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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A world without colour would seem dead. Colour is life.

Alma Woodsey Thomas (1891-1978) was an expressionist painter, arts educator, teacher, sculptor, marionette maker and playwright. Born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1891 to John Harris Thomas and Amelia Cantey Thomas, the artist was one of four daughters. 

Entering the world as an African-American woman at the turn of a tumultuous century, Thomas lived through the Civil Rights Movement, two world wars, the Harlem Renaissance and Great Depression, industrial and technological revolutions and major advances in women’s rights. However, it is often noted that her work is absent of political statement, and Thomas herself commented on this on a number of occasions: “Through colour, I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness, rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.” In fact, her 1963 painting depicting The March on Washington was probably her only work that was blatantly political in theme. It is clear that she did not want her art confined and stereotyped as a result of her racial heritage or gender. When asked by a journalist if she considered herself to be a “black artist”, Thomas replied “I am an American.” 

By the time Thomas began her career as an artist, she was 69. In the four decades she spent working in education, she was not only a teacher, but a leader and an inspiration to young people, organising marionette theatre productions, opening galleries and bringing art classes to black children from impoverished backgrounds. 

Thomas is best known for her work in the form of concentric circles and parallel lines, which often resemble carefully pruned flower beds or gobstoppers cleaved in two. Her work has been compared to the pointillism of Seurat and the fractured images of ancient mosaics, with raw canvas exposed beneath acrylic squares of flat colour. Over the years, her artistic style has spanned Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and colour field painting in its approach and composition. Thomas not only painted in vivid colours but surrounded herself with them – from her home to her clothes to her art, Thomas’ life was seeped in vibrant hues and embellished in pattern.

From a brief glance at the artist’s biography, it is clear that her passion to learn about art never ceased. In 1907, after her family relocated to Washington, Thomas enrolled at Armstrong Manual Training High School. A revolutionary individual from the beginning, it is no surprise that Thomas was the only female student in her year to take maths and architectural drawing. In 1911 she graduated from high school and attended Miner Normal School (now known as the University of the District of Columbia), receiving her certificate for kindergarten teaching in 1913.

Thomas later accepted a role at a school in Maryland, where she stayed for four months before taking a teaching position at the Thomas Garrett Settlement House in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1915. She remained there for 6 years, and in 1921, at the age of 30, Thomas followed her dream of becoming a costume designer and enrolled in Home Economics at Howard. During this time, she created costumes for the University’s theatre group ‘The Howard Players’. 

In 1924, Thomas became the first student to graduate from the newly formed art department at Columbia University, achieving a Master of Arts with a thesis that focused on the art of marionette making. Thomas was later hired as the Assistant Director of drawing at the Cheyney Training School for Teachers in Pennsylvania, where she stayed for just one term before accepting a teaching position in the art department at Shaw Junior High School. She held this role for an astonishing 35 years, but, even as a teacher, her love for learning remained persistent. Between 1930 and 1934, Thomas took summer classes at Teachers College at Columbia University, which taught all manner of art theory, philosophy, and crafts such as pottery. 

Returning to her love for puppetry, in 1935 Thomas took a course on marionette making in New York. During this period, and for many years surrounding it, African-Americans were prohibited from entering the National Theatre in Washington D.C. In response, Thomas organised marionette shows that were open to the minority community, staging puppet theatre at institutions such as the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA, the Howard University Gallery of Art, Armstrong Manual Training High School and Shaw Junior High School. These included popular shows such as Alice in Wonderland, as well as plays written by Thomas herself.

In 1936 Thomas went on to organise the School Arts League, which had classes on Saturday mornings and was specifically aimed at inspiring a love for visual culture in African-American high school students. Two years later, she organised the founding and opening  of the school’s first art gallery. By 1943, Thomas was the Vice President of the Barnett Aden Gallery, which was the first gallery in DC to break social barriers and invite artists of all cultures and racial backgrounds to exhibit.

