# data[].attributes.body
Era: 1919

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Name: Madam C.J. Walker (born Sarah Breedlove)

Era: 1867-1919

Nationality: African American

Occupation: Businesswoman – hair care, entrepreneur, philanthropist, activist. Began at around 10 years old as a domestic servant, laundress, then entrepreneur.

Social Status: Extremely poor (slavery) to first female self-made millionaire in America.

Family: Both parents were slaves,  with 5 children, Sarah was born last into her parents’ freedom. She was orphaned at aged 7. She married at aged 14 and had her only daughter at 18. Married twice (widowed then divorced) – the latter being influential in her development as a businesswoman.

Workplace: Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company

Influence: Supported women’s economic independence by hiring mainly women for her haircare empire, philanthropist for many organisations, African American rights activist.

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Era: 1893

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Name: Emmeline Pankhurst (nee Goulden)

Era: 1858-1928

Nationality: British

Occupation: Political Activist (militant), Founder of Women’s Franchise League, Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU),

Social Status: Comfortable. Didn’t ‘need’ to work.

Family: Politician, actor, and businessman father, and politically active, home-maker mother, One of 11 children. Liberal household, encouraged to fight for equality in some aspects – but NOT gender, wanting their daughters to marry young and not have paid employment. Married Richard Pankhurst, a pro-women’s rights barrister. She didn’t want to marry but would gain more social rights if she did. Had 5 children: Christabel, Estelle Sylvia, Francis, Adela, and Henry.

Workplace: Headquarters for WSPU.

Influence: A key figure in the successful (militant) fight for women’s suffrage.

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Emmeline Pankhurst ( Goulden; 15 July 1858 - 14 June 1928) was a British political activist who organised the UK suffragette movement and helped women win the right to vote. In 1999, named her as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century, stating that "she shaped an idea of objects for our time" and "shook society into a new pattern from which there could be no going back". She was widely criticised for her militant tactics, and historians disagree about their effectiveness, but her work is recognised as a crucial element in achieving women's suffrage in the United Kingdom.

Born in the Moss Side district of Manchester to politically active parents, Pankhurst was introduced at the age of 14 to the women's suffrage movement. She founded and became involved with the Women's Franchise League, which advocated suffrage for both married and unmarried women. When that organisation broke apart, she tried to join the left-leaning Independent Labour Party through her friendship with socialist Keir Hardie but was initially refused membership by the local branch on account of her sex. While working as a Poor Law Guardian, she was shocked at the harsh conditions she encountered in Manchester's workhouses.

In 1903, Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), an all-women suffrage advocacy organisation dedicated to "deeds, not words". The group identified as independent from - and often in opposition to - political parties. It became known for physical confrontations: its members smashed windows and assaulted police officers. Pankhurst, her daughters, and other WSPU activists received repeated prison sentences, where they staged hunger strikes to secure better conditions, and were often force-fed. As Pankhurst's eldest daughter Christabel took leadership of the WSPU, antagonism between the group and the government grew. Eventually, the group adopted arson as a tactic, and more moderate organisations spoke out against the Pankhurst family. In 1913, several prominent individuals left the WSPU, among them Pankhurst's younger daughters, Adela and Sylvia. Emmeline was so furious that she "gave [Adela] a ticket, £20, and a letter of introduction to a suffragette in Australia, and firmly insisted that she emigrate". Adela complied and the family rift was never healed. Sylvia became a socialist.

With the advent of the First World War, Emmeline and Christabel called an immediate halt to the militant terrorism in support of the British government's stand against the "German Peril". Emmeline organised and led a massive procession called the Women's Right to Serve demonstration to illustrate women's contribution to the war effort. Emmeline and Christabel urged women to aid industrial production and encouraged young men to fight. Some have suggested there is an ideological link between the feminist movement and the white feather movement.

In 1918, the Representation of the People Act granted votes to all men over the age of 21 and women over the age of 30. This discrepancy was intended to ensure that men did not become minority voters as a consequence of the huge number of deaths suffered during the First World War.

She transformed the WSPU machinery into the Women's Party, which was dedicated to promoting women's equality in public life. In her later years, she became concerned with what she perceived as the menace posed by Bolshevism and joined the Conservative Party. She was selected as the Conservative candidate for Whitechapel and St Georges in 1927. She died on 14 June 1928, only weeks before the Conservative government's Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 extended the vote to all women over 21 years of age on 2 July 1928. She was commemorated two years later with a statue in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament.

Emmeline Goulden was born on Sloan Street in the Moss Side district of Manchester on 15 July 1858. At school, her teachers called her Emily, a name she preferred. Although her birth certificate says otherwise, she believed and later claimed her birthday was a day earlier, on Bastille Day (14 July). Most biographies, including those written by her daughters, repeat this claim. Feeling a kinship with the female revolutionaries who stormed the Bastille, she said in 1908: "I have always thought that the fact that I was born on that day had some kind of influence over my life." The family into which she was born had been steeped in political agitation for generations; her mother, Sophia, was a Manx woman from the Isle of Man who was descended from men who were charged with social unrest and slander.

In 1881, the Isle of Man became the first place in the British Isles to grant women the right to vote in Manx national elections (the Isle does not return members to the UK Parliament). Her father, Robert Goulden, was a self-made man - working his way from errand boy to manufacturer - from a humble Manchester family with its own background of political activity. Robert's mother, a fustian cutter, worked with the Anti-Corn Law League, and his father was press-ganged into the Royal Navy and present at the Peterloo massacre, when cavalry charged and broke up a crowd demanding parliamentary reform.

The Gouldens' first son died at the age of three, but they had 10 other children; Emmeline was the eldest of five daughters. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Seedley, where her father had co-founded a small business. He was also active in local politics, serving for several years on the Salford town council. He was an enthusiastic supporter of dramatic organisations including the Manchester Athenaeum and the Dramatic Reading Society. He owned a theatre in Salford for several years, where he played the leads in several Shakespeare plays. Goulden absorbed an appreciation of drama and theatrics from her father, which she used later in social activism. The Gouldens included their children in social activism. As part of the movement to end U.S. slavery, Robert welcomed American abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher when he visited Manchester. Sophia used the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, written by Beecher's sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, as a regular source of bedtime stories for her sons and daughters. In her 1914 autobiography My Own Story, Goulden recalls visiting a bazaar at a young age to collect money for newly freed slaves in the U.S.

Emmeline began to read books when she was very young, with one source claiming that she was reading as early as the age of three. She read the at the age of nine and enjoyed the works of John Bunyan, especially his 1678 story The Pilgrim's Progress. Another of her favourite books was Thomas Carlyle's three-volume treatise The French Revolution: A History, and she later said the work "remained all [her] life a source of inspiration". Despite her avid consumption of books, however, she was not given the educational advantages enjoyed by her brothers. Their parents believed that the girls needed most to learn the art of "making home attractive" and other skills desired by potential husbands. The Gouldens deliberated carefully about future plans for their sons' education, but they expected their daughters to marry young and avoid paid work. Although they supported women's suffrage and the general advancement of women in society, the Gouldens believed their daughters incapable of the goals of their male peers. Feigning sleep one evening as her father came into her bedroom, Goulden heard him pause and say to himself, "What a pity she wasn't born a lad."

It was through her parents' interest in women's suffrage that Goulden was first introduced to the subject. Her mother received and read the Women's Suffrage Journal, and Goulden grew fond of its editor Lydia Becker. At the age of 14, she returned home from school one day to find her mother on her way to a public meeting about women's voting rights. After learning that Becker would be speaking, she insisted on attending. Goulden was enthralled by Becker's address and later wrote, "I left the meeting a conscious and confirmed suffragist." A year later, she arrived in Paris to attend the École Normale de Neuilly. The school provided its female pupils with classes in chemistry and bookkeeping, in addition to traditionally feminine arts such as embroidery. Her roommate was Noémie, the daughter of Victor Henri Rochefort, who had been imprisoned in New Caledonia for his support of the Paris Commune. The girls shared tales of their parents' political exploits and remained good friends for years. Goulden was so fond of Noémie and the school that she returned with her sister Mary Jane as a parlour boarder after graduating. Noémie had married a Swiss painter and quickly found a suitable French husband for her English friend. When Robert refused to provide a dowry for his daughter, the man withdrew his offer of marriage and Goulden returned, miserable, to Manchester.

In the autumn of 1878, at the age of 20, Goulden met and began a relationship with Richard Pankhurst, a barrister who had advocated women's suffrage - and other causes, including freedom of speech and education reform - for years. Richard, 44 years old when they met, had earlier resolved to remain a bachelor to better serve the public. Their mutual affection was powerful, but the couple's happiness was diminished by the death of his mother the following year. Sophia Jane Goulden chastised her daughter for "throwing herself" at Richard and advised her without success to exhibit more aloofness. Emmeline suggested to Richard that they avoid the legal formalities of marriage by entering into a free union; he objected on the grounds that she would be excluded from political life as an unmarried woman. He noted that his colleague Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy had faced social condemnation before she formalised her marriage to Ben Elmy. Emmeline Goulden agreed, and they had their wedding in St Luke's Church, Pendleton on 18 December 1879.

St Luke's Church, Pendleton

During the 1880s, living at the Goulden cottage with her parents in Seedley, then at 1 Drayton Terrace Chester Rd Old Trafford (1881 census Stretford) opposite Richards parents home, Emmeline Pankhurst tended to her husband and children, but still devoted time to political activities. Although she gave birth to five children in ten years, both she and Richard believed that she should not be "a household machine". Thus a butler was hired to help with the children as Pankhurst involved herself with the Women's Suffrage Society. Their daughter Christabel was born on 22 September 1880, less than a year after the wedding. Pankhurst gave birth to another daughter, Estelle Sylvia, in 1882, and their son Henry Francis Robert, nicknamed Frank, in 1884. Soon afterwards Richard Pankhurst left the Liberal Party. He began expressing more radical socialist views and argued a case in court against several wealthy businessmen. These actions roused Robert Goulden's ire and the mood in the house became tense. In 1885, the Pankhursts moved to Chorlton-on-Medlock, and their daughter Adela was born. They moved to London the following year, where Richard ran unsuccessfully for election as a Member of Parliament and Pankhurst opened a small fabric shop called Emerson and Company, together with her sister Mary Jane.

In 1888, Pankhurst's son Frank developed diphtheria. He died on 11 September. Overwhelmed with grief, Pankhurst commissioned two portraits of the dead boy but was unable to look at them and hid them in a bedroom cupboard. The family concluded that a faulty drainage system at the back of their house had caused their son's illness. Pankhurst blamed the poor conditions of the neighbourhood, and the family moved to a more affluent middle class district at Russell Square. She was soon pregnant once more and declared that the child was "Frank coming again". She gave birth to a son on 7 July 1889 and named him Henry Francis in honour of his deceased brother.

Pankhurst made their Russell Square home into a centre for political intellectuals and activists, including, "Socialists, Protesters, Anarchists, Suffragists, Free Thinkers, Radicals and Humanitarians of all schools." She took pleasure in decorating the house - especially with furnishings from Asia - and clothing the family in tasteful apparel. Her daughter Sylvia later wrote: "Beauty and appropriateness in her dress and household appointments seemed to her at all times an indispensable setting to public work."

Women's Franchise League

Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch, daughter of US suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, became friends with Pankhurst through their work in the Women's Franchise League.

The inaugural meeting of the Women's Franchise League (WFL) was held on 25 July 1889, at the Pankhurst home in Russell Square. Early members of the WFL included Josephine Butler, leader of the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts; the Pankhursts' friend Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme-Elmy; and Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch, daughter of US suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

The WFL was considered a radical organisation, since in addition to women's suffrage it supported equal rights for women in the areas of divorce and inheritance. It also advocated trade unionism and sought alliances with socialist organisations. The more conservative group that emerged from the NSWS split spoke out against what they called the "extreme left" wing of the movement. The WFL reacted by ridiculing the "Spinster Suffrage party" and insisting that a wider assault on social inequity was required. The group's radicalism caused some members to leave; both Blatch and Elmy resigned from the WFL. The group fell apart one year later.

Pankhurst began to work with several political organisations, distinguishing herself for the first time as an activist in her own right and gaining respect in the community. One biographer describes this period as her "emergence from Richard's shadow." In addition to her work on behalf of women's suffrage, she became active with the Women's Liberal Federation (WLF), an auxiliary of the Liberal Party. She quickly grew disenchanted with the group's moderate positions, however, especially its unwillingness to support Irish Home Rule and the aristocratic leadership of Archibald Primrose.

