone with the Wind. 

Waters went on to star in a number of films, including Cairo and The Sound and the Fury, but it was her role in a film adaptation of The Member of the Wedding that confirmed her cinematic talent. Released shortly after the publication of Waters’ autobiography His Eye Is on the Sparrow in 1951, the film sealed in the mind of the audience the idea that Waters was in fact the characters she played: she was a woman who received blow after blow at the hands of lovers and bad turns of fortune; a woman who had suffered and survived a heritage of slavery. Some believe that it was Waters’ role as Berenice in The Member of the Wedding which started the archetype of the big, strong African American woman who symbolised the dignity and resilience of Black Americans.

Despite the film’s success, Waters’ career then entered another phase of decline. Some attribute this to the fact that the Black Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s cast a new light on the mammy roles that Waters would traditionally play, which, for all her interpretative efforts, came to be seen as derogatory and old-fashioned, but achieving consistent success as a black actress was never going to be easy.

Waters worked in television more sporadically, and then returned to singing in nightclubs.

She died in September 1977 at 80 years of age from cancer.

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©The Heroine Collective 2019 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include: Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Films. New York and London: Continuum. 1973. // Bourne, Stephen. Ethel Waters: Stormy Weather. Lanham, Toronto, Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press, Inc. 2007. // Encylopaedia Britannica, Ethel Waters https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ethel-Waters // McElrath, Jessica. “Remembering the Career of Ethel Waters” // Waters, Ethel. His Eye Is on the Sparrow. New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1951.

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A Canadian, Stern completed a medical degree from the University of Toronto in 1939 at the age of 24. The following year, she moved to the United States, where she continued her training in pathology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and then at the Good Samaritan and Cedars of Lebanon hospitals in Los Angeles.

In LA, she married fellow Canadian Solomon Shankman, a chemist with whom she went on to have three children and spend the rest of her life. Following her marriage, in 1943 Stern became a naturalised American citizen. 

Stern was one of the first scientists to specialise in cytopathology – the study of diseased cells which is fundamental in the understanding of cancer. She started her career at Los Angeles’ Cancer Detection Center, where she was a Director of Laboratories and Research. By 1961, she was working for the Medical Schools of the University of Southern California as a research coordinator, and at The University of California, teaching classes in the pathology department.

Stern’s research focused on the study of cancerous cells in the cervix.

At the time, dramatic progress was being made in this field thanks to the development of a screening test that is today known as Pap smear, after Dr Papanicolau, who devised it. The test detected the presence of abnormal cells and cell growth (dysplasia) in the cervix.

Stern set out to determine whether there was a connection between the presence of these cells, which can be a symptom of the herpes virus, or HPV, and the development of cervical cancer. For two years, she studied over 10,000 women in Los Angles County, testing them for dysplastic growths and, a year later, checking whether they had developed cancer.

In a study published in 1963, she concluded that dysplasia almost always led to the development of cervical cancer, which implied that the detection of HPV should be followed by measures aimed at preventing the progress of these cells into a malign tumour. These measures included the excision of dysplastic tissue, a procedure which today is often carried out with laser surgery and is effective in preventing the development of cervical cancer.

Also in 1963, Stern became an associate researcher at the University of California’s School of Public Health, and in 1965 she was promoted to professor of epidemiology.

In subsequent research, Stern drew on her knowledge of both cytopathology and epidemiology to understand what factors encouraged women to access gynaecological healthcare, or prevented them from doing so. Being especially interested in the approach to healthcare among poorer women, and having surveyed that cervical cancer was more common among black and Hispanic women, Stern directed her team’s research effort to determine the causes for this, and possible solutions. She coordinated the opening of special free clinics where women could be tested for cervical abnormalities. Her studies revealed that women were more likely to put themselves forward for tests if childcare, transportation and flexible hours were offered. Another determining factor was the reassurance that a female nurse or doctor would carry out the tests.

In another groundbreaking study, Stern tried to determine whether the regular use of the oral contraceptive was linked with the development of cervical cancer. Again, she surveyed thousands of women, this time for a period of seven years and in a study published in 1977, she concluded that women who regularly took the pill were six times more likely to develop cervical cancer. This eventually led to the removal of Enovid from the pharmaceutical market – the contraceptive which contained about ten times the amount of oestrogen in contemporary oral contraceptives.