Encouraged by the artist community of Washington (and those contemporaries who participated in the artists group ‘The Little Paris Studio’), in 1950 Thomas enrolled in classes at American University, where she would receive a second degree. Here, she studied for over a decade under figures such as Joe Summerford, Robert Gates and Jacob Kainen. This period in Thomas’ life would nurture the artist’s fascination with the abstract and monochromatic styles that she would gravitate to in later years, and which eventually became characteristic of her most celebrated works. It was not until the early 1960s when Thomas fully retired from teaching and began to focus her energy on her career as an artist. 

Thomas is often associated with the Washington Colour School, (which largely consisted of colour-field painters such as Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Gene Davis, Howard Mehring, Tom Downing, and Paul Reed); it has been argued that her work stands apart from this group in a number of stylistic ways. In the introduction to Alma W. Thomas: A Retrospective of the Paintings (1998), (a catalogue that would accompany a seminal exhibition at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art), curator Sachi Yanari argues that “Like them, Thomas turned to acrylic paint and explored non-traditional painting techniques on large-scale canvases. But she remained independent from them in style, technique and subject matter.” Thomas found the beauty of nature to be her primary source of inspiration, and this can be seen in the titles of paintings such as Hydrangeas Spring Song (1976), and Breeze Rustling Through Fall Flowers (1968).

Though Thomas’s earlier paintings focused on figurative works, by the mid 1960s she had turned almost entirely to bright colours and systemic abstraction, inspired by her knowledge of colour theory, and her time studying at American University. She was greatly influenced by the first moon landing in 1969, creating the Space or Snoopy series the very same year. These works were brought to life on large canvases, with Thomas’s characteristic rectangles of tesselating colour on pale backgrounds allowing the patterns to look almost as though they are moving, like an optical illusion. In the 1970s, her arthritis and diminishing eyesight started to interfere with her artistic practice, yet her love for colour never ceased. Her last known work is titled ‘Rainbow’ (1978).

Thomas continued to paint until the end of her life, never marrying, and living in the family home that her father had bought in 1907. During her lifetime and posthumously, her work has been recognised internationally and has been the subject of many exhibitions. These include a solo exhibition at Howard University in 1966, and later at Fisk University in 1971-1972. Thomas’ paintings were also the subject of a 1987 travelling exhibition by the National Museum of American Art. In 1972, Thomas was the first African-American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. During the reception of the retrospective she said “One of the things we couldn’t do was go into museums, let alone think of hanging our pictures there. My, times have changed. Just look at me now.” 

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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 Black Art: A Cultural History, Thames & Hudson 2002, // Forgotten Women Artists by Zing Tsjeng // Women of Abstract Expressionism by Joan Marter.

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Born in 1893 in Paris to bohemian parents, Stark spent her childhood travelling between Italy and England with her parents and sister, Vera. When she was 13, Stark suffered a traumatic injury when her hair got caught in a machine, causing severe damage to her scalp and ear, which left Stark with permanent scars on her face for the rest of her life. Perhaps due to an insecurity about the scars, throughout her life, Stark was famed for her fabulous hats. 

Although Stark had little formal education and didn’t come from money, she learned multiple languages in her youth, including German and Italian, and would become fluent in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Russian as an adult. Stark went to London in 1912 to study for a degree at Bedford College in London, but her education was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. Stark went on to become a Red Cross nurse in Europe to help with the war effort. 

After the war finished, Stark returned to Italy and began to teach herself Arabic. Following the death of her sister after a miscarriage and desperate to escape her life in Italy, in 1927, at age 34, Stark set off for Beirut to travel around the Middle East. 

Gertrude Bell had already forged the way for women to travel in the Middle East with an entourage, but Stark favoured a simpler approach, travelling unaccompanied, and speaking with the people who lived in the country, in their own language, to learn about the authentic experience of each place she visited.