In 1888 Pankhurst had met and befriended Keir Hardie, a socialist from Scotland. He was elected to parliament in 1891 and two years later helped to create the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Excited about the range of issues which the ILP pledged to confront, Pankhurst resigned from the WFL and applied to join the ILP. The local branch refused her admission on the grounds of her sex, but she eventually joined the ILP nationally. Christabel later wrote of her mother's enthusiasm for the party and its organising efforts: "In this movement she hoped there might be the means of righting every political and social wrong."

One of her first activities with the ILP found Pankhurst distributing food to poor men and women through the Committee for the Relief of the Unemployed. In December 1894 she was elected to the position of Poor Law Guardian in Chorlton-on-Medlock. She was appalled by the conditions she witnessed first-hand in the Manchester workhouse:

The first time I went into the place I was horrified to see little girls seven and eight years old on their knees scrubbing the cold stones of the long corridors ... bronchitis was epidemic among them most of the time ... I found that there were pregnant women in that workhouse, scrubbing floors, doing the hardest kind of work, almost until their babies came into the world ... Of course the babies are very badly protected ... These poor, unprotected mothers and their babies I am sure were potent factors in my education as a militant.

Pankhurst immediately began to change these conditions, and established herself as a successful voice of reform on the Board of Guardians. Her chief opponent was a passionate man named Mainwaring, known for his rudeness. Recognising that his loud anger was hurting his chances of persuading those aligned with Pankhurst, he kept a note nearby during meetings: "Keep your temper!"

After helping her husband with another unsuccessful parliamentary campaign, Pankhurst faced legal troubles in 1896 when she and two men violated a court order against ILP meetings at Boggart Hole Clough. With Richard's volunteering his time as legal counsel, they refused to pay fines, and the two men spent a month in prison. The punishment was never ordered for Pankhurst, however, possibly because the magistrate feared public backlash against the imprisonment of a woman so respected in the community. Asked by an ILP reporter if she were prepared to spend time in prison, Pankhurst replied: "Oh, yes, quite. It wouldn't be so very dreadful, you know, and it would be a valuable experience." Although ILP meetings were eventually permitted, the episode was a strain on Pankhurst's health and caused loss of income for their family.

Richard's death

The loss of her husband left Pankhurst with new responsibilities and a significant amount of debt. She moved the family to a smaller house at 62 Nelson Street, resigned from the Board of Guardians, and was given a paid position as Registrar of Births and Deaths in Chorlton. This work gave her more insight into the conditions of women in the region. She wrote in her autobiography: "They used to tell me their stories, dreadful stories some of them, and all of them pathetic with that patient and uncomplaining pathos of poverty." Her observations of the differences between the lives of men and women, for example in relation to illegitimacy, reinforced her conviction that women needed the right to vote before their conditions could improve. In 1900 she was elected to the Manchester School Board and saw new examples of women suffering unequal treatment and limited opportunities. During this time she also re-opened her store, with the hope that it would provide additional income for the family.

The individual identities of the Pankhurst children began to emerge around the time of their father's death. Before long they were all involved in the struggle for women's suffrage. Christabel enjoyed a privileged status among the daughters, as Sylvia noted in 1931: "She was our mother's favourite; we all knew it, and I, for one, never resented the fact." Christabel did not share her mother's fervour for political work, however, until she befriended the suffrage activists Esther Roper and Eva Gore-Booth. She soon became involved with the suffrage movement and joined her mother at speaking events. Sylvia took lessons from a respected local artist and soon received a scholarship to the Manchester School of Art. She went on to study art in Florence and Venice. The younger children, Adela and Harry, had difficulty finding a path for their studies. Adela was sent to a local boarding school, where she was cut off from her friends and contracted head lice. Harry also had difficulty at school; he suffered from measles and vision problems.

Women's Social and Political Union/WSPU

The group's early militancy took non-violent forms. In addition to making speeches and gathering petition signatures, the WSPU organised rallies and published a newsletter called Votes for Women. The group also convened a series of "Women's Parliaments" for example, in Caxton Hall, to coincide with official government sessions. When a bill for women's suffrage was filibustered on 12 May 1905, Pankhurst and other WSPU members began a loud protest outside the Parliament building. Police immediately forced them away from the building, where they regrouped and demanded passage of the bill. Although the bill was never resurrected, Pankhurst considered it a successful demonstration of militancy's power to capture attention. Pankhurst declared in 1906: "We are at last recognized as a political party; we are now in the swim of politics, and are a political force."

Before long, all three of her daughters became active with the WSPU. Christabel was arrested after spitting at a policeman during a meeting of the Liberal Party in October 1905; Adela and Sylvia were arrested a year later during a protest outside Parliament. Pankhurst was arrested for the first time in February 1908, when she tried to enter Parliament to deliver a protest resolution to Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. She was charged with obstruction and sentenced to six weeks in prison. She spoke out against the conditions of her confinement, including vermin, meagre food, and the "civilised torture of solitary confinement and absolute silence" to which she and others were ordered. Pankhurst saw imprisonment as a means to publicise the urgency of women's suffrage; in June 1909 she struck a police officer twice in the face to ensure she would be arrested. Pankhurst was arrested seven times before women's suffrage was approved. During her trial on 21 October 1908 she told the court: "We are here not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers."

Pankhurst (wearing prison clothes) described her first incarceration as: "like a human being in the process of being turned into a wild beast."[64]

The exclusive focus of the WSPU on votes for women was another hallmark of its militancy. While other organisations agreed to work with individual political parties, the WSPU insisted on separating itself from - and in many cases opposing - parties which did not make women's suffrage a priority. The group protested against all candidates belonging to the party of the ruling government since it refused to pass women's suffrage legislation. This brought them into immediate conflict with Liberal Party organisers, particularly since many Liberal candidates supported women's suffrage. (One early target of WSPU opposition was future Prime Minister Winston Churchill; his opponent attributed Churchill's defeat in part to "those ladies who are sometimes laughed at.")

Members of the WSPU were sometimes heckled and derided for spoiling elections for Liberal candidates. On 18 January 1908, Pankhurst and her associate Nellie Martel were attacked by an all-male crowd of Liberal supporters who blamed the WSPU for costing them a recent by-election to the Conservative candidate. The men threw clay, rotten eggs, and stones packed in snow; the women were beaten and Pankhurst's ankle was severely bruised. Similar tensions later formed with Labour. Until party leaders made the vote for women a priority, however, the WSPU vowed to continue its militant activism. Pankhurst and others in the union saw party politics as distracting to the goal of women's suffrage and criticised other organisations for putting party loyalty ahead of women's votes.

As the WSPU gained recognition and notoriety for its actions, Pankhurst resisted efforts to democratise the organisation itself. In 1907 a small group of members led by Teresa Billington-Greig called for more involvement from the rank-and-file suffragettes at the union's annual meetings. In response, Pankhurst announced at a WSPU meeting that elements of the organisation's constitution relating to decision-making were void and cancelled the annual meetings. She also insisted that a small committee chosen by the members in attendance be allowed to co-ordinate WSPU activities. Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel were chosen (along with Mabel Tuke and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence) as members of the new committee. Frustrated, several members including Billington-Greig and Charlotte Despard quit to form their own organisation, the Women's Freedom League. In her 1914 autobiography Pankhurst dismissed criticism of the WSPU's leadership structure:

if at any time a member, or a group of members, loses faith in our policy; if any one begins to suggest that some other policy ought to be substituted, or if she tries to confuse the issue by adding other policies, she ceases at once to be a member. Autocratic? Quite so. But, you may object, a suffrage organisation ought to be democratic. Well the members of the W.S.P.U. do not agree with you. We do not believe in the effectiveness of the ordinary suffrage organisation. The W.S.P.U. is not hampered by a complexity of rules. We have no constitution and by-laws; nothing to be amended or tinkered with or quarrelled over at an annual meeting ... The W.S.P.U. is simply a suffrage army in the field.

Tactical intensification

On 21 June 1908, 500,000 activists rallied in Hyde Park to demand votes for women. This day is the beginning of "Women' s Sunday". It was organised by the WSPN, the massive demonstration for women's suffrage saw thousands march in seven processions all over London, gathering for a day of peaceful protest. Asquith and leading MPs responded with indifference. Angered by this intransigence and abusive police activity, some WSPU members increased the severity of their actions. Soon after the rally, twelve women gathered in Parliament Square and tried to deliver speeches for women's suffrage. Police officers seized several of the speakers and pushed them into a crowd of opponents who had gathered nearby. Frustrated, two WSPU members - Edith New and Mary Leigh - went to 10 Downing Street and hurled rocks at the windows of the Prime Minister's home. They insisted their act was independent of the WSPU command, but Pankhurst expressed her approval of the action. When a magistrate sentenced New and Leigh to two months' imprisonment, Pankhurst reminded the court of how various male political agitators had broken windows to win legal and civil rights throughout Britain's history.

Portrait badge of Emmeline Pankhurst - c. 1909 - Sold in large numbers by the WSPU to raise funds for its cause - Museum of London

These tactics caused some tension between the WSPU and more moderate organisations, which had coalesced into the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). That group's leader, Millicent Fawcett, originally hailed WSPU members for their courage and dedication to the cause. By 1912, however, she declared that hunger strikes were mere publicity stunts and that militant activists were "the chief obstacles in the way of the success of the suffrage movement in the House of Commons." The NUWSS refused to join a march of women's suffrage groups after demanding without success that the WSPU end its support of property destruction. Fawcett's sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson later resigned from the WSPU for similar reasons.

Press coverage was mixed; many journalists noted that crowds of women responded positively to speeches by Pankhurst, while others condemned her radical approach to the issue. The Daily News urged her to endorse a more moderate approach, and other press outlets condemned the breaking of windows by WSPU members. In 1906 journalist Charles Hands referred to militant women using the diminutive term " suffragette" (rather than the standard " suffragist"). Pankhurst and her allies seized the term as their own and used it to differentiate themselves from moderate groups.

The last half of the century's first decade was a time of sorrow, loneliness, and constant work for Pankhurst. In 1907 she sold her home in Manchester and began an itinerant lifestyle, moving from place to place as she spoke and marched for women's suffrage. She stayed with friends and in hotels, carrying her few possessions in suitcases. Although she was energized by the struggle-and found joy in giving energy to others- her constant travelling meant separation from her children, especially Christabel, who had become the national coordinator of the WSPU. In 1909, as Pankhurst planned a speaking tour of the United States, Henry was paralyzed after his spinal cord became inflamed. She hesitated to leave the country while he was ill, but she needed money to pay for his treatment and the tour promised to be lucrative. On her return from a successful tour, she sat by Henry's bedside as he died on 5 January 1910. Five days later she buried him beside his brother Frank in Highgate Cemetery, then spoke before 5,000 people in Manchester. Liberal Party supporters who had come to heckle her remained quiet as she addressed the crowd.

Conciliation, force-feeding attempt, and arson

After the Liberal losses in the 1910 elections, ILP member and journalist Henry Brailsford helped organise a Conciliation Committee for Women's Suffrage, which gathered 54 MPs from various parties. The group's Conciliation Bill looked to be a narrowly defined but still significant possibility to achieve the vote for some women. Thus the WSPU agreed to suspend its support for window-breaking and hunger strikes while it was being negotiated. When it became clear that the bill would not pass, Pankhurst declared: "If the Bill, in spite of our efforts, is killed by the Government, then ... I have to say there is an end to the truce." When it was defeated, Pankhurst led a protest march of 300 women to Parliament Square on 18 November. They were met with aggressive police response, directed by Home Secretary Winston Churchill: officers punched the marchers, twisted arms, and pulled on women's breasts. Although Pankhurst was allowed to enter Parliament, Prime Minister Asquith refused to meet her. The incident became known as Black Friday. Her sister Mary Jane, who had attended the protest, too, was arrested for the third time, a few days later. She was sentenced to a month of imprisonment. On Christmas Day she died at the home of their brother Herbert Goulden, two days after her release.

As subsequent Conciliation Bills were introduced, WSPU leaders advocated a halt to militant tactics. Aileen Preston was appointed as Pankhurst's driver in April 1911, to drive her around the country to help spread the suffrage message.