Stern was diagnosed with stomach cancer in the 1970s. She underwent several cycles of chemotherapy but eventually died in 1980. Her studies were crucial in preventing thousands of women from dying of cervical cancer. Thanks to her discoveries in preventing, diagnosing and stopping the disease, cervical cancer went from being one of the biggest killers of American women in the 1950s to having its fatality rate drastically reduced by the end of the century.

©The Heroine Collective 2019 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include: Elliott Ellen, PhD. “Elizabeth Stern’s Cancer Research Had a Lasting Impact On Women’s Health.” The Jackson Laboratory blog. https://www.jax.org/news-and-insights/jax-blog/2016/september/elizabeth-stern-influenced-womens-health-initiatives. Accessed on 13 Mar 2019 // Figueroa, Mariana. “In memoriam: Solomon Shankman”ASBMB Today. http://www.asbmb.org/asbmbtoday/201411/InMemoriam/. Accessed 10 Apr 2019 // Glorfeld Jeff. “Science history: Elizabeth Stern, women’s health pioneer” Cosmos The Science of Everything. Accessed on 13 Mar 2019 //The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Elizabeth Stern” Encycloped Britannica https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elizabeth-Stern. Accessed on 8 Apr 2019.

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She started developing an interest in woodcarving after coming across a figurine carved by her late father, and decided she wanted to study art. She successfully applied to the Carnegie Institute of Technology but the school refused to let Catlett matriculate upon finding out that she was black. Instead she went to the historically black Howard University, and from there on to Iowa University, where in 1940 she became the first African-American woman to graduate with a MFA.

At Iowa, Catlett was encouraged to make work about the subjects she knew best – the reality of being an African-American woman, raising children, being at once dispossessed yet also proud and dignified. Women became the subject of much of her work, women with broad hips and angular faces, standing proudly, sometimes raising their fists, sometimes nursing children, but almost invariably depicted from a slightly lower angle, so that the viewer is forced to look up at them.

I felt my work should do something for women because nobody was interested in them

 

In 1941, Catlett married fellow artist Charles White and followed him South, where he had won a scholarship to study and make murals. In the South, Catlett experienced even harsher racism, and became firmer in her resolution to dedicate her art to representing and elevating black people.
She did this not only by making the black experience the subject of her work, but by being a passionate teacher. She would teach for decades.

In the early 1940s, she taught sculpture and dressmaking to adults at the Carver School in Harlem. The experience of teaching working class people who had limited access to education moved Catlett deeply. She saw how hungry to learn her students were; she later found that same hunger for education during her time in Mexico.

In 1946, she won the same Rosenwald Foundation grant her husband had been awarded five years prior, and she used it to move it to Mexico City. There, she joined the Taller de Grafica Popular, a group of printmakers who shared her vision of art as a political tool and responsibility. Catlett divorced White, with whom she had three sons, and married artist Francisco Mora.

In Mexico, her work evolved to encompass lithographs, linoleum cuts, and sculpture in wood, stone, clay and bronze. In it, one can see the influence of modernism with its abstract form and smooth shapes, the angular woodcut of German expressionism, African masks, Mexican populist art and more. Catlett was active in Mexico at the same time as some American artists were becoming internationally known for pop art, and this can be glimpsed in some of her work. But ever the activist, where Warhol was concerned with celebrity culture, Catlett focused on African American activists, as in her print ‘Malcolm X Speaks for Us’.

She was not so concerned with the aesthetics of her work and with the critics’ judgment of it, as with her mission as an artist. Of her art, she said: “I have always wanted [it] to service my people – to reflect us, to relate us, to stimulate us, to make us aware of our potential.”

As a political activist, Catlett was targeted by the Communist witch-hunts of the mid-century. Repeatedly questioned and threatened to have her passport removed, eventually Catlett gave up her American citizenship and was declared an undesirable alien.

In 1958, she became the first female professor of sculpture at the School of Fine Arts in Mexico City. She carried on teaching even after becoming a successful artist until, in 1975 she retired to Cuernavaca in Mexico. She then spent her time between Mexico and New York. She regained her American citizenship in 2002.