Soon Stark also found that she could exploit the preconceptions about her gender to her advantage: she pretended to be less intelligent than she was in order to get what she wanted, and her gender allowed her to discover undocumented parts of society in the Middle East. For example, when travelling through Iraq, Stark gained access to women living a harem, getting insight into the women’s lives.

It’s important at this point to acknowledge the colonial context Stark was travelling in. As much research as Stark did, her knowledge was still rooted in orientalist knowledge of the time; Stark believed in the superiority of the British Empire and was hostile towards nationalistic movements. But this didn’t discount her empathetic writing. In an evaluation of Stark’s output, Cynthia Young finds that despite Stark’s political beliefs, a ‘non-critical acceptance and respect of cultures’ prevails in her writing.

In 1934, Stark’s first book The Valley of the Assassins was published, documenting her travels through the wilderness of Iran, where very few Westerners had visited before. The book followed Stark on an adventure to find the Valley of the Assasins, the fabled base of the cult of Assassins, and locate an ancient fortress. 

Stark’s flair for turning her travels and observations about the modern Middle East into a thrilling quest was replicated in 1936’s The Southern Gates of Arabia and 1940’s A Winter Arabia. Stark was also noted for the high standard of her prose: she took a novelistic approach to describing the landscape and replicating her dialogue with the people she came into contact with. 

Stark put her travels on hold at the outbreak of the Second World War and went to work for the Propaganda Section of the British Ministry of Information as an Assistant Information Officer. Stark organised the Brotherhood of Freedom in Cairo, which was a group of Allied sympathisers who lobbied the Egyptians to side with the British during the conflict. 

In Egypt, Stark met Stewart Perowne, a British civil servant. Despite Perowne being widely known to be gay, he and Stark married in 1947, but they divorced five years later. Stark did not remarry. 

Impressed with her wartime performance in Egypt, Stark was dispatched to the United States of America in 1942 to lobby for the UK government’s position against the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. These views were not popular in America. Stark didn’t believe that she was anti-Jewish but campaigned for consent from the people of Palestine before a mass migration happened. 

After the Second World War ended, Stark turned her attention to travelling through Turkey, Central Asia and China, publishing work including Alexander’s Path (1958) and The Minaret of Djam (1970). In her post-war career, Stark’s books became more concerned with exploring classical civilization, rather than documenting her adventures. In Alexander’s Path, for example, Stark followed Alexander the Great’s journey through Turkey. 

In addition to her writing skill, Stark’s contributions to cartography – through marking unknown villages and other landmarks while exploring Asia – earned her a Royal Geographical Society award.

At age 75, Stark undertook her last adventure: travelling to Afghanistan to see a recently discovered minaret from the Middle Ages. Stark died in 1993 in Italy, a few months after turning 100. 

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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 Respect, Postcolonialism and the Travel Writing of Freya Stark’ by Cynthia Young // Stalking Freya Stark by Jane Geniesse // The Inspiring Legacy of Freya Stark by Salma Abdelnour Gilman.

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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 decided in my teens that I would do what one woman could do to show that women had as much brains as men and could do things as well if she gave them her undivided attention.

A scholar and mountaineer, Annie Smith Peck spent her life working to reach new heights for women, both literally and metaphorically.

Annie Smith Peck was born into a prominent Rhode Island family on 19th October 1850. Her father, George B. Beck, was a lawyer and city councilman who also ran a number of businesses.

Annie was a dedicated student, and she pursued a level of education that was almost unheard of for women during this time period. In 1875, she enrolled in the University of Michigan, which had only begun admitting women five years prior, where she completed a four-year degree program in just three years.  She graduated from the University of Michigan with honors in 1878, at which point she went on to pursue a master’s degree. She earned that degree in 1881, and after completion of her masters program, she began working as a professor at Purdue University.  In accepting this position, she became one of the first female professors in the United States.