In 1912, WSPU members adopted arson as another tactic to win the vote. After Prime Minister Asquith had visited the Theatre Royal in Dublin, suffragette activists Gladys Evans, Lizzie Baker, Mary Leigh, and Mabel Capper attempted to cause an explosion using gunpowder and benzine, which resulted in minimal damage. During the same evening, Mary Leigh threw an axe at the carriage containing John Redmond (leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party), the Lord Mayor, and Asquith.

Over the next two years women set fire to a refreshments building in Regent's Park, an orchid house at Kew Gardens, pillar boxes, and a railway carriage. Emily Davison threw herself under the Kings Horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913. Her funeral drew 55,000 attendees along the streets and at the funeral. This gave significant publicity to the movement. Although Pankhurst confirmed that these women had not been commanded by her or Christabel, they both assured the public that they supported the arsonist suffragettes. There were similar incidents around the country. One WSPU member, for example, put a small hatchet into the Prime Minister's carriage inscribed with the words: "Votes for Women," and other suffragettes used acid to burn the same slogan into golf courses used by MPs. In 1914, Mary Richardson slashed the Velasquez painting Rokeby Venus to protest against Pankhurst's imprisonment.

Defection and dismissal

The WSPU's approval of property destruction led to the departure of several important members. The first were Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and her husband Frederick. They had long been integral members of the group's leadership but found themselves in conflict with Christabel about the wisdom of such volatile tactics. After returning from a vacation in Canada they found that Pankhurst had expelled them from the WSPU. The pair found the decision appalling, but to avoid a schism in the movement they continued to praise Pankhurst and the organisation in public. Around the same time, Emmeline's daughter Adela left the group. She disapproved of WSPU endorsement of property destruction and felt that a heavier emphasis on socialism was necessary. Adela's relationship with her family - especially Christabel - was also strained as a result.

The deepest rift in the Pankhurst family came in November 1913 when Sylvia spoke at a meeting of socialists and trade unionists in support of trade union organiser Jim Larkin. She had been working with the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS), a local branch of the WSPU which had a close relationship with socialists and organised labour. The close connection to labour groups and Sylvia's appearance on stage with Frederick Pethick-Lawrence - who also addressed the crowd - convinced Christabel that her sister was organising a group that might challenge the WSPU in the suffrage movement. The dispute became public, and members of groups including the WSPU, ILP, and ELFS braced themselves for a showdown. After being dismissed from the WSPU, Sylvia felt "bruised, as one does, when fighting the foe without, one is struck by the friend within."

In January Sylvia was summoned to Paris, where Emmeline and Christabel were waiting. Their mother had just returned from another tour of the US, and Sylvia had just been released from prison. All three women were exhausted and stressed, which added considerably to the tension. In her 1931 book The Suffrage Movement Sylvia describes Christabel as an unreasonable figure, haranguing her for refusing to toe the WSPU line:

She turned to me. "You have your own ideas. We do not want that; we want all our women to take their instructions and walk in step like an army!" Too tired, too ill to argue, I made no reply. I was oppressed by a sense of tragedy, grieved by her ruthlessness. Her glorification of autocracy seemed to me remote indeed from the struggle we were waging, the grim fight even now proceeding in the cells. I thought of many others who had been thrust aside for some minor difference.

With their mother's blessing, Christabel ordered Sylvia's group to dissociate from the WSPU. Pankhurst tried to persuade the ELFS to remove the word "suffragettes" from its name, since it was inextricably linked to the WSPU. When Sylvia refused, her mother switched to fierce anger in a letter:

You are unreasonable, always have been & I fear always will be. I suppose you were made so! ... Had you chosen a name which we could approve we could have done much to launch you & advertise your society by name. Now you must take your own way of doing so. I am sorry but you make your own difficulties by an incapacity to look at situations from other people's point of view as well as your own. Perhaps in time you will learn the lessons that we all have to learn in life.

Adela, unemployed and unsure of her future, had become a worry for Pankhurst as well. She decided that Adela should move to Australia, and paid for her relocation. They never saw one another again.

The Women's Party

In November 1917 the WSPU's weekly newspaper announced that the WSPU was to become the Women's Party. Twelve months later on Tuesday 19 November at the Queen's Hall in London Emmeline Pankhurst said that her daughter Christabel would be their candidate at the forthcoming General Election, the first at which women could stand as candidates. They didn't say which constituency they would fight but a few days later Westbury in Wiltshire was identified. Emmeline lobbied Prime Minister David Lloyd George to ensure Christabel would have coalition backing. However, as these discussions were taking place the Pankhurst's switched their attention to Smethwick in Staffordshire. The Coalition had already settled on a local candidate, Major Samuel Nock Thompson, but Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, was persuaded to ask Thompson to withdraw. Significantly, Christabel was not issued with a formal letter of support from the two leaders, the Coalition Coupon. Christabel then had a straight fight with the Labour candidate John Davison and lost by 775 votes. The Women's Party fought no other elections and closed soon after.

A female women's rights activist handing out the Suffragette newspaper with the headline "We Will Not Be Prussianised" to British servicemen on 16 April 1915.

When the First World War began in August 1914, Emmeline and Christabel considered that the threat posed by Germany was a danger to all humanity, and that the British government needed the support of all men. They persuaded the WSPU to halt all militant suffrage activities until fighting on the European mainland ended. It was no time for dissent or agitation; Christabel wrote later: "This was national militancy. As Suffragists we could not be pacifists at any price." A truce with the government was established, all WSPU prisoners were released, and Christabel returned to London. Emmeline and Christabel set the WSPU into motion on behalf of the war effort. In her first speech after returning to Britain, Christabel warned of the "German Peril". She urged the gathered women to follow the example of their French sisters, who - while the men fought - "are able to keep the country going, to get in the harvest, to carry on the industries". Emmeline tried to shame men in to volunteering for the front lines.

Sylvia and Adela, meanwhile, did not share their mother's enthusiasm for the war. As committed pacifists, they rejected the WSPU's support for the government. Sylvia's socialist perspective convinced her that the war was another example of capitalist oligarchs exploiting poor soldiers and workers. Adela, meanwhile, spoke against the war in Australia and made public her opposition to conscription. In a short letter, Emmeline told Sylvia: "I am ashamed to know where you and Adela stand." She had a similar impatience for dissent within the WSPU; when long-time member Mary Leigh asked a question during a meeting in October 1915, Pankhurst replied: "That woman is a pro German and should leave the hall. ... I denounce you as a pro German and wish to forget that such a person ever existed." Some WSPU members were outraged by this sudden rigid devotion to the government, the leadership's perceived abandonment of efforts to win the vote for women, and questions about how funds collected on behalf of suffrage were being managed with regard to the organisation's new focus. Two groups split from the WSPU: The Suffragettes of the Women's Social and Political Union (SWSPU) and the Independent Women's Social and Political Union (IWSPU), each dedicated to maintaining pressure toward women's suffrage.

Pankhurst put the same energy and determination she had previously applied to women's suffrage into patriotic advocacy of the war effort. She organised rallies, toured constantly delivering speeches, and lobbied the government to help women enter the work force while men were overseas fighting. Another issue which concerned her greatly at the time was the plight of so-called war babies, children born to single mothers whose fathers were on the front lines. Pankhurst established an adoption home at Campden Hill designed to employ the Montessori method of childhood education. Some women criticised Pankhurst for offering relief to parents of children born out of wedlock, but she declared indignantly that the welfare of children-whose suffering she had seen firsthand as a Poor Law Guardian-was her only concern. Due to lack of funds, however, the home was soon turned over to Princess Alice. Pankhurst herself adopted four children, whom she renamed Kathleen King, Flora Mary Gordon, Joan Pembridge and Elizabeth Tudor. They lived in London, where-for the first time in many years-she had a permanent home, at Holland Park. Asked how, at the age of 57 and with no steady income, she could take on the burden of bringing up four more children, Pankhurst replied: "My dear, I wonder I didn't take forty."

Russian delegation

Pankhurst visited North America in 1916 together with the former Secretary of State for Serbia, Čedomilj Mijatović, whose nation had been at the centre of fighting at the start of the war. They toured the United States and Canada, raising money and urging the US government to support Britain and its Canadian and other allies. Two years later, after the US entered the war, Pankhurst returned to the United States, encouraging suffragettes there - who had not suspended their militancy - to support the war effort by sidelining activities related to the vote. She also spoke about her fears of communist insurgency, which she considered a grave threat to Russian democracy.

In August she met with Alexander Kerensky, the Russian Prime Minister. Although she had been active with the socialist-leaning ILP in years past, Pankhurst had begun to see leftist politics as disagreeable, an attitude which intensified while she was in Russia. The meeting was uncomfortable for both parties; he felt that she was unable to appreciate the class-based conflict driving Russian policy at the time. He concluded by telling her that English women had nothing to teach women in Russia. She later told the New York Times that he was the "biggest fraud of modern times" and that his government could "destroy civilisation."

Accomplishment of suffrage (1918)

When she returned from Russia, Pankhurst was delighted to find that women's right to vote was finally on its way to becoming a reality. The 1918 Representation of the People Act removed property restrictions on men's suffrage and granted the vote to women over the age of 30 (with several restrictions). As suffragists and suffragettes celebrated and prepared for its imminent passage, a new schism erupted: should women's political organisations join forces with those established by men? Many socialists and moderates supported unity of the sexes in politics, but Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst saw the best hope in remaining separate. They reinvented the WSPU as the Women's Party, still open only to women. Women, they said, "can best serve the nation by keeping clear of men's party political machinery and traditions, which, by universal consent, leave so much to be desired." The party favoured equal marriage laws, equal pay for equal work, and equal job opportunities for women. These were matters for the post-war era, however. While the fighting continued the Women's Party demanded no compromise in the defeat of Germany; the removal from government of anyone with family ties to Germany or pacifist attitudes; and shorter work hours to forestall labour strikes. This last plank in the party's platform was meant to discourage potential interest in Bolshevism, about which Pankhurst was increasingly anxious.

In the years after the 1918 Armistice, Pankhurst continued to promote her nationalist vision of British unity. She maintained a focus on women's empowerment, but her days of fighting with government officialdom were over. She defended the presence and reach of the British Empire: "Some talk about the Empire and Imperialism as if it were something to decry and something to be ashamed of. [I]t is a great thing to be the inheritors of an Empire like ours ... great in territory, great in potential wealth. ... If we can only realise and use that potential wealth we can destroy thereby poverty, we can remove and destroy ignorance." For years she travelled around England and North America, rallying support for the British Empire and warning audiences about the dangers of Bolshevism. After the war she lived in Bermuda and America for a couple of years.

Emmeline Pankhurst also became active in political campaigning again when a bill was passed allowing women to run for the House of Commons. Many Women's Party members urged Pankhurst to stand for election, but she insisted that Christabel was a better choice. She campaigned tirelessly for her daughter, lobbying Prime Minister Lloyd George for his support and at one point delivering a passionate speech in the rain. Christabel lost by a very slim margin to the Labour Party candidate, and the recount showed a difference of 775 votes. One biographer called it "the bitterest disappointment of Emmeline's life." The Women's Party withered from existence soon afterward.

As a result of her many trips to North America, Pankhurst became fond of Canada, stating in an interview that "there seems to be more equality between men and women [there] than in any other country I know." In 1922 she applied for Canadian "permission to land" (a prerequisite to status as a "British Subject with Canadian Domicile") and rented a house in Toronto, where she moved with her four adopted children. She became active with the Canadian National Council for Combating Venereal Diseases (CNCCVD), which worked against the sexual double standard which Pankhurst considered particularly harmful to women. In many of her public lectures across Canada, she also promoted eugenic feminist notions of "race betterment" and often gave speeches together with Emily Murphy, a prominent proponent compulsory sterilization for the "feeble-minded." During a tour of Bathurst, the mayor showed her a new building which would become the Home for Fallen Women. Pankhurst replied: "Ah! Where is your Home for Fallen Men?" Before long, however, she grew tired of long Canadian winters, and she ran out of money. She returned to England in late 1925.

Back in London Emmeline was visited by Sylvia, who had not seen her mother in years. Their politics were by now very different, and Sylvia was living, unmarried, with an Italian anarchist. Sylvia described a moment of familial affection when they met, followed by a sad distance between them. Emmeline's adopted daughter Mary, however, remembered the meeting differently. According to her version, Emmeline set her teacup down and walked silently out of the room, leaving Sylvia in tears. Christabel, meanwhile, had become a convert to Adventism and devoted much of her time to the church. The British press sometimes made light of the varied paths followed by the once indivisible family.