Catlett experienced discrimination throughout her life: she was black, she was poor, she was a woman, and she was targeted by the American government. It was not easy for her to have her voice heard and her work seen, yet she never compromised the nature of her work nor what she stood for. Eventually, fame found her, her work was exhibited on a bigger scale and introduced to a new audience by jazz musician Rufus Reid, who composed an album inspired by her work.

Catlett died in 2012. The fact that her work isn’t better known speaks of the discrimination rife in the art world, but Catlett’s legacy is kept alive by both artists and art historians who were inspired by her life and work.

©The Heroine Collective 2019 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include Beckwith, Noemi, Elizabeth Catlett, Rufus Reid et al. “An Alternative History of Art: Elizabeth Catlett” BBC Radio 4. Accessed on 15 February 2019.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tf0d8 // Boucher, Brian. “Elizabeth Catlett, 1915-2012.” Art in America. Accessed on 15 February 2019. https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/elizabeth-catlett-1915-2012/ // Carnegie Mellon University. “May 15: University Honors Artist Elizabeth Catlett With Special Exhibition, Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts.” Accessed on 18 February 2019. https://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2008/May/may15_catlettexhibition.shtml // National Museum of Women in the Arts, “Elizabeth Catlett”. Accessed on 13 February 2019. https://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/elizabeth-catlett // Rosenberg, Karen, and Daniel Slotnik. “Elizabeth Catlett, Sculptor With Eye on Social Issues, Is Dead at 96” The New York Times. // Smitshonian American Art Museum, “Elizabeth Catlett.” Accessed on 13 February 2019. https://americanart.si.edu/artist/elizabeth-catlett-781.

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The daughter of a reverend, Isabella was raised with strong evangelical views that informed her view of the world and her philanthropic work. As she followed her father through his benefices around England, Isabella became used to a nomadic lifestyle at an early age. Moreover, having being born with a spinal defect and general poor health, for which she was encouraged to spend as much time as possible outdoors, this puny, sickly child learned in her early years horse riding, rowing, and the habit to interrogate, observe and write about her surroundings.

Everything suggests a beyond.

After undergoing a surgery for her spine and having been advised to take a sea voyage for her health, Isabella took her first journey at the age of twenty-three, first to Prince Edward Island to visit a cousin and from there to mainland Canada and the United States. She wrote an account of this in her book The English Woman in America, which was published in 1856 and was going to be the first of many books detailing her travels and adventures.

In 1858, following her father’s death, Isabella relocated to Edinburgh with her mother and sister Henrietta. She became especially fond of the Highlands and the Isle of Mull, where she spent time in her sister’s cottage in Tobermory. Whenever she was back from her travels, Isabella lived with her sister, to whom she used to write long letters, many of which were published. By this point, the 1860s, Isabella’s travels had extended from the United States to the Mediterranean, the Pacific and Asia.

Only poor health thwarted Isabella’s restlessness and continuous desire for adventure. Despite the spinal surgery, she kept suffering from a bad back and was often bedridden, but she kept going, and in 1872 she embarked on a trip to Australia, New Zealand and the Sandwich Islands. From there, she went to Hawaii and North America and spent the last months of 1873 in the Rocky Mountains, where she got to finesse her horse riding and had a short-lived romance with a cowboy. On this occasion, she travelled for about eighteen months and published two volumes, one on the Hawaiian Archipelago’s wildlife, which was of interest to scientists as well as the general public, and the second titled A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains.

I dreamt of bears so vividly that I woke with a furry death hug at my throat, but feeling quite refreshed.

Back home in Edinburgh in 1876-7, she developed an interest in science and medicine that led her to meet Dr. John Bishop, who she would have married a few years later. She went on to travel through Japan, the Malay Peninsula, Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula, where she contracted typhoid fever, after which she returned to Scotland. There, Henrietta died in June 1880 and in 1881 Isabella married Dr. Bishop, ten years her junior.

After his death in 1886, Isabella devoted herself to the cause of medical missions, studying medicine at St. Mary’s Hospital London and joining the missionary cause. Armed with new knowledge and strengthened ideals, she traveled to Ireland and India, where she founded two hospitals: the John Bishop Memorial Centre in Cashmere and the Henrietta Bird Hospital for Women in Punjab.

