By Nupur Kudapkar
As most of us know, being a woman is not easy, From gender pay gaps to being harassed and catcalled simply for fashion choices, sometimes it simply sucks. However, being a woman today is far easier than, say, 100 years ago. During women’s history month, we have to appreciate and commend all the women that came before us that paved the way for young women to flourish in a society that wants to see us grow.
- Ida B. Wells (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931)
Ida B. Wells was a journalist and early civil rights campaigner of African-American descent. Her advocacy began in the 1890s, when she launched an anti-lynching effort in the United States. She went on to become a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909 and remained active in the movement until her death in 1955. Ida B. Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, and relocated to Memphis in 1883, where she began her career as a teacher. She wrote on race and politics in the South, speaking out against lynchings of African Americans and risking her own life in the process. By presenting the truth, Wells aimed to dispel damaging beliefs and enhance the African American experience. She made her voice known at a time, place, and environment that was not just hostile to her identity and cause, but also visibly explosive. In 1892, she wrote Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, and in 1895, she published The Red Record. In 1892, a gang of white men and youths assaulted and murdered three African American men, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Harry Stewart, for the sole reason that they had a profitable grocery shop. Their killings made her column in Memphis Free Speech, a black publication, more topical, provocative, and widely read than ever before. Wells fled Memphis for her own safety when her newspaper office was burnt in reprisal for her columns, but she continued her campaign in New York. She transformed lynching into a national issue with the active backing of black women’s groups, African American publications, and a few white allies. Members of the gang would approach male criminals and persuade them to see reason. When the more serious offenders refused to listen or relent, they were publicly humiliated. If the males resorted to force, the ladies turned to their lathis.\
- Mary Winsor (1869 – 1956)
Mary Winsor was born in Haverford, Pennsylvania, to a pioneer Quaker family. She received her education at Drexel Institute of Philadelphia, Bryn Mawr, and others. She conducted a survey of the English Suffrage movement at the request of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She founded and served as President of the Pennsylvania Limited Suffrage Society, as well as being a member of the National Woman’s Party. On September 4, 1917, at the age of 44, she was arrested during the Draftee Parade and condemned to 60 days in the Occoquan Workhouse.On August 6, 1918, she was detained once more near the Lafayette statue in Washington, D.C. The arrestees declined to testify at their trial on August 15, 1918, for “having a meeting on public grounds.” “It is certainly enough to pay taxes when you are not represented,” Mary Winsor added, “let alone pay a fine if you object to this system.” She and the others were sentenced to ten days in the D.C. Jail. She had labored and spoken for suffrage across the country, including on the “Prison Special” speaking tour in February 1919.
- Mary Ware Dennett (April 4, 1872 – July 25, 1947)
She was a suffragist, birth-control reformer, and anti-war activist. She began her reform career as the literature coordinator for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, where she penned a number of key pieces for the campaign. She started the National Birth Control League, the first birth control organization in the United States, in 1915. (later renamed the Voluntary Parenthood League). In the 1920s, she and Margaret Sanger were the leaders of the birth-control reform movement, but her goal of legalizing birth control for anybody who chose to use it was far more comprehensive than Sanger’s. Sanger intended to keep birth control within the authority of doctors and believed that medicalizing it was the best way to gain societal support. She effectively thwarted Dennett’s idea of birth control as a basic right, and we now refer to Sanger as a “reproductive rights leader” rather than Dennett. But it’s worth considering how our understanding of contraception and reproductive rights may have changed if Dennett had won.
- Eliza Leonida Zamfirescu (November 10, 1887 – November 25, 1973)
In Bucharest, Romania, Elisa Leonida Zamfirescu, was the world’s first female chemical engineer. After graduating from the Royal Academy of Technology Berlin, Charlottenburg, she worked as an assistant at the Geological Institute of Romania and also taught physics and chemistry, becoming the first woman member of A.G.I.R. (General Association of Romanian Engineers), thus setting the world record for being the World’s First Female Chemical Engineer.
- Rosa Louise McCauley Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005)
Rosa Parks helped kickstart the civil rights movement in the United States when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus to a white man in 1955. Her efforts spurred local Black community leaders to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott, organized by a young Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., lasted more than a year—during which Parks, not surprisingly, lost her job—and ended only when the United States Supreme Court determined that bus segregation was unconstitutional. Over the following half-century, Parks rose to national prominence as a symbol of dignity and courage in the fight to eliminate racial discrimination.