In 1926 Pankhurst joined the Conservative Party and two years later ran as a candidate for Parliament in Whitechapel and St George's. Her transformation from a fiery supporter of the ILP and window-smashing radical to an official Conservative Party member surprised many people. She replied succinctly: "My war experience and my experience on the other side of the Atlantic have changed my views considerably." Her biographers insist that the move was more complex; she was devoted to a programme of women's empowerment and anti-communism. Both the Liberal and Labour parties bore grudges for her work against them in the WSPU, and the Conservative Party had a victorious record after the war and a significant majority. Pankhurst may have joined the Conservative Party as much to secure the vote for women as from ideological affinity.

Pankhurst's campaign for Parliament was preempted by her ill health and a final scandal involving Sylvia. The years of touring, lectures, imprisonment and hunger strikes had taken their toll; fatigue and illness became a regular part of Pankhurst's life. Even more painful, however, was the news in April 1928 that Sylvia had given birth out of wedlock. She had named the child Richard Keir Pethick Pankhurst, in memory of her father, her ILP comrade, and her colleagues from the WSPU respectively. Emmeline was further shocked to see a report from a newspaper in the US that declared that "Miss Pankhurst" - a title usually reserved for Christabel - boasted of her child being a triumph of " eugenics", since both parents were healthy and intelligent. In the article, Sylvia also spoke of her belief that "marriage without legal union" was the most sensible option for liberated women. These offences against the social dignity which Pankhurst had always valued devastated the elderly woman; to make matters worse, many people believed the "Miss Pankhurst" in newspaper headlines referred to Christabel. After hearing the news, Emmeline spent an entire day crying; her campaign for Parliament ended with the scandal.

As her health deteriorated, Pankhurst moved into a nursing home in Hampstead. She requested that she be treated by the doctor who attended to her during her hunger strikes. His use of the stomach pump had helped her feel better while in prison; her nurses were sure that the shock of such treatment would severely wound her, but Christabel felt obliged to carry out her mother's request. Before the procedure could be carried out, however, she fell into a critical condition from which none expected her to recover. On Thursday, 14 June 1928, Pankhurst died at the age of 69. She was interred in Brompton Cemetery in London.

Emmeline Pankhurst's memorial statue (1930), by Arthur George Walker, was erected with unusual speed, as noted by the New York Times: "While the transition from martyrdom to sculptured memorials is familiar, the process in Mrs Pankhurst's case has been unusually brief."[129]

News of Emmeline Pankhurst's death was announced around the country, and extensively in North America. Her funeral service on 18 June 1928 was filled with her former WSPU colleagues and those who had worked beside her in various capacities. The Daily Mail described the procession as "like a dead general in the midst of a mourning army". Women wore WSPU sashes and ribbons, and the organisation's flag was carried alongside the Union Flag. Christabel and Sylvia appeared together at the service, the latter with her child. Adela did not attend. Press coverage around the world recognised her tireless work on behalf of women's right to vote - even if they did not agree on the value of her contributions. The New York Herald Tribune called her "the most remarkable political and social agitator of the early part of the twentieth century and the supreme protagonist of the campaign for the electoral enfranchisement of women."

Shortly after the funeral, one of Pankhurst's bodyguards from her WSPU days, Catherine Marshall, began raising funds for a memorial statue. In spring 1930 her efforts bore fruit, and on 6 March her statue in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to and gesturing towards the Houses of Parliament, was unveiled. A crowd of radicals, former suffragettes, and national dignitaries gathered as former Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin presented the memorial to the public. In his address, Baldwin declared: "I say with no fear of contradiction, that whatever view posterity may take, Mrs. Pankhurst has won for herself a niche in the Temple of Fame which will last for all time." Sylvia was the only Pankhurst daughter in attendance; Christabel, touring North America, sent a telegram which was read aloud. While planning the agenda for the day, Marshall had intentionally excluded Sylvia, who in her opinion had hastened Pankhurst's death. Historic England listed the statue as Grade II on 5 February 1970.

A proposal to move the statue of Pankhurst away from the Houses of Parliament to the private Regent's University London in Regent's Park was submitted to Westminster City Council planning department in July 2018 by former Conservative MP Sir Neil Thorne. This proposal was withdrawn in September 2018 after widespread anger and a public campaign against it. The planning application received 896 comments, 887 of them objections. A 38 Degrees petition against the removal of the statue attracted 180,839 signatures. The Curator's Office at the Palace of Westminster commissioned a report into the plan to remove the statue. Published on 22 August 2018, it concluded 'The Memorial to Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst is of high significance, which is not fully recognised through its listing at Grade II. An application has been made to Historic England to upgrade the memorial to Grade II*. This is based on it having 'more than special interest', in terms of its unique history, its artistic quality and the importance of its setting next to the Houses of Parliament. This proposal to move the memorial from Victoria Tower Gardens to Regent's Park would cause substantial harm to the significance of the memorial, as well has harm to the Westminster Abbey and Parliament Square Conservation Area...The proposal to move the memorial, therefore, should not be granted planning permission or listed building consent.

During the twentieth century Emmeline Pankhurst's value to the movement for women's suffrage was debated passionately, and no consensus was achieved. Her daughters Sylvia and Christabel weighed in with books, scornful and laudatory respectively, about their time in the struggle. Sylvia's 1931 book The Suffrage Movement describes her mother's political shift at the start of the First World War as the beginning of a betrayal of her family (especially her father) and the movement. It set the tone for much of the socialist and activist history written about the WSPU and particularly solidified Emmeline Pankhurst's reputation as an unreasonable autocrat. Christabel's "Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote," released in 1959, paints her mother as generous and selfless to a fault, offering herself completely to the most noble causes. It provided a sympathetic counterpart to Sylvia's attacks and continued the polarised discussion; detached and objective assessment has rarely been a part of Pankhurst scholarship.

Recent biographies show that historians differ about whether Emmeline Pankhurst's militancy helped or hurt the movement; however, there is general agreement that the WSPU raised public awareness of the movement in ways that proved essential. Baldwin compared her to Martin Luther and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: individuals who were not the sum total of the movements in which they took part, but who nevertheless played crucial roles in struggles of social and political reform. In the case of Pankhurst, this reform took place in both intentional and unintentional ways. By defying the roles of wife and mother as the docile companion, Pankhurst helped to pave the way for many future feminists, though some would later decry her support for empire and endorsement of the idea of "race betterment."

In 1987 one of her homes in Manchester was opened as the Pankhurst Centre, an all-women gathering space and museum. In 2002, Pankhurst was placed at number 27 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. In 2006, a blue plaque for Pankhurst and her daughter, Christabel was placed by English Heritage at 50 Clarendon Road, Notting Hill, London W11 3AD, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where they had lived.

In January 2016, following a public vote, it was announced that a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst by Hazel Reeves would be unveiled in Manchester in 2019, making her the first woman to be honoured with a statue in the city since Queen Victoria more than 100 years ago. This, in fact, happened on 14 December 2018, one hundred years after British women were first able to vote in the 1918 United Kingdom general election. Her name and image and those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters including her daughters are etched on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London that was unveiled in 2018. One of the ' houses' at Wellacre Academy in Manchester is named after her.

Helen Pankhurst, the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst and the granddaughter of Sylvia Pankhurst, works for women's rights. Along with her daughter, she founded Olympic Suffragettes, which campaigns on a number of women's rights issues.

Pankhurst has appeared in several works of popular culture. In the 1974 BBC television miniseries Shoulder to Shoulder, Pankhurst is played by Siân Phillips. In the 2015 film Suffragette, Pankhurst is played by Meryl Streep.

Bartley, Paula. Emmeline Pankhurst. London: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-415-20651-0.

Carter, Sarah. "'Develop a Great Imperial Race': Emmeline Pankhurst, Emily Murphy, and Their Promotion of 'Race Betterment' in Western Canada in the 1920s." In Finding Directions West: Readings that Locate and Dislocate Western Canada's Past, eds. George Colpitts and Heather Devine, 133-50. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2017. ISBN 978-1-55238-881-5.

Fulford, Roger. Votes for Women: The Story of a Struggle. London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1957. OCLC 191255

Hallam, David J.A., Taking on the Men: the first women parliamentary candidates 1918, Studley, 2018. ISBN 978-1-85858-592-5 (Chapter 2 "Christabel Pankhurst in Smethwick)

Oakley, Robin. The Forgotten Pankhurst Boys, Highgate Cemetery Newsletter, August 2021 [1]

Pankhurst, Christabel. Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote. London: Hutchinson & Co., 1959. OCLC 2161124.

Pankhurst, E. Sylvia. The Suffragette Movement. 1931. New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1971. OCLC 82655317.

Pugh, Martin. The Pankhursts. London: Penguin Books, 2001. ISBN 0-14-029038-9.

West, Rebecca. "A Reed of Steel." The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17. Ed. Jane Marcus. New York: The Viking Press, 1982. ISBN 0-670-79458-9.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Emmeline Pankhurst ( Goulden; 15 July 1858 - 14 June 1928) was a British political activist who organised the UK suffragette movement and helped women win the right to vote.

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Era: 1938

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Era: 1960

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Era: 1979

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Era: 1995

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Era: 2010

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Era: 2012

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Era: 2018

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Era: 1888

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Name: Millicent Fawcett

Era: 1847-1929

Nationality: British

Occupation: Author, Public speaker, Campaigner, Activist, Leader of National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), Founder of Newnham College for Women in Cambridge. Political figure.

Social Status: Comfortable – private boarding school in London. Two properties.

Family: Businessman father, home-maker mother. 8th of 10 children. Her older sister became the first female doctor in Britain. Liberal household, Married a feminist and politician, Henry Fawcett, and they both believed in education for all, One child – Phillipa, first female to top the Cambridge maths exam.

Workplace: Secretary to her blind husband, Author, Newnham College, Public speaking venues.

Influence: A key figure in the fight for equality in Education and Government.

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Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (11 June 1847 - 5 August 1929) was an English politician, writer and feminist. She campaigned for women's suffrage through legal change and from 1897 to 1919 led Britain's largest women's rights association, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). She explained, "I cannot say I became a suffragist. I always was one, from the time I was old enough to think at all about the principles of Representative Government." Fawcett tried to broaden women's chances of higher education, serving as a governor of Bedford College, London (now Royal Holloway) and co-founding Newnham College, Cambridge in 1875. In 2018, 100 years after the Representation of the People Act, she became the first woman honoured by a statue in Parliament Square.

Millicent Garrett Fawcett was born on 11 June 1847 in Aldeburgh, to Newson Garrett (1812-1893), a businessman from nearby Leiston, and his London wife Louisa ( née Dunnell, 1813-1903). She was the eighth of their ten children.

According to the Stracheys, "The Garretts were a close and happy family in which children were encouraged to be physically active, read widely, speak their minds, and share in the political interests of their father, a convert from Conservatism to Gladstonian Liberalism, a combative man, and a keen patriot."

As a child, Fawcett's elder sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, who became Britain's first female doctor, introduced her to Emily Davies, an English suffragist. In her mother's biography, Louisa Garrett Anderson quotes Davies as saying to her mother, to Elizabeth and to Fawcett, "It is quite clear what has to be done. I must devote myself to securing higher education, while you open the medical profession to women. After these things are done, we must see about getting the vote." She then turned to Millicent: "You are younger than we are, Millie, so you must attend to that."

Aged 12 in 1858, Fawcett was sent to London with her sister Elizabeth to attend a private boarding school in Blackheath. Their sister Louise took her to the sermons of Frederick Denison Maurice, a socially aware and less traditional Anglican priest, whose opinions influenced her view of religion. In 1865, she attended a lecture by John Stuart Mill. The following year, she and a friend, Emily Davies, supported the Kensington Society by collecting signatures for a petition asking Parliament to enfranchise women householders.

John Stuart Mill introduced Millicent to many other women's rights activists, including Henry Fawcett, a Liberal Member of Parliament who had intended to marry her sister Elizabeth before she decided to focus on her medical career. Millicent and Henry married on 23 April 1867. Henry had been blinded in a shooting accident in 1858 and Millicent acted as his secretary. Their marriage was said to be based on "perfect intellectual sympathy"; Millicent pursued a writing career while caring for Henry, and ran two households, one in Cambridge, one in London. The family had some radical beliefs in support of proportional representation, individualistic and free trade principles, and opportunities for women. Their only child was Philippa Fawcett, born in 1868, who was much encouraged by her mother in her studies. In 1890 Philippa became the first woman to obtain top score in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos exams.