By 1890, Isabella’s fame was established as both a traveller and a missionary advocate. She was made a fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in 1891 and a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, to which no woman had previously been admitted. She travelled through Canada to Japan, Korea and China, funding on her way three more hospitals as well as an orphanage in Japan. On her return to England she published books on both Korea and China, which were illustrated by photographs she herself had taken on her journeys.

In December 1900, almost seventy years old, Isabella went to Morocco for six months, but poor health forced her to stop writing and return to Scotland. She was planning another visit to China, but her health quickly deteriorated and she died in Edinburgh in 1904. In her will, she bequeathed some funds for the Henrietta Amelia Bird memorial clock in Tobermory, which to this day is the town clock.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include: “Isabella Bird (1831-1904)” The John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland, https://digital.nls.uk/jma/who/bird/, accessed 30 Dec 2018 // Brown, Olive. “Islander’s memorial” The Scotsman.  https://www.scotsman.com/news/islander-s-memorial-1-1098854 accessed 5 January 2019 // Lucas, Charles Prestwood (ed) Dictionary of National Bibliography (1912) // McClay, David. “Travels with Isabella Bird”, National Library of Scotland, https://www.nls.uk/about-us/films-made-by-nls/isabella-bird-transcript, accessed 30 Dec 2018 // Stoddart, Anna (1906) The Life of Isabella Bird (Mrs Bishop) London: Murray.

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While working in factories, Tereshkova continued her education via evening classes and correspondence courses, later qualifying as a technician and eventually an engineer. She also became secretary of the Young Communist League before joining the Communist Party, and pursued a qualification as a skydiver after performing her first jump in 1959. This keen interest in parachuting determined the course of her life.

In 1961, the Soviet space programme was launched and the Russian government began looking for a female cosmonaut to send into space. It sounds great, but of course, the agenda was far from feminist. The official explanation was an interest in the female body’s reaction to being sent into space, but the actual reason for the programme was political. Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev was determined to upstage the USA in the space race with another first: by sending a female cosmonaut into space before the US even allowed women to become pilots, the communist regime could be depicted as the better provider of equal rights. 

Tereshkova proved to be the right person for the job. In order to be eligible, female applicants were required to be pilots or parachutists under the age of thirty, up to 170cm tall and up to 70 kg heavy. Over four hundred Soviet women applied. In 1962, five were ultimately selected to train for just fifteen months before their mission. The programme was shrouded in such secrecy that Tereshkova didn’t even tell her mother that she’d been selected.

Comprising of classes, parachute jumps and time in an aerobatic jet, the training mirrored the one designed for male cosmonauts, and after it, Tereshkova was deemed the best candidate.

The mission was dual flight: two crafts, Vostok 5 and 6, would be launched a few days apart from each other and be in orbit at the same time, with ground control manoeuvring them within a short distance of each other. The other craft was to be controlled by a male cosmonaut.

Tereshkova was launched into space on 16 June 1963 with the call sign “Seagull” (which she was to retain a long time). Her mission wasn’t uncomplicated. She reportedly became sicker than foreseen, at one point becoming momentarily unable to steer the craft. Moreover, she realised that Vostok 6 had been mistakenly programmed not to descend on her return to Earth, but to ascend. At increasing speed. Into outer space. Heroically, Tereshkova was able to fix this problem while communicating with ground control.

Tereshkova orbited Earth forty-eight times and, after almost three days, she had spent longer in space than the combined time of all American cosmonauts up to that point. She only went to space once and might have trained for a second mission entailing a space walk, but the space programme was dismantled in 1969, and the interest in women going to space waned. Tereshkova and her fellow female cosmonauts in training protested, but to no avail. The Soviet government would not send another woman into space until the 1980s, when the USA became a serious threat in the space race.

After 1969, Tereshkova, already a leading member of the Communist Party, became increasingly involved with politics. She became a member of the Central Committee, an honour reserved to the most strongly politically-minded members of the Party. She spent the rest of her professional life as an ambassador for the Soviet Union and its space programme.

Now retired and a grandmother to two children, Tereshkova enjoys a more private life even though she still occasionally makes public appearances to talk about her time in space. She recalls looking at Earth and feeling overwhelmed by its beauty and fragility. She recently volunteered for a one-way trip to Mars. She is over eighty years old. 

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch.