Were this all Annie had ever accomplished, she would still be a remarkable woman with a story worth telling, but becoming one of America’s first female professors was only the beginning of Annie’s groundbreaking accomplishments. In 1885, after seeing the Matterhorn during a trip to Greece, Annie became intrigued by the prospect of mountain climbing.  At the age of 44, she began trying her hand at it, and in 1895, a decade after first spotting the Matterhorn, she became the third woman to climb it and the first to do so wearing pants.

Her most groundbreaking summit occurred in 1910 when she summited Mount Huascaran. It was an arduous climb, one that she attempted five times over the course of four years. She was 60 years old when she finally succeeded, and in doing so, she became the first person of any gender to summit Mount Huascaran. In 1927, the north peak of that mount was named in her honor: Cumbre Aña Peck.  

A year after summiting Mount Huascaran, Anna summited another mount in Peru: Mount Coropuna. This time, she left a “Votes for Women” pennant at the top.  Anna continued climbing throughout her life, summiting her last mountain at the age of 82. She passed away a few years later and remains, to this day, the only woman in history to become the first to summit a major world peak.  

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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 Annie Smith Peck: Scholar and Mountaineer by Dr. Russell A Potter  // Annie Smith Peck: America Mountain Climber, Encyclopedia Britannica// Annie Smith Peck, Brooklyn Museum. 

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Dorothy Thompson was a renowned foreign correspondent, newspaper columnist and radio broadcaster. During the 1930s, she was hugely instrumental in drawing the world’s attention to the dangers posed by Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Dorothy Celene Thompson was born in New York in 1893. Her mother died when she was just a child and, as a teenager, she moved to Chicago to live with her aunt. There she studied politics and economics at Syracuse University. 

Following her graduation in 1914, Thompson moved to Buffalo, New York. Committed to the right of women to have the vote, she campaigned for the New York Woman Suffrage Party. She also worked in advertising to help fund her two younger siblings’ college education, and she wrote articles occasionally for the New York papers. 

In 1920, Thompson moved to Europe to pursue her career in journalism. A combination of exceptional talent and breath-taking daring resulted in a number of enviable scoops. While visiting relatives in Ireland, she interviewed prominent Sinn Féin leader Terence MacSwiney. It was the last interview he would ever give; he died on hunger strike in prison only months later. Thompson also managed to swing an exclusive interview with the deposed Hapsburg King Karl I by posing as a Red Cross nurse in order to gain access to his home.

Thompson was appointed as the Vienna correspondent to the Philadelphia Public Ledger and was then promoted to the Chief of the Central European Service just a few years later. In 1925 she began working for the New York Post as head of its Berlin bureau in Germany. Her biographer, Peter Kurth, described her as, “The undisputed queen of the overseas press corps, the first woman to head a foreign news bureau of any importance”.

Throughout this time, Thompson kept a watchful eye on the political situation in Germany, documenting the rise of the Nazi Party in insightful and often prophetic articles. In 1931, she was granted an interview with Adolph Hitler who was then less than two years away from becoming Germany’s Chancellor. The interview was strictly controlled, and she could only ask three questions but, when it was published, Thompson added her own scathing commentary. This interview formed the basis of her 1932 book, I Saw Hitler, in which she issued a stark warning about him being allowed to take power in Germany.

Her ridiculing of the future dictator meant that, in the summer of 1934, the Nazi Party ordered Thompson to leave Germany. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from the country.

Back in the USA Thompson wrote a thrice-weekly newspaper column, “On the Record”, for The New York Tribune. The column, which she wrote for 20 years, was syndicated in over 170 papers, and it reached around 10 million readers. She also became a hugely popular and sought-after radio commentator and was employed by NBC during the latter half of the 1930s. 

Thompson dedicated herself to opposing and exposing Hitler and the Nazi Party. She denounced them frequently and vociferously in her newspaper columns, during her radio broadcasts, and at the many public speaking appearances she made throughout the country. In 1939 she disrupted a 20,000 strong rally of American Nazi sympathizers, the German-American Bund, in Madison Square Garden. She was loudly ridiculing the speakers even as officials escorted her away.