In 1868 Millicent joined the London Suffrage Committee, and in 1869 spoke at the first public pro-suffrage meeting held in London. In March 1870 she spoke in Brighton, her husband's constituency. As a speaker she was said to have a clear voice. In 1870 she published her short Political Economy for Beginners, which was "wildly successful", running through 10 editions in 41 years. In 1872 she and her husband published Essays and Lectures on Social and Political Subjects, containing eight essays by Millicent. In 1875 she co-founded Newnham Hall and served on its council.

Despite many interests and duties, Millicent, with Agnes Garrett, raised four of their cousins, who had been orphaned early in life: Amy Garrett Badley, Fydell Edmund Garrett, Elsie Garrett (later a prominent botanical artist in South Africa), and Elsie's twin, John.

After Fawcett's husband died on 6 November 1884, she temporarily withdrew from public life, sold both family homes and moved with Philippa to the house of her sister, Agnes Garrett. When she resumed work in 1885, she began to concentrate on politics and was a key member of what became the Women's Local Government Society. Originally a Liberal, she joined the Liberal Unionist party in 1886 to oppose Irish Home Rule. She, like other English Protestants, felt that allowing home rule for Catholic Ireland would hurt England's prosperity and be disastrous for the Irish.

In 1891 Fawcett wrote the introduction of a new edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Lyndall Gordon calls this an "influential essay": Fawcett reasserted the reputation of the early feminist philosopher and claimed her as an early figure in the struggle for the vote.

Fawcett was granted an honorary doctorate of law by the University of St Andrews in 1899.

Fawcett began her political career at the age of 22, at the first women's suffrage meeting. After the death of Lydia Becker, Fawcett became leader of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), Britain's main suffragist organisation. Politically she took a moderate position, distancing herself from the militancy and direct actions of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), which she believed harmed women's chances of winning the vote by souring public opinion and alienating Members of Parliament. Despite the publicity for the WSPU, the NUWSS with its slogan "Law-Abiding suffragists" retained more support. By 1905, Fawcett's NUWSS had 305 constituent societies and almost 50,000 members, compared with the WSPU's 2,000 members in 1913. Fawcett mainly fought for women's suffrage, and found home rule "a blow to the greatness and prosperity of England as well as disaster and... misery and pain and shame".

She explains her disaffiliation from the more militant movement in her book What I remember:

I could not support a revolutionary movement, especially as it was ruled autocratically, at first, by a small group of four persons, and latterly by one person only.... In 1908, this despotism decreed that the policy of suffering violence, but using none, was to be abandoned. After that, I had no doubt whatever that what was right for me and the NUWSS was to keep strictly to our principle of supporting our movement only by argument, based on common sense and experience and not by personal violence or lawbreaking of any kind.

The South African War became an opportunity for Fawcett to share female responsibilities in British culture. She was nominated to lead the commission of women sent to South Africa, sailing there in July 1901 with other women "to investigate Emily Hobhouse's indictment of atrocious conditions in concentration camps where the families of the Boer soldiers were interned." No British women had been entrusted before with such a task in wartime. Millicent fought for the civil rights of the Uitlanders "as the cause of revival of interest in women's suffrage".

Fawcett had backed countless campaigns over many years, for instance to curb child abuse by raising the age of consent, criminalise incest and cruelty to children within the family, end the practice of excluding women from courtrooms when sexual offences were considered, stamp out the "white slave trade", and prevent child marriage and the introduction of regulated prostitution in India. Fawcett campaigned to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, as reflecting sexual double standards. They required prostitutes to be examined for sexually transmitted diseases and if found to have passed disease to their clients, to be imprisoned. Women could be arrested on suspicion of being a prostitute and imprisoned for refusing consent to examinations that were invasive and painful. The men who infected the women were not subject to the Acts, which were repealed through campaigning by Fawcett and others. She believed such double standards would never be erased until women were represented in the public sphere.

Fawcett wrote three books, one co-authored with her husband, and many articles, some published posthumously. Her Political Economy for Beginners went into ten editions, sparked two novels, and appeared in many languages. One of her first articles on women's education appeared in Macmillan's Magazine in 1875, the year when her interest in women's education led her to become a founder of Newnham College for Women in Cambridge. There she served on the college council and backed a controversial bid for all women to receive Cambridge degrees. Millicent regularly spoke at girls' schools, women's colleges and adult education centres. In 1904, she resigned from the Unionists over free trade, when Joseph Chamberlain gained control in his campaign for tariff reform.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, the WSPU ceased all activities to focus on the war effort. Fawcett's NUWSS replaced her political activity with support for hospital services in training camps, Scotland, Russia and Serbia, largely because the organisation was markedly less militant than the WSPU: it contained many more pacifists and support for the war within it was weaker. The WSPU was called jingoistic for its leaders' strong support for the war. While Fawcett was not a pacifist, she risked dividing the organisation if she ordered a halt to the campaign, and diverted NUWSS funds to the government as the WSPU had. The NUWSS continued to campaign for the vote during the war and used the situation to its advantage by pointing out the contribution women had made to the war effort. She held her post until 1919, a year after the first women had been given the vote under the Representation of the People Act 1918. After that, she left the suffrage campaign and devoted much time to writing books, including a biography of Josephine Butler.

In 1919 Fawcett was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Birmingham. In the 1925 New Year Honours she was appointed Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire (GBE).

Millicent Fawcett died in 1929 at her London home in Gower Street. Her ashes were scattered at the Golders Green Crematorium. In 1932, a memorial to Fawcett, alongside that of her husband, was unveiled in Westminister Abbey with an inscription that reads: "A wise constant and courageous Englishwoman. She won citizenship for women."

Millicent Fawcett Hall was constructed in 1929 in Westminster as a place for women's debates and discussions; presently owned by Westminster School, the hall is used by the drama department as a 150-seat studio theatre. St Felix School, near Fawcett's birthplace of Aldeburgh, has named one of its boarding houses after her. A blue plaque for Fawcett was erected in 1954 by London County Council at her home of 45 years in Bloomsbury.

The archives of Millicent Fawcett are held at The Women's Library, London School of Economics, which in 2018 renamed one of its campus buildings Fawcett House, after her role in the British suffrage movement and connections to the area.

In February 2018 Fawcett was announced as winner of a BBC Radio 4 poll for the most influential woman of the past 100 years.

In 2018, 100 years after the passing of the Representation of the People Act, for which Fawcett had successfully campaigned and which granted limited franchise, she became the first woman commemorated with a statue in Parliament Square, by the sculptor Gillian Wearing. This followed a campaign led by Caroline Criado Perez, in which over 84,000 online signatures were garnered.

Fawcett's statue holds a banner quoting from a speech she gave in 1920, after Emily Davison's death during the 1913 Epsom Derby: "Courage calls to courage everywhere". At its unveiling Theresa May said, "I would not be standing here today as Prime Minister, no female MPs would have taken their seats in Parliament, none of us would have the rights we now enjoy, were it not for one truly great woman: Dame Millicent Garret [ sic] Fawcett."

1. ^ Maya Oppenheim (11 June 2018). "Millicent Fawcett: Who was the tireless suffragist and how did she change women's voting rights forever?". The Independent.

2. ^ Lyons, Izzy (5 February 2018). "How Millicent Fawcett and Ethel Smyth helped women win the vote". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235.

3. ^ Howarth, Janet. "Fawcett, Dame Millicent Garrett [née Millicent Garrett] (1847-1929)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/33096.

4. "Millicent Fawcett statue gets Parliament Square go ahead". BBC News Online. BBC. 20 September 2017.

5. ^ Manton, Jo (1965). Elizabeth Garrett Anderson: England's First Woman Physician. London: Methuen. p. 20.

6. ^ Ogilvie, Marilyn Bailey (1986). Women in science: antiquity through the nineteenth century: a biographical dictionary with annotated bibliography (3 ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-15031-6.

7. ^ Strachey, Ray (2016). The Cause: A Short History of the Women's Movement in Great Britain. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. ISBN 978-1539098164.

8. ^ Garrett Anderson, Louisa (1939). Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, 1836-1917. Faber and Faber.

9. Caroline Series, "And what became of the women?", ^ Mathematical Spectrum, Vol. 30 (1997/8), pp. 49-52.

10. "Millicent Garrett Fawcett, 1847-1929". The History of Economic Thought.

11. ^ Doughan, David; Gordon, Professor Peter; Gordon, Peter (3 June 2014). Dictionary of British Women's Organisations, 1825-1960. Taylor & Francis. pp. 223-224. ISBN 978-1-136-89777-1.

12. ^ Rubinstein, David (1991). "Millicent Garrett Fawcett and the Meaning of Women's Emancipation, 1886-99". Victorian Studies. 34 (3): 365-380. ISSN 0042-5222. JSTOR 3828580.

13. Lyndall Gordon ^ Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Great Britain: Virago, 2005, p. 521 ISBN 1-84408-141-9.

14. ^ Van Wingerden, Sophia A. (1999). The women's suffrage movement in Britain, 1866-1928. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 100. ISBN 978-0-312-21853-9.

15. ^ Velllacott, Jo (1987). "Feminist Consciousness and the First World War". History Workshop. 23 (23): 81-101. doi:10.1093/hwj/23.1.81. JSTOR 4288749.

16. ^ National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies. "NUWSS". National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies.

17. ^ Millicent Garrett Fawcett; E. M. Turner (2002). Josephine Butler: Her Work and Principles and Their Meaning for the Twentieth Century. Portrayer Publishers. ISBN 978-0-9542632-8-7.

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Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (11 June 1847 - 5 August 1929) was an English politician, writer and feminist. She campaigned for women's suffrage through legal change and from 1897 to 1919 led Britain's largest women's rights association, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). She explained, "I cannot say I became a suffragist.

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Name: Rosie the Riveter (allegorical cultural icon)

Era: 1939-1945 during WWII

Nationality: American (but occurred in all WWII-related countries)

Occupation: Factory worker (mostly war-related industries such as shipyards and ammunition)

Social Status: Mostly low socio-economic women who were laid off during the depression but also ‘housewives’ who wanted to help with the war effort, and those who wanted to gain independence.

Family: Usually had a family to provide for, especially the majority who had been jobless during the depression. With husbands away at war, they were single mothers.

Workplace: Factories, using heavy machinery and equipment, working on production lines.

Influence: As a symbol of hope at the time that everyone could chip in for the war effort, it was hugely successful. As a lasting feminist icon, it has become a symbol for gender equality in the workplace and played a part in achieving tangible law changes to women’s (and men’s) factory wages and conditions.

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Rosie the Riveter is a cultural icon of World War II, representing the women who worked in factories and shipyards during World War II, many of whom produced munitions and war supplies. These women sometimes took entirely new jobs replacing the male workers who joined the military.

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Name: Gloria Steinem

Era: 1934-

Nationality: American

Occupation: Writer and journalist, feminist, activist.

Social Status: Struggling family – low-wage travelling salesman father, then when divorced, living in a single-parent household with her mentally ill mother who could not sustain employment.

Family: Grandmother was a key figure in First Wave US feminism – chairwoman for National Woman Suffrage Association, first woman elected to the Toledo Board of Education. Separated parents, mother will mental health challenges, exacerbated by gendered medical care and employment discrimination. Widowed, is a step-mother to actor Christian Bale.

Workplace: Freelance writer, journalism offices such as New York Magazine (gendered experiences), then the office of Ms. Magazine (mostly women), public speaker (conferences, TV, and rallies).

Influence: Long-lasting influence due to her Second Wave US feminism campaigning for equal rights for women, continues to be a political figure in her support of candidates she feels will improve gender equality.

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Gloria Marie Steinem (; born March 25, 1934) is an American journalist and social-political activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Steinem was a columnist for magazine and a co-founder of magazine. In 1969, Steinem published an article, "After Black Power, Women's Liberation," which brought her national attention and positioned her as a feminist leader. In 1971, she co-founded the National Women's Political Caucus which provides training and support for women who seek elected and appointed offices in government. Also in 1971, she co-founded the Women's Action Alliance which, until 1997, provided support to a network of feminist activists and worked to advance feminist causes and legislation. In the 1990s, Steinem helped establish Take Our Daughters to Work Day, an occasion for young girls to learn about future career opportunities. In 2005, Steinem, Jane Fonda, and Robin Morgan co-founded the Women's Media Center, an organization that "works to make women visible and powerful in the media."