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Throughout Joan’s childhood and teens, the supporters of Valois were pitted against the supporters of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, who had formed an alliance with the English, claiming his right to the throne. Reims, the town where monarchs were traditionally crowned, had been under siege since the death of King Charles VI in 1422. Five years later, his heir had not been crowned.

Since the age of thirteen, Joan had claimed she spoke to God and His Saints Michael, Catherine and Margaret, who had told her that Charles VI’s son was destined to become king of France. She felt compelled to help him achieve the throne.

Armed with a will of steel and complete trust in her vision, sixteen-year-old Joan sought to speak to the Dauphin, but was dismissed and turned away by his generals. She tried again a year later in 1429. This time, she was granted an audience. Attired in men’s clothes – which she preferred to women’s garments – she convinced the Dauphin that they needed to fight the English together, and head to Reims where he would be crowned.

After being interrogated by a cohort of theologians (to ensure she wasn’t a heretic), Joan was allowed to go to battle alongside the Dauphin. She was given a military household of several men, a battle standard which she had decorated with a portrait of Christ in Judgment, and a sword which she prophesised would eventually be found in the church of Saint Catherine-de-Fierbois.

In May 1429, she led a victorious attack against the English at Orleans, where she had prophesised that she would prove her worth. Battle after battle, she advanced towards Reims with the Dauphin, treating the people who had lived under oppression with compassion and piety. She quickly became an idol among them.

They finally reached Reims on 16th July 1429, and the Dauphin was crowned King Charles VII of France the following day.

But Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy refused to accept the new king. The war raged on, and so did Joan, whose fame as a mystic and valiant warrior quickly spread from town to town. However, after a failed attack against the English, she was forced give herself up to the Burgundian troupes, who held her captive in a castle. So strong was her pull to return to battle that she tried to escape her cell by jumping out of a tower. But her attempts to escape failed, and she was eventually brought to trial before a church court.

A highly politicised trial ensued, led by theologians handpicked by Philip the Good and his English allies. Joan maintained that all she had done was fulfil her mission, as dictated by God and His saints. She was found guilty of several charges including claiming to be a prophet, disobeying the church militant, and wearing men’s clothes.

It was this last offence that led the church court, which could not condemn people to being executed, to pass her case to the secular court. The secular court ordered that Joan be burned alive.

Her execution took place on 30 May 1431, when she was just nineteen. Records report that she asked two friars to hold a crucifix high enough for her to see while burning.

Twenty years later, an inquest into her trial found her innocent and her sentence revoked and annulled. Joan was canonised as a saint in 1920. The second Sunday of May is now her national day in France.

Several explanations for Joan’s voices have been attempted over the centuries. These include medical conditions ranging from schizophrenia to epilepsy, a genuine connection with the divine and, last but not least, an understanding that, as a woman, Joan’s only chance to be heard was to claim that her military and political strategies came from God.

In the 13^th and 14^th centuries, a number of women in Western Europe claimed to hear God, Jesus, Mary or a number of saints speak to them. More often than not they were believed, and occasionally canonised as saints by the church. Joan might have decided to use the rise of mysticism to have her voice heard. But whether she genuinely believed she conversed with God is of scarce importance; what made ripples through the centuries is her sheer courage and conviction in her beliefs.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include: Eschner, Kat. “Remembering Joan of Arc, the Gender-Bending Woman Warrior Who Changed History.” Smithsonian, 9 January 2017 // Flinders, Carol. Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics. 1993. New York: Harper Collins. // Gordon, Mary. Joan of Arc. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 2000. // Lanhers, Yvonne. “Saint Joan of Arc” entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica. 22 June 2018. // Miller, Sara G. “What Really Caused the Voices in Joan of Arc’s Head?” Live Science. // Pernoud, Regine. Joan of Arc: By Herself and Her Witness. Lanham: Scarborough House. 1982. Transl. by Edward Hyams. // Thery, Julien. “How Joan of Arc Turned the Tide in the Hundred Years’ War” National Geographic History Magazine. 4 March 2017.

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Elizebeth was born to a family of Quaker farmers in 1892, the ninth of ten children and one of only two siblings to obtain a college degree. Fascinated with languages, she graduated from Hillsdale College in Michigan with a major in English literature and minor degrees in Greek, Latin and German.

