26 November 1883 Sojourner Truth (born as Isabella Hardenbergh), speaker and preacher, charismatic religious and political leader, died on this day at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan, USA. The day of her death is known but the day of…
Category: Biography
Black History Month: Eslanda Goode Robeson
Background As Carol Boyce Davies has noted, black women have been consistently written out of accounts of black international radicalism. The life and work of Eslanda Goode Robeson is a case in point. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1896, Eslanda…
Black History Month: Witness against Slavery – The Story of Mary Prince
Oh the horrors of slavery! … the truth ought to be told of it; and what my eyes have seen I think it is my duty to relate …. I have been a slave – I have felt what a…
Black History Month: Black cadet harassed to death at sea? Or murdered?
June 24 2010. On this date Akhona Geveza, a nineteen-year-old South African cadet on a cargo ship, disappeared. Her body was later found drifting in the sea off the Croatian coast. The question is still was she murdered to shut…
Katherine Swynford (c.1350-1403)
Katherine Swynford was born Katherine de Roët, the daughter of a minor court official who served in the court of Queen Philippa of Hainault, the wife of Edward III of England. Her family were prominent landowners in Hainault, on the…
Una Marson 1905-65
In a small, sparsely furnished office in Kingston in the spring of 1928 Jamaica’s feisty first woman editor-publisher Una Marson proudly proclaimed, ‘This is the age of woman: what man has done women may do’. Born in 1905 in the…
Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) Suffragette Leader and Single Parent in Edwardian Britain
As we celebrate Mother’s Day in April 2011, it is salutary to remember women in the past who were single mums struggling to support their children while engaged in public work. Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the suffragette movement in…
Women’s History Month: Ethel Smyth
On 11 March 1903 Ethel Smyth became the first woman composer to have her work performed at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, when the Met put on her second opera, Der Wald. Music, like literature, has historically been divided…
Women’s History Month: The Hmong Nurses
The Hmong are agrarian people who emigrated from China to the mountainous regions of Northern Laos following centuries of persecution. They are an indubitably independent people, geographically and culturally separate from the rest of Laos, but they have a long…