As of May 2018, Steinem was traveling internationally as an organizer and lecturer, and was a media spokeswoman on issues of equality. In 2015, Steinem, alongside two Nobel Peace Laureates ( Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia), Abigail Disney, and other prominent women peace activists, undertook a journey from the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang to South Korea, crossing the most heavily militarized zone in the world between the two Koreas.

Steinem was born on March 25, 1934, in Toledo, Ohio, the daughter of Ruth (née Nuneviller) and Leo Steinem. Her mother was Presbyterian, mostly of German (including Prussian) and some Scottish descent. Her father was Jewish, the son of immigrants from Württemberg, Germany, and Radziejów, Poland. Her paternal grandmother, Pauline Perlmutter Steinem, was chairwoman of the educational committee of the National Woman Suffrage Association, a delegate to the 1908 International Council of Women, and the first woman to be elected to the Toledo Board of Education, as well as a leader in the movement for vocational education. Pauline also rescued many members of her family from the Holocaust.

The Steinems lived and traveled about in a trailer, from which Leo carried out his trade as a roaming antiques dealer. Before Gloria was born, her mother, Ruth, then age 34, had a "nervous breakdown" which left her an invalid, trapped in delusional fantasies that occasionally turned violent. She changed "from an energetic, fun-loving, book-loving" woman into "someone who was afraid to be alone, who could not hang on to reality long enough to hold a job, and who could rarely concentrate enough to read a book." Ruth spent long periods in and out of sanatoriums for the mentally ill. Steinem was ten years old when her parents separated in 1944. Her father went to California to find work, while she and her mother continued to live together in Toledo.

While her parents divorced under the stress of her mother's illness, Steinem did not attribute it at all to male chauvinism on the father's part-she claims to have "understood and never blamed him for the breakup." Nevertheless, the impact of these events had a formative effect on her personality: while her father, a traveling salesman, had never provided much financial stability to the family, his exit aggravated their situation. Steinem concluded that her mother's inability to hold on to a job was evidence of general hostility towards working women. She also concluded that the general apathy of doctors towards her mother emerged from a similar anti-woman animus. Years later, Steinem described her mother's experience as pivotal to her understanding of social injustices. These perspectives convinced Steinem that women lacked social and political equality.

Steinem attended Waite High School in Toledo and Western High School in Washington, D.C., graduating from the latter while living with her older sister Susanne Steinem Patch. She then attended Smith College, an institution with which she continues to remain engaged, from which she received her A.B. magna cum laude and graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.[clarification needed ]

In 1957, Steinem had an abortion. The procedure was performed by Dr. John Sharpe, a British physician, when abortion was still illegal. Years later, Steinem dedicated her memoir My Life on the Road (2015) to him. She wrote,

"Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India. Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, 'You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.'"

In the late 1950s, Steinem spent two years in India as a Chester Bowles Asian Fellow. After returning to the United States, she served as director of the Independent Research Service, an organization funded in secret by a donor that turned out to be the CIA. She worked to send non-Communist American students to the 1959 World Youth Festival. In 1960, she was hired by Warren Publishing as the first employee of magazine.

magazine features editor Clay Felker gave freelance writer Steinem what she later called her first "serious assignment", regarding contraception; he didn't like her first draft and had her re-write the article. Her resulting 1962 article about the way in which women are forced to choose between a career and marriage preceded Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique by one year.

In 1963, while working on an article for Huntington Hartford's Show magazine, Steinem was employed as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club. The article, published in 1963 as "A Bunny's Tale", featured a photo of Steinem in Bunny uniform and detailed how women were treated at those clubs. Steinem has maintained that she is proud of the work she did publicizing the exploitative working conditions of the bunnies and especially the sexual demands made of them, which skirted the edge of the law. However, for a brief period after the article was published, Steinem was unable to land other assignments; in her words, this was "because I had now become a Bunny-and it didn't matter why." However, on the upside, the article compelled the owner of Playboy, Hugh Hefner, to review and improve the working conditions of the Bunnies.

In the interim, she conducted an interview with John Lennon for Cosmopolitan magazine in 1964. In 1965, she wrote for NBC-TV's weekly satirical revue, That Was The Week That Was (TW3), contributing a regular segment entitled "Surrealism in Everyday Life". Steinem eventually landed a job at Felker's newly founded magazine in 1968.

In 1969, she covered an abortion speak-out for New York Magazine, which was held in a church basement in Greenwich Village, New York. Steinem had had an abortion herself in London at the age of 22. She felt what she called a "big click" at the speak-out, and later said she didn't "begin my life as an active feminist" until that day. As she recalled, "It [abortion] is supposed to make us a bad person. But I must say, I never felt that. I used to sit and try and figure out how old the child would be, trying to make myself feel guilty. But I never could! I think the person who said: 'Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament' was right. Speaking for myself, I knew it was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life. I wasn't going to let things happen to me. I was going to direct my life, and therefore it felt positive. But still, I didn't tell anyone. Because I knew that out there it wasn't [positive]." She also said, "In later years, if I'm remembered at all it will be for inventing a phrase like 'reproductive freedom' ... as a phrase it includes the freedom to have children or not to. So it makes it possible for us to make a coalition."

In 1972, she co-founded the feminist-themed magazine alongside founding editors Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Mary Thom, Patricia Carbine, Joanne Edgar, Nina Finkelstein, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, and Mary Peacock; it began as a special edition of New York, and Clay Felker funded the first issue. Its 300,000 test copies sold out nationwide in eight days. Within weeks, Ms. had received 26,000 subscription orders and more than 20,000 reader letters. In 1974, Ms. collaborated with public television to produce the television program Woman Alive!, and Steinem was featured in the first episode in her role as co-founder of Ms. magazine. The magazine was sold to the Feminist Majority Foundation in 2001; Steinem remains on the masthead as one of six founding editors and serves on the advisory board.

In November 1977, Steinem spoke at the 1977 National Women's Conference among other speakers including Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford, Lady Bird Johnson, Bella Abzug, Barbara Jordan, Cecilia Burciaga, Lenore Hershey, and Jean O'Leary.

In 1978, Steinem wrote a semi-satirical essay for Cosmopolitan titled "If Men Could Menstruate" in which she imagined a world where men menstruate instead of women. She concludes in the essay that in such a world, menstruation would become a badge of honor with men comparing their relative sufferings, rather than the source of shame that it had been for women.

On March 22, 1998, Steinem published an op-ed in The New York Times ("Feminists and the Clinton Question") in which she claimed that Bill Clinton's alleged behavior did not constitute sexual harassment, although she did not actually challenge the accounts by his accusers. The op-ed was criticized by various writers, as in the Harvard Crimson and in the Times itself. In 2017, Steinem, in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, stood by her 1998 New York Times op-ed, but also said: "I wouldn't write the same thing now."

In 1959, Steinem led a group of activists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to organize the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna festival, to advocate for American participation in the World Youth Festival, a Soviet-sponsored youth event.

In 1968, Steinem signed the " Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

In 1969, she published an article, "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" which brought her to national fame as a feminist leader. As such she campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in its favor in 1970. That same year she published her essay on a utopia of gender equality, "What It Would Be Like If Women Win", in magazine.

On July 10, 1971, Steinem was one of more than three hundred women who founded the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), including such notables as Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Shirley Chisholm, and Myrlie Evers-Williams. As a co-convener of the Caucus, she delivered the speech " Address to the Women of America", stating in part:

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.

Despite her influence in the feminist movement, Steinem also earned criticism from some feminists as well, who questioned whether she was committed to the movement or using it to promote her glamorous image. The Redstockings also singled her out for agreeing to cooperate with the CIA-backed Independent Research Service. It was also acknowledged that Steinem worked as a CIA agent when this operation was taking place.

Steinem, who grew up reading Wonder Woman comics, was also a key player in the restoration of Wonder Woman's powers and traditional costume, which were restored in issue #204 (January-February 1973). Steinem, offended that the most famous female superhero had been depowered, had placed Wonder Woman (in costume) on the cover of the first issue of Ms. (1972)- Warner Communications, DC Comics' owner, was an investor-which also contained an appreciative essay about the character. In doing so, however, Steinem forced the firing of Samuel R. Delany who had taken over scripting duties with issue #202. Delany was supposed to write a six-issue story arc, which would culminate in a battle over an abortion clinic where Wonder Woman was to defend women trying to use their services, a critical feminist issue at the time. The story outlines and the work already done on the issues was scrapped, something that Steinem was not aware of and made no attempt to rectify.

At the outset of the Gulf War in 1991, Steinem, along with prominent feminists Robin Morgan and Kate Millett, publicly opposed an incursion into the Middle East and asserted that ostensible goal of "defending democracy" was a pretense.

During the Clarence Thomas sexual harassment scandal in 1991, Steinem voiced strong support for Anita Hill and suggested that one day Hill herself would sit on the Supreme Court.

In 1992, Steinem co-founded Choice USA, a non-profit organization that mobilizes and provides ongoing support to a younger generation that lobbies for reproductive choice.

In 1993, Steinem co-produced and narrated an Emmy Award-winning TV documentary for HBO about child abuse, called, "Multiple Personalities: The Search for Deadly Memories". Also in 1993, she and Rosilyn Heller co-produced an original TV movie for Lifetime, "Better Off Dead", which examined the parallel forces that both oppose abortion and support the death penalty.

On June 1, 2013, Steinem performed on stage at the "Chime For Change: The Sound Of Change Live" Concert at Twickenham Stadium in London, England. Later in 2014, UN Women began its commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women, and as part of that campaign Steinem (and others) spoke at the Apollo Theater in New York City. Chime For Change was funded by Gucci, focusing on using innovative approaches to raise funds and awareness especially regarding girls and women.

Contrary to popular belief, Steinem did not coin the feminist slogan "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle". Although she helped popularize it, the phrase is actually attributable to Irina Dunn. When Time magazine published an article attributing the saying to Steinem, Steinem wrote a letter saying the phrase had been coined by Dunn.

In addition to Steinem, participants in crossing the DMZ included organizer Christine Ahn from Hawaii; feminist Suzuyo Takazato from Okinawa; Amnesty International human rights lawyer Erika Guevara of Mexico; Liberian peace and reconciliation advocate Leymah Gbowee; Philippines lawmaker Liza Maza; Northern Ireland peace activist Mairead Maguire and Colonel Ann Wright, a retired officer who resigned from the U.S. military to protest the US invasion of Iraq.

Steinem was the honorary co-chairwoman of 2015 Women's Walk For Peace In Korea with Mairead Maguire, and in the weeks leading up to the walk Steinem told the press, "It's hard to imagine any more physical symbol of the insanity of dividing human beings." The group's main goal is to advocate disarmament and seek Korea's reunification. It will be holding international peace symposiums both in Pyongyang and Seoul in which women from both North Korea and South Korea can share experiences and ideas of mobilizing women to stop the Korean crisis. It is especially believed that the role of women in this act would help and support the reunification of family members divided by the split prolonged for 70 years.

She is also the chair of the advisory board of Apne Aap Women Worldwide, an organization fighting sex trafficking and inter-generational prostitution in India, founded by Ruchira Gupta. She has also written extensively on her travels, experiences with women and the Indian feminist movement with her colleague and friend, Ruchira Gupta. In 2014, Steinem and Gupta traveled through India to meet the country's young feminists, writers, and thought leaders. A diary was kept documenting their travels, "Notes on A Tour of the Indian Women's Movement".

Steinem's involvement in presidential campaigns stretches back to her support of Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential campaign.

A proponent of civil rights and fierce critic of the Vietnam War, Steinem was initially drawn to Senator Eugene McCarthy because of his "admirable record" on those issues, but after meeting him and hearing him speak, she found him "cautious, uninspired, and dry". As the campaign progressed, Steinem became baffled at "personally vicious" attacks that McCarthy leveled against his primary opponent Robert F. Kennedy, even as "his real opponent, Hubert Humphrey, went free".

On a late-night radio show, Steinem garnered attention for declaring " George McGovern is the real Eugene McCarthy". In 1968, Steinem was chosen to pitch the arguments to McGovern as to why he should enter the presidential race that year; he agreed, and Steinem "consecutively or simultaneously served as pamphlet writer, advance 'man', fund raiser, lobbyist of delegates, errand runner, and press secretary".

McGovern lost the nomination at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and Steinem later wrote of her astonishment at Hubert Humphrey's "refusal even to suggest to Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley that he control the rampaging police and the bloodshed in the streets".