- Hannie Schaft (September 16, 1920 – April 17, 1945)
Hannie Schaft, aged 24, was known among the Nazis as “the girl with the red hair,” and she was so lethal that Adolf Hitler personally ordered her abduction. When the Nazis invaded Poland, Hannie Schaft was only a teenager. German tanks swept into the Netherlands less than a year later, in 1940. Schaft was well aware that the Nazis would torment her nation, therefore she devoted the remainder of her life to bringing the Nazi invaders down. Schaft, along with two other female resistance members, the sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen, frequently targeted the invaders for assassination. The three assassins worked together to assassinate Dutch traitors and Nazi commanders. During the last months of the war, Nazis apprehended Hannie Schaft at a roadblock when she was carrying illicit publications and a weapon. The Nazis saw the red roots poking out from her colored hair after detaining her. Despite the fact that their fight was undoubtedly lost, they had kidnapped the girl with the red hair. The Nazis transported Schaft to the Overveen sand dunes just three weeks before the Netherlands was liberated. A Nazi executioner pointed a pistol at Schaft and fired. However, the first bullet just injured her. Before being hit by the bullet that killed her, Schaft said, “I’m a better shot.” The Dutch unearthed Schaft’s remains after the war and gave her a state burial before reburying her. Hannie Schaft died on April 17, 1945, when she was just 24 years old.
- Ruth Bader Ginsburg (March 15, 1933 – September 18, 2020)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the United States Supreme Court’s second female justice. Bader, who was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1933, taught at Rutgers University Law School before moving on to Columbia University, where she became the university’s first female tenured professor. During the 1970s, she was the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project, and in 1980, she was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. President Bill Clinton appointed her to the United States Supreme Court in 1993, and she continued to battle for gender equality in instances such as United States v. Virginia. She died on September 18, 2020, as a result of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, but she had beaten cancer five times in the previous two decades before it tragically took her life.
- Gunjan Saxena (1975- Present)
Flight Lieutenant Gunjan Saxena, born in 1975, is an Indian Air Force officer and former helicopter pilot. Gunjan, a veteran of the Kargil War in 1999, joined the IAF in 1994. In 1996, she was one of six women who joined the IAF as pilots. She was the lone woman in the Kargil Battle at the age of 24, making her the first woman IAF officer to go to war. She is also the first of two women, along with Flight Lieutenant Srividya Rajan of the Indian Air Force, to fly Cheetah helicopters into a conflict zone. During the Kargil War, her responsibilities included rescuing wounded soldiers, transporting supplies, and aiding with surveillance tasks like charting enemy locations. She was a part of an operation to evacuate nearly 900 personnel, both injured and killed, from Kargil at the time. Later, in 2004, her career as a helicopter pilot came to an end.
- Greta Thunberg (January 3, 2003 – Present)
Greta Thunberg, a Swedish adolescent activist, was named TIME Magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year. Her iconic and powerful address to world leaders (theoretically putting old political cronies in their place) echoed through computer and cellphone speakers, forever changing the world’s perspective on climate change and the lack of action being taken to ensure young people of a future, habitable planet. Thunberg will undoubtedly go down in history, and her legacy is just getting started.
- The Gulabi Gang (2006 – Present)
As someone who is Indian, the culture is beautiful but flawed, The Gulabi Gang is a remarkable women’s movement founded in 2006 by Sampat Pal Devi in the Uttar Pradesh district of Banda in Northern India. This district is one of the poorest in the country, with a profoundly patriarchal society, tight caste divides, female illiteracy, domestic abuse, child labor, child marriages, and dowry demands. The women’s organization is known as the Gulabi or “Pink” Gang because its members wear bright pink saris and wield bamboo sticks. “We are not a gang in the usual sense of the term, we are a gang for justice.” The Gulabi Gang was formed to punish abusive spouses, dads, and brothers, as well as to oppose domestic abuse and desertion. Members of the gang would approach male criminals and persuade them to see reason. When the more serious offenders refused to listen or relent, they were publicly humiliated. If the males resorted to force, the ladies turned to their lathis (Gulabi Gang).
Here is their website if you would like to learn more or donate: https://www.gulabigang.in/