In addition to her tireless work drawing attention to the evils of the Nazis, Thompson also championed refugees fleeing violence and persecution in Europe. In her 1938 book, Refugees: Anarchy or Organization?, she detailed the challenges faced by those escaping Nazi Germany and the Spanish Civil War. She urged Americans to understand that refugees would enrich and benefit the nation and that they should be welcomed within its borders.

Thompson was one of the most respected and influential women of her time. In 1939 she appeared on the cover of Time magazine; she was awarded honorary degrees from a variety of universities, and she was even immortalised on Hollywood’s silver screen. The 1942 comedy, Woman of the Year, featured a hugely successful and internationally renowned journalist played by Katharine Hepburn, a character instantly recognisable to film-goers.

Thompson was married three times and had one son, Michael Lewis, who was born in 1930. After the Second World War, she continued to write and publish but was less in the public eye. In 1958, she retired from her newspaper column with the intention of writing an autobiography. However, her failing health meant she was barely able to make a start on the book. She was spending time with her family in Portugal in 1961 when she died of a heart attack at just 67 years of age. 

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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 American Cassandra: Dorothy Thompson, the Journalist who Warned the World About Adolph Hitler by Kristen Hunt  // The Life of Dorothy Thompson, Pluncket Lake Press 2019 // Dorothy Thompson Papers: An Inventory of Her Papers at Syracuse University.

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Better known as Kate, Katharina Görtler was born in Rumbach in Germany in November 1848. She married Joseph Kaird in 1875 and had a son, Jacob. Kaird died shortly after the birth, leaving Kate a young widow with a son to raise alone.

In 1882, Kate and her little boy emigrated to the USA, settling in Sandy Hook in New Jersey. She took a job as a waitress in a boarding house and there she met a retired sea captain, John Walker. The couple married in 1884 and Kate gave birth to their daughter, Mary, the following year.

Captain Walker was the keeper of Sandy Hook Light and, soon after his marriage to Kate, he was transferred to Robbins Reef Light. Kate moved with her husband and children to this highly unusual home; a socket lighthouse situated on a small rift of sand surrounded by water at the entrance to one of the busiest channels in the Port of New York and New Jersey. Kate became assistant keeper and helped her husband to operate and maintain the light, keeping safe the vessels in the harbour waters.

In 1886, Walker died of pneumonia. At his death, he told his wife, “Mind the light, Kate” – and of course she did. For the next three decades.

Following Walker’s death it took four years for Kate to be officially recognised as the Robbins Reef Light keeper and to receive the appropriate remuneration. Initially the authorities had believed that this diminutive woman was not up to the job and refused her application. It was only after several men had turned down the role, by which time Kate had proved herself more than capable, that the post was formally hers and she was paid the $600 per year salary.

Minding the Robbins Reef Light was a huge responsibility and a tremendous amount of work. The light was lit at sunset every evening and remained shining until dawn. Kerosene lamps reflected onto the light’s huge lens, projecting across the harbour and illuminating the perilous reef beneath. Every few hours throughout the night, Kate had to refill those lamps and wind up the clockwork mechanism which drove the rotating lens.

When conditions were foggy Kate had to go down to the building’s cellar to fire up the engines which operated the siren. The siren would blast at three second intervals to alert oncoming shipping. On foggy nights, Kate would not sleep; she preferred to stay awake in case of a siren malfunction. In that event she would walk up to the top of the tower and hammer manually on the bell to alert officials on the shore that the siren needed repairing. 

During the day Kate would wash the lamps, trim the wicks and clean the lens to prepare for the night ahead. She also kept detailed notes regarding weather conditions and water traffic and submitted a monthly report to the coastguard. In a 1909 interview, Kate told The New York Times, “Maintaining this light is more work than running any household or any child”.