Steinem was reluctant to re-join the McGovern campaign, as although she had brought in McGovern's single largest campaign contributor in 1968, she " still had been treated like a frivolous pariah by much of McGovern's campaign staff". In April 1972, Steinem remarked that he "still doesn't understand the Women's Movement".

McGovern ultimately excised the abortion issue from the party's platform, and recent publications show McGovern was deeply conflicted on the issue. Steinem later wrote this description of the events:

The consensus of the meeting of women delegates held by the caucus had been to fight for the minority plank on reproductive freedom; indeed our vote had supported the plank nine to one. So fight we did, with three women delegates speaking eloquently in its favor as a constitutional right. One male Right-to-Life zealot spoke against, and Shirley MacLaine also was an opposition speaker, on the grounds that this was a fundamental right but didn't belong in the platform. We made a good showing. Clearly we would have won if McGovern's forces had left their delegates uninstructed and thus able to vote their consciences.

However, Germaine Greer flatly contradicted Steinem's account, reporting, " Jacqui Ceballos called from the crowd to demand abortion rights on the Democratic platform, but Bella [Abzug] and Gloria stared glassily out into the room, thus killing the abortion rights platform", and asking "Why had Bella and Gloria not helped Jacqui to nail him on abortion? What reticence, what loserism had afflicted them?" Steinem later recalled that the 1972 Convention was the only time Greer and Steinem ever met.

The cover of Harper's that month read, "Womanlike, they did not want to get tough with their man, and so, womanlike, they got screwed".

In the run-up to the 2004 election, Steinem voiced fierce criticism of the Bush administration, asserting, "There has never been an administration that has been more hostile to women's equality, to reproductive freedom as a fundamental human right, and has acted on that hostility", adding, "If he is elected in 2004, abortion will be criminalized in this country". At a Planned Parenthood event in Boston, Steinem declared Bush "a danger to health and safety", citing his antagonism to the Clean Water Act, reproductive freedom, sex education, and AIDS relief.

Steinem was an active participant in the 2008 presidential campaign, and praised both the Democratic front-runners, commenting,

Both Senators Clinton and Obama are civil rights advocates, feminists, environmentalists, and critics of the war in Iraq ... Both have resisted pandering to the right, something that sets them apart from any Republican candidate, including John McCain. Both have Washington and foreign policy experience; George W. Bush did not when he first ran for president.

She also made headlines for a New York Times op-ed in which she cited gender and not race as "probably the most restricting force in American life". She elaborated, "Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women."

Following McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, Steinem penned an op-ed in which she labeled Palin an "unqualified woman" who "opposes everything most other women want and need", described her nomination speech as "divisive and deceptive", called for a more inclusive Republican Party, and concluded that Palin resembled " Phyllis Schlafly, only younger".

In an HBO interview with Bill Maher, Steinem, when asked to explain the broad support for Bernie Sanders among young Democratic women, responded, "When you're young, you're thinking, 'Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.'" Her comments triggered widespread criticism, and Steinem later issued an apology and said her comments had been "misinterpreted".

Steinem endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the run-up for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Steinem was an honorary co-chair of and speaker at the Women's March on Washington on January 21, 2017, the day after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president.

In 1967, Steinem revealed in an interview with The New York Times that she worked full time from 1958 until 1962 at the Independent Research Service, which was largely financed by the CIA. In May 1975, Redstockings, a radical feminist group, published a report that Steinem and others put together on the Vienna Youth Festival and its attendees for the Independent Research Service. Redstockings raised the question of whether Steinem had continuing ties with the CIA, which Steinem denied. Steinem defended her relationship to the CIA, saying: "In my experience The Agency was completely different from its image; it was liberal, nonviolent and honorable."

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Steinem had a four-year relationship with the publisher Mortimer Zuckerman.

On September 3, 2000, at age 66, Steinem married David Bale, father of actor Christian Bale. The wedding was performed at the home of her friend Wilma Mankiller, the first female Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation. Steinem technically became stepmother to Bale's four adult children; she has no biological children. Steinem and Bale were married for only three years before he died of brain lymphoma on December 30, 2003, at age 62.

Steinem was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1986 and trigeminal neuralgia in 1994.

Commenting on aging, Steinem says that as she approached 60 she felt like she entered a new phase in life that was free of the "demands of gender" that she faced from adolescence onward.

Steinem lives alone in New York's Upper East Side, where she owns the first three floors of her historic brownstone apartment. In 2021, on her 87th birthday, Google Arts & Culture launched a virtual tour of her home, where she has lived since 1966.

Although most frequently considered a liberal feminist, Steinem has repeatedly characterized herself as a radical feminist. More importantly, she has repudiated categorization within feminism as "nonconstructive to specific problems", saying: "I've turned up in every category. So it makes it harder for me to take the divisions with great seriousness." Nevertheless, on concrete issues, Steinem has staked several firm positions.

In 1979, Steinem wrote the article on female genital mutilation that brought it into the American public's consciousness; the article "The International Crime of Female Genital Mutilation" was published in the March 1979 issue of Ms. The article reported on the "75 million women suffering with the results of genital mutilation". According to Steinem, "The real reasons for genital mutilation can only be understood in the context of the " patriarchy": men must control women's bodies as the means of production, and thus repress the independent power of women's sexuality."

Steinem has frequently voiced her disapproval of the obscurantism and abstractions some claim to be prevalent in feminist academic theorizing. She said, "Nobody cares about feminist academic writing. That's careerism. These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted[...] But I recognize the fact that we have this ridiculous system of tenure, that the whole thrust of academia is one that values education, in my opinion, in inverse ratio to its usefulness-and what you write in inverse relationship to its understandability." Steinem later singled out deconstructionists like Judith Butler for criticism, saying, "I always wanted to put a sign up on the road to Yale saying, 'Beware: Deconstruction Ahead'. Academics are forced to write in language no one can understand so that they get tenure. They have to say 'discourse', not 'talk'. Knowledge that is not accessible is not helpful. It becomes aerialised-and I think it's important that women's experiences be given a narrative."

Steinem has criticized pornography, which she distinguishes from erotica, writing: "Erotica is as different from pornography as love is from rape, as dignity is from humiliation, as partnership is from slavery, as pleasure is from pain." Steinem's argument hinges on the distinction between reciprocity versus domination, as she writes, "Blatant or subtle, pornography involves no equal power or mutuality. In fact, much of the tension and drama comes from the clear idea that one person is dominating the other."

On the issue of same-sex pornography, Steinem asserts, "Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography including male-male gay pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master." Steinem has also cited " snuff films" as a serious threat to women.

In an essay published in Time magazine on August 31, 1970, "What Would It Be Like If Women Win", Steinem wrote about same-sex marriage in the context of the "Utopian" future she envisioned, writing:

What will exist is a variety of alternative life-styles. Since the population explosion dictates that childbearing be kept to a minimum, parents-and-children will be only one of many "families": couples, age groups, working groups, mixed communes, blood-related clans, class groups, creative groups. Single women will have the right to stay single without ridicule, without the attitudes now betrayed by "spinster" and "bachelor." Lesbians or homosexuals will no longer be denied legally binding marriages, complete with mutual-support agreements and inheritance rights. Paradoxically, the number of homosexuals may get smaller. With fewer over-possessive mothers and fewer fathers who hold up an impossibly cruel or perfectionist idea of manhood, boys will be less likely to be denied or reject their identity as males.

In 1977, Steinem expressed disapproval that the heavily publicized sex reassignment surgery of tennis player Renée Richards had been in her opinion characterized as either a frightening look at what feminism could cause or as proof that feminism was no longer necessary. Steinem wrote that the issue was at minimum "a diversion from the widespread problems of sexual inequality." She also wrote that, while she supported the right of individuals to identify as they choose, she believed some transsexuals "surgically mutilate their own bodies" in order to conform to a gender role that is inexorably tied to physical body parts. She claimed that "feminists are right to feel uncomfortable about the need for and uses of transsexualism."

On October 2, 2013, Steinem clarified her remarks on transgender people in an op-ed for The Advocate, writing that critics failed to consider that her 1977 essay was "written in the context of global protests against routine surgical assaults, called female genital mutilation by some survivors." Steinem later in the piece expressed unequivocal support for transgender people, saying that transgender people "including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives. Those lives should be celebrated, not questioned." She also apologized for any pain her words might have caused.

On June 15, 2020, Steinem co-wrote a letter with Mona Sinha to the editor of The New York Times, in which they opposed the elimination of civil rights protections for transgender healthcare by the Trump administration. In it, they made note of precolonial American traditions of gender variance and claimed that "the health of any of us affects the health of all of us, and excluding trans people endangers us all."

Biography magazine's 25 most influential women in America (Steinem was listed as one of them)[9]

Clarion award[9]

Esquire's 75 greatest women of all time (Steinem was listed as one of them) (2010)[139]

Equality Now's international human rights award, given jointly to her and Efua Dorkenoo (2000)[140]

FAO CERES Medal

Front Page award[9]

Glamour magazine's "The 75 Most Important Women of the Past 75 Years" (Steinem was listed as one of them) (2014)[141]

Library Lion award (2015)[142]

National Gay Rights Advocates Award[9]

National Magazine awards[9]

Parenting's Lifetime Achievement Award (1995)[9]

Presidential Medal of Freedom (2013)[145][146][147]

Rutgers University announced the Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in September 2014.[148] The Chair was created to fund teaching and research for someone (not necessarily a woman) who exemplifies Steinem's values of equal representation in the media,[149] and to have this person teach at least one undergraduate course per semester.[149]

United Nations' Ceres Medal[9]

United Nations' Society of Writers Award[9]

Women's Sports Journalism Award[9]

In 1995, Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem, by Carolyn Heilbrun, was published.

In 2005, Steinem appeared in season 2, episode 13 of The L Word

In the musical Legally Blonde, which premiered in 2007, Steinem is mentioned in the scene where Elle Woods wears a flashy Bunny costume to a party, and must pretend to be dressed as Gloria Steinem "researching her feminist manifesto 'I Was A Playboy Bunny'". (The actual name of the piece by Steinem being referred to here is "A Bunny's Tale".)

In 2013, Female Force: Gloria Steinem, a comic book by Melissa Seymour, was published.

Also in 2013, Steinem was featured in the documentary MAKERS: Women Who Make America about the feminist movement.

Also in 2014, Steinem appeared in season 6, episode 3, of the television show The Good Wife.

In Jennifer Lopez's 2016 music video for her song " Ain't Your Mama", Steinem can be heard saying part of her " Address to the Women of America" speech, specifically, "This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution."

The Gloria Steinem Papers are held in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, under collection number MS 237.

The Glorias is an American biographical film about Steinem which premiered in 2020. In the film, she is played by four actresses who portray her life at various ages: Ryan Kiera Armstrong as a child, Lulu Wilson as a teen, Alicia Vikander between the ages of 20 and 40, and Julianne Moore as an older woman.

In 2020, Steinem was portrayed by Rose Byrne in the FX miniseries Mrs. America, depicting the movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA).

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Gloria Marie Steinem (; born March 25, 1934) is an American journalist and social-political activist who emerged as a nationally recognized leader of second-wave feminism in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Steinem was a columnist for magazine and a co-founder of magazine.

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Name: Ita Buttrose

Era: 1942-

Nationality: Australian

Occupation: Journalist, author, founding editor of Cleo magazine, Editor in chief of Cleo and the Australian Women’s Weekly, TV personality, Chair of the ABC.

Social Status: Well-off at first, then divorced parents so a dip in status. Worked from 15 years of age in journalism.

Family: Journalist father (she was born in the US while her father was a New York correspondent), home-maker mother. Married early and had two children.

Workplace: Journalism offices (gendered experiences), Cleo office (mostly women), boardrooms, chat shows.

Influence: Australian of the Year for her legacy in journalism and advocacy work. Feminist icon due to her Cleo magazine dealing with women’s issues during 2nd Wave feminism. Youngest ever female editor at the Telegraph at 23yrs old.

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Ita Clare Buttrose is an Australian TV network chairperson, television and radio personality, author and former magazine editor, publishing executive and newspaper journalist.

She was the founding editor of , a high-circulation magazine aimed at women aged 20 to 40 that was frank about sexuality (and, in its infancy, featured nude male centrefolds) and, later, the editor of the more conventional The Australian Women's Weekly. She was the youngest person to be appointed editor of The Weekly, which was then, per capita, the largest-selling magazine in the world.