After working as a substitute headmistress in a local school, in 1916 Elizebeth took up a position in Chicago’s Newberry Library – she was a lover of literature, and the library held an original Shakespeare folio. She was working at Newberry when she was interviewed for a job at Riverbanks Laboratories. Funded and built by retired Colonel George Fabyan, the laboratories were dedicated to the exploration of “obscure sciences” and employed researchers to advance the study of sound waves, genetics, and cryptanalysis.

Elizebeth captured her interviewer’s attention when she mentioned her love of Shakespeare’s work. Fabyan, an eccentric millionaire determined to prove that Shakespeare’s plays had in fact been written by Francis Bacon, hired Elizebeth so that she might find and break secret codes which he thought existed in Shakespeare’s work and would prove Bacon’s authorship.

As World War I raged throughout Europe, Riverbanks Laboratories became the country’s official cryptology centre for the American government. There, Elizebeth met William Friedman, a geneticist who not only fell in love with her, but also with her work on the decoding of secret writing. He would become her lifelong partner and collaborator, and in 1917, the couple started working together for the American government, decoding messages from Riverbanks Laboratories and training army officers to do the same.

In 1921, the Friedmans moved to Washington, D.C. to work for the War Department. This was only the beginning: in 1923, Elizebeth was hired as a cryptanalyst for the U.S. Navy, which in turn led to a position with the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Prohibition and Customs.

Throughout the 1920s, the American government was involved in a strenuous fight against organised crime, which was at the core of the Prohibition Era. Thanks to Friedman’s efforts and teachings, thousands of secret codes were deciphered and contraband operations were blocked. Working from international reports and intelligence obtained undercover, via wiretaps, informants and surveillance, Elizebeth broke codes and solve encrypted messages, both written and transmitted on the radio. Her work often supported the FBI by providing strategic intelligence for operational planning and necessary to build cases against organised crime leaders. She deciphered over 12,000 rum-runners messages, solved 650 smuggling traffic cases and decrypted 24 different coding systems used by smugglers.

Her achievements during Prohibition are exceptional but her career reached its pinnacle during World War II, when she helped decipher several Enigma machines while training army officers and aiding both the American and the Canadian government with domestic and international operations.

Shortly before and after the attack on Pearl Harbour, Elizebeth was assigned to the Coordination of Information’s operation. She spent the rest of the war serving as a civilian cryptologist under the direction of the Navy. She kept working until 1946, when a post-war restructuring of the whole government law enforcement branch forced her to resign a few months before her retirement eligibility.

Never one to slow down, Elizebeth returned to her first love and together with William focused on the project that had first brought them together: the analysis of Shakespeare’s work. This culminated in the 1957 publication of The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined, a comprehensive analysis of a cryptographic approach to the Bard’s work which maintains that his plays were in fact written by him, and not Bacon.

After Wiliam’s death in 1969, Elizebeth dedicated the rest of her life to collecting her husband’s work into the most extensive private collection of cryptographic material in the world, housed in the George Marshall Library in Lexington, Virginia.

She died in 1980 in obscurity, her achievements overshadowed by the work of her male colleagues in the world of cryptography and law enforcement.

But Elizebeth was an exceptional individual with a pioneering brain who for over thirty years deciphered thousands of secret codes, armed only with pen, paper, and a basic knowledge of maths. An enduring fascination with cryptology and a recent renewed interest in her work will hopefully bring her the recognition she has long been due.

©The Heroine Collective 2016 – Present, All Rights Reserved. Every effort is made to ensure our articles are as accurate as they can possibly can be, but if you notice a factual error, please do be in touch. We only use images we believe are either in the public domain or images we believe we are able to use for illustrative, editorial and non-commercial purposes. If you believe one of our images is being used incorrectly, please be in touch. References include: ‘Elizebeth S. Friedman’ Hall of Honour. Nsa.gov. 1999 // Friedman, William F and Elizebeth S.  Shakespearean Ciphers Examined. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1957 // Kale, Sirlin. “The Forgotten Female Codebreaker Who Helped America Defeat the Nazis.” Broadly. 14 Nov. 2017 // Noble, Breana. “ ‘A Life in Code’ highlights first female cryptanalyst’s accomplishments after Hillsdale” The Hillsdale Collegian. 30 March 2017.

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