In addition to tending the light, Kate also had two children to raise single-handedly. She turned the small three-story lighthouse, basically a cast iron cylinder, into a comfortable home for her family and, when her children were young, she would row them to Staten Island and back every day in order that they could attend school.

Although not part of her formal duties, Kate would come to the aid of vessels that had fallen foul of the treacherous waters around the reef and aided in the rescue of approximately 50 ships during her time as keeper at Robbins Reef Light. On one occasion, a schooner crashed onto the reef and five sailors were plunged into the freezing water. Kate used the small boat in which she took her children to school to row through the wreckage. She rescued not just all five men but their little dog too.

Kate finally retired in 1919 aged 71. In the decades to follow, Robbins Reef was known as “Kate’s Light”. She died in February 1931. Her obituary in the New York Evening Post read, “In the sight of the city of towers and the torch of liberty lived this sturdy little woman, proud of her work and content in it, keeping her lamp alight and her windows clean, so that New York Harbor might be safe for ships that pass in the night”.

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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 SailNorthEast.com and Neatorama.com.

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Ynes was born in Washington D.C on 24th May 1870, to Sarah Wilmer and Mexican Diplomat Enrique Mexia. Though she was born in DC, she spent the bulk of her childhood in Texas. Shortly after the death of her husband, Ynes moved to San Francisco, where she worked as a social worker.

While in San Francisco, Ynes joined the Sierra Club, an organisation dedicated to protecting and celebrating the environment that had been founded there in 1892. Ynes had always loved nature, so this was an obvious fit. In 1921, she also began taking courses at a local university, and it was here that she fell in love with botany.

Four years later, at the age of 55, Ynes embarked on a plant collection trip to Mexico that would change, not only the course of the rest of her life, but also the history of botany. Though she began the trip with a group of other botanists, Ynes soon became convinced that she would be more successful on her own, so she broke away from the team. It was a dangerous choice ––which she must have realised when she fell off a cliff during the expedition and fractured her hand, as well as several ribs — but Ynes was undeterred.  She spent two years gathering 500 specimens, approximately 50 of which were previously undiscovered.

Over the next several years, Ynes continued her collecting, travelling everywhere from Alaska to Peru to Argentina in search of rare plants. She faced earthquakes and volcanoes and all sorts of other natural impediments, but she persisted, ultimately collecting roughly 150,000 specimens. It is believed that approximately 500 of those plants had previously been undiscovered.

Ynes died just 13 years after she embarked on her first expedition, but in that time, she made a profound, lasting contribution to the field of botany.  Several of the plants she discovered have been named in her honor, her specimens are stored and showcased world-wide, and to this day, nearly a century later, scientists are still studying her work. Her remarkable life is a testament to the idea that you’re never to old to set another goal or a dream a new dream.

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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.

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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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“You must, on the one hand, forget that any social prejudices stand in your way as physicians: but on the other hand you must remember that, in virtue of these, you continue to have certain class interests, which can not, with either justice or safety, be ignored.” – Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi

Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi was a medical doctor whose work helped disprove many discriminatory assumptions about women’s bodies in her seminal paper, The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation. In addition to her medical research, Mary also enabled generations of women to enter the medical profession through her teaching and lobbying.

Mary was born in 1842 in London, to American parents. In 1848, the family returned to the US to live in New York, where Mary was also educated. Mary had known she wanted to study medicine from a young age. Writing as an adult she recalled, at age 9, finding a dead rat and wanting to cut it open to study its organs. Mary realised her dream in 1861, when she became the first woman admitted to the New York College of Pharmacy and went on to graduate with an M.D. from the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.

In 1866, after lobbying the university, Mary became the first woman to study medicine at the École de Médecine in Paris. However, her admission came with stipulations: she was forbidden from entering through the same door as the male students, and she had to sit alone and close to the professor.

Later – continuing her tradition of firsts – upon her return to the USA, Mary became the first woman to be voted into the New York Academy of Medicine.

In 1873, Edward Clark, M.D., published Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance For Girls, which argued that women could not cope with the traditional academic demands placed on men. Clark proposed that women who pushed themselves to compete with their male counterparts could experience nervous collapse and sterility. He concluded that if women were to have the same educational rights as men, it would lead to long-term damage to women’s reproductive organs. As women had only just been allowed to enter further education, there was no data to prove nor disprove Clark’s claims. Clark’s paper caused outrage among feminists, especially as much of the First Wave’s fight had been about realising equal education opportunities for women.

The Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation was Mary’s calm and heavily researched response to Clark’s claims. Unlike Clark, who had relied on anecdotal observation, Mary put a range of women through medical trials to investigate their menstrual pain, muscle strength, cycle length and daily exercise; her findings concluded that there was nothing about menstruation which impaired women’s physical or mental abilities, disproving Clark’s study. In 1876, almost to confirm Mary’s intellectual victory, her paper won the Boylston Medical Prize at Harvard – the school at which Clark taught.

The Question of Rest had a structural influence. In the late 19th century, there was a common assumption regarding the biological difference between male and female bodies: that the female body was inferior. As her paper disproved many misconceptions about menstruation and the capability of the female body using data and research, Mary’s research became an important part of medical literature and contributed towards the changing social perception of the female body.

Throughout her career, Mary had been championed by women, including Ann Preston, who had supported Mary at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, and Marie Zarkrzewska, who gave Mary her first chance to practice medicine at the New England Hospital for Women and Children in 1862. Mary used her early experience of being supported by women as a model for her own career. She mentored female students, taught at the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and founded the Association of the Medical Education of Women, which later became the Women’s Medical Association of New York City. She also continued to lobby universities to accept women to study medicine throughout her career.

In addition to her work as a medical doctor, Mary was a prolific writer. In 1860, two years before she began her medical studies, Mary’s first short story, Lost and Found, was published in The Atlantic. Throughout her life, she published 9 books and over 120 medical articles. In 1873, Mary married Dr. Abraham Jacobi, who specialised in paediatrics. The couple had three children together, although only one survived to adulthood.

Mary died in 1906 at age 63, but not before predicting her own death and cause of death in a detailed investigation into her own illness – Description of the Early Symptoms of the Meningeal Tumor Compressing the Cerebellum. From Which the Writer Died. Written by Herself.

Mary’s work and attitude of challenging assumptions about the female body remain of vital importance today. As questions over the tampon tax, female fertility rates and smear test practices continue to be raised, the solution becomes clearer: that more women, and more feminists, need to be encouraged to enter medicine, politics and public life in order to continue to change medical practices, policies and debates around female health.

©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: Rachel Swaby, ‘The Godmother of American Science’, The Atlantic, 08.04.15, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/04/getting-educated-does-not-make-women-infertile-and-other-discoveries-made-in-the-1880s/389922/ [last accessed 30.03.19] // Becky Little, ‘The Scientist Who Said Periods Weren’t A Big Deal’, National Geographic, 08.03.16, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/03/160308-international-womens-day-history-month-periods-education-science/ [last accessed 30.03.19] //  ‘Dr Mary Corinna Putman Jacobi’, Changing the Face of Medicine, https://cfmedicine.nlm.nih.gov/physicians/biography_163.html [last accessed 30.03.19] // Ashley Juavinett, ‘Five facts about Mary Putnam Jacobi, medical pioneer and suffragette’, Massive Science, 22.09.17, https://massivesci.com/articles/mary-putnam-jacobi-sufragette-female-doctor/ [last accessed 30.03.19] // Denise Grady, ‘Honouring Female Pioneers in Science’, The New York Times, 11.11.13, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/12/science/extraordinary-women-in-science-and-medicine-exhibit-offers-up-little-known-details.html [last accessed 30.03.19]

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