Buttrose was a panellist on the Network Ten morning program from 2013 until 2018.

In 2019 Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Buttrose as the new chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Buttrose was born at Potts Point, Sydney, and named after her maternal grandmother, Ita Clare Rodgers (née Rosenthal), pronounced (rhyming with 'fighter'). She was raised as a Catholic by her parents. Buttrose's father, Charles Oswald Buttrose, was a journalist and at one time the editor of The Daily Mirror in Sydney. By her own account she had decided on a career in journalism at the age of 11. Buttrose spent her first five years in New York City when her father was the New York correspondent for The Daily Mirror. She has Jewish ancestry on her maternal side.

The family returned to Australia in 1949 and settled in the harbourside suburb of Vaucluse. Her parents divorced during her teens, after 25 years of marriage, and details of her father's private life were printed in the tabloid press, causing considerable anguish to her mother. Buttrose briefly attended a private school but because her father could not afford the fees she was then moved to a public school. She completed her secondary education at Dover Heights Home Science High School, leaving at 15 to begin her career.

She started her career at Australian Consolidated Press, owned by the Packer family, working as a copy girl at The Australian Women's Weekly, then became a cadet journalist on The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph in Sydney. Her first byline came in 1959 when the 17-year-old covered the Australian tour by Princess Alexandra.

Buttrose was appointed women's editor of the Telegraph at just 23 years old. In 1966 she won a racetrack fashion contest run by a rival newspaper, for which the first prize was an overseas trip, including a visit to Expo 67 in Montreal. Buttrose and her husband then stopped in England in 1967 where she worked for a time on the British national magazine before giving birth to her first child, a daughter, Kate. It was after her daughter's birth that she received a telegram from Sir Frank Packer, head of Australian Consolidated Press, offering her back her former job as women's editor at the Telegraph. The family then returned to Australia.

In 1971 Buttrose was chosen as founding editor of a new Australian women's magazine. This was originally to have been an Australian edition of the renowned American magazine Cosmopolitan, but the deal fell through after Hearst Magazines sold the Cosmopolitan rights to longtime Packer rivals Fairfax, so Packer and Buttrose set about creating a new publication, dubbed Cleo which they launched in 1972, several months ahead of its rival. Cleo was an instant hit, selling its entire original print run in just two days; the magazine broke new ground in Australian mainstream publishing, featuring the first nude male centrefold (actor Jack Thompson) and frank articles on female sexuality and other topics, leading to the inclusion of the first sealed section in an Australian magazine. During the early months of the magazine, Buttrose became pregnant with her second child, Ben, but with the grudging support of the Packers she worked through her pregnancy; an unusual feat for that time as it was still common for women to have to give up work permanently after they became pregnant.

Buttrose edited Cleo until 1975, when she was appointed editor of the Packers' flagship magazine, The Australian Women's Weekly (1975-76), then she became editor-in-chief of both publications from 1976 to 1978, before being appointed Publisher of Australian Consolidated Press Women's Division from 1978 to 1981. In 1981 she left the Packers after their rival Rupert Murdoch offered her the job of Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph in 1981, making her the first female editor of a major metropolitan newspaper in Australia, a position she held until 1984; she was also appointed to the board of News Limited. She made frequent appearances on radio and TV and in 1980, her media prominence led to her becoming the subject of the song " Ita", recorded by rock band Cold Chisel, which was included on their successful album.

Buttrose was the chairperson of the National Advisory Committee on AIDS (NACAIDS) from 1984 until 1988. On one occasion, she appeared personally in a nationwide TV campaign to explain that donating blood at a blood bank did not pose a risk of catching AIDS (the fear of which had caused a significant drop in donations).

After her stint with News Limited, Buttrose founded her own publishing company, Capricorn Publishing, and launched her own magazine, Ita, but this eventually folded and she launched a new company, the Good Life Publishing Company, which in 2005 published bark!, a lifestyle magazine aimed at dog owners.

Ita Buttrose at La Traviata at Handa Opera on Sydney Harbour 2012

Buttrose is also a prolific author and has published nine books, including her autobiography, A Passionate Life. In 2011 Penguin published A Guide to Australian Etiquette.

Ita Buttrose at the AACTA Awards with Ross Steele AM

Buttrose was a regular on Beauty and the Beast in the 1990s and early 2000s. Buttrose was also a regular commentator on the Nine Network breakfast show and was at one point considered to replace Kerri-Anne Kennerley in the network's morning slot.

In June 2013, Buttrose joined Network Ten where she hosted morning program Studio 10 two mornings a week for the station alongside Joe Hildebrand, Sarah Harris, Denise Drysdale and Jessica Rowe. The show premiered in late 2013. However, 2016 saw Buttrose reduce her appearances on the program to just twice a week to spend more time with her grandchildren.

Ita made a cameo appearance in episode 7547 of The Bold and the Beautiful alongside Brendan Jones and Amanda Keller as a news reporter airing in March 2017.

Buttrose at the premiere of Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

In April 2018, Buttrose resigned as panelist on Studio 10 to focus on other parts of her life, including spending more time with her grandchildren and writing.

Since leaving Network Ten, Buttrose has appeared on The Morning Show on the Seven Network and filled in for Sonia Kruger on Today Extra on the Nine Network. In 2019 she was appointed chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). She has decided not to seek re-appointment for a second term, meaning her tenure will end in March 2024.

In 2011 she was elected President of Alzheimer's Australia until end of June 2014. She is currently an ambassador for Alzheimer's Australia.

Buttrose is or has been a patron of Women of Vision, World Vision Australia, the Macular Disease Foundation of Australia, the University of the Third Age, the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation of Australia, Amarant, the National Menopause Foundation, the Sydney Women's Festival, Safety House, and the National Institute of Secretaries and Administrators.{{cn))

Buttrose is also an ambassador of the Australian Women Chamber of Commerce (AWCCI) and sits on the AWCCI Advisory Board. She works on the professional speakers' circuit.

Buttrose was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1979, and appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 1988. In 2003, she was awarded the Centenary Medal. Buttrose was inducted to the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in 2001, and advanced to Companion of the Order of Australia in 2019.

In August 2017 Buttrose was recognised for Outstanding Lifetime Achievement at the annual Kennedy Awards for Excellence in Journalism.

In 1984 she was named the Variety Club 'Personality of the Year' as well as winning the Australasian Academy of Broadcast, Arts and Sciences for the 'Most Promising Newcomer to Radio'. In 1993 Buttrose was named Juvenile Diabetes Foundation's 'Australian of the Year'.

In April 2011, Buttrose and Cleo were the subject of the ABC-TV two-part telemovie Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo, starring Asher Keddie as Buttrose, Rob Carlton as Kerry Packer and Tony Barry as Frank Packer.

In January 2013, Buttrose was named the 2013 Australian of the Year.

She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Macquarie University in 2014 in recognition of her contribution to the arts. In 2015, she was awarded a second honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the University of Wollongong for her distinguished service to Australian society and for her commitment to advocating for vulnerable people in the community. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of the university degree by the University of New South Wales in 2018 in recognition of her eminent service to health, and for being an inspirational role model for aspiring women in business and for those wanting to make a difference in society.

At 21 years of age, Buttrose married architect Alasdair "Mac" Macdonald and had two children. In 1975, while editing The Australian Women's Weekly, her marriage to Macdonald broke down and the couple divorced in 1976. Later she met Peter Sawyer and they married in 1979. By her own account it was "not a very happy marriage"; Sawyer left in 1980 and they subsequently divorced.

Buttrose cared for her father after he was diagnosed with vascular dementia. He died in 1999.

In his 2007 book Who Killed Channel Nine?, former Nine Network producer Gerald Stone claimed that Buttrose and Kerry Packer conducted a private but intense affair during Buttrose's tenure on Cleo. Stone also claimed that Packer even offered to marry her but she rejected the idea and they split after a "blazing row". Buttrose herself has repeatedly declined to comment on the matter.

Buttrose resides in Sydney.

Buttrose has authored or co-authored 10 books:

A Guide to Australian Etiquette (2011)

Eating for Eye Health: the Macular Degeneration Cookbook, co-authored with Sydney chef Vanessa Jones (2009)

Get in Shape: A complete workout for strength, health & vitality, co-authored with Lee Campbell (2007)

Motherguilt: Australian women reveal their true feelings about Motherhood, co-authored with Dr Penny Adams (2005; reprinted 2006)

How Much Is Enough? Your Financial Roadmap to a Happy Retirement, co- authored with Will Buttrose and Mike Galgut (2003)

What is Love? (2000)

A Word to the Wise (1999)

A Passionate Life (1998; updated paperback version published 2001)

Every Occasion: The Guide to Modern Etiquette (1985)

Early Edition: My First Forty Years (1985)

"Ita Buttrose AO, OBE: Journalist, businesswoman, television personality and author", pp. [52]-55, in: The world we see: leadership lessons from Australia's iconic change makers, Sarah Liu, 2016 (ISBN 9780646958804)

Foreword: Martins, Ralph and Ragg, Mark. Understanding Alzheimer's: the complete Australian guide to the management and prevention of Alzheimer's (2013, Pan Macmillan Australia).

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Ita Clare Buttrose is an Australian TV network chairperson, television and radio personality, author and former magazine editor, publishing executive and newspaper journalist. She was the founding editor of , a high-circulation magazine aimed at women aged 20 to 40 that was frank about sexuality (and, in its infancy, featured nude male centrefolds) and, later, the editor of the more conventional The Australian Women's Weekly .

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Name: Oprah Winfrey

Era: 1954-

Nationality: African American

Occupation: Businesswoman, Talk-show host, producer, actor, author, philanthropist.

Social Status: Extremely poor beginnings to extremely rich in adulthood (North America’s first black multibillionaire).

Family: Raised by her single teenage mother, suffered sexual abuse, had a child who died at birth when 14yrs old, lived teenage years with her father. Has a longstanding partner and no living children.

Workplace: Newsrooms, Oprah Winfrey Show talk show offices/studio for 25 years.

Influence: Hosted the highest-rated TV chat show in US history. Spoke directly to women, many housewives, about self-improvement, spirituality, literature, and self-help. Was a role model for black women and full-figured women. Opened and teaches at the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, South Africa. A link to Gloria Steinem’s Ms. Magazine “The November 1988 Ms. observed that "in a society where fat is taboo, she made it in a medium that worships thin and celebrates a bland, white-bread prettiness of body and personality [...] But Winfrey made fat sexy, elegant – damned near gorgeous – with her drop-dead wardrobe, easy body language, and cheerful sensuality.".

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“Oprah” redirects here. Not to be confused with Orpah or Opera.

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Name: Chandrika Kumaratunga

Era: 1945-

Nationality: Sri Lankan

Occupation: First female President of Sri Lanka, member of the Council of Women World Leaders and the Global Leadership Foundation.

Social Status: Financially well-off due to her parents both being Sri Lankan Prime Ministers but lived in danger and spent time in Europe for education and safety reasons.

Family: Daughter of an assassinated Prime Minister (father) and Prime Minister mother – the world’s first female Prime Minister. Widowed to an actor/politician who was assassinated, has two children.

Workplace: Parliament (gendered environment).

Influence: Her legacy as the first female President is inspiring to many women, but as the Chair of the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation, her efforts to create a unified and peaceful Sri Lanka continue. This influence has an enormous effect on women and girls, who are the worst-off during times of conflict, both economically, educationally, and physically (many UN articles on this fact). In 2018 she was awarded the French Legion of Honour, the highest rank of the National Order of France for her military and peace efforts.

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Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga ( Sinhala: චන්ද්‍රිකා බණ්ඩාරනායක කුමාරතුංග, Tamil: சந்திரிகா பண்டாரநாயக்க குமாரதுங்க; born 29 June 1945) is a Sri Lankan politician who served as the fifth President of Sri Lanka, from 12 November 1994 to 19 November 2005. The country's only female president to date, she is the daughter of two former prime ministers and was the leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) until the end of 2005. In 2015 she was appointed as the chairperson of office for national unity and reconciliation.

Chandrika Bandaranaike was born on June 29, 1945 at Wentworth in Guidford Crescent, Colombo to Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike and Sirima Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike.[citation needed ] The family moved the year later to a mansion at Rosmead Place, Colombo purchased by her paternal grandfather.

Her father S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike was an Oxford educated barrister who was the Minister of Local Administration at the time of her birth. A nationalist and left wing politician, who had by the time build up a strong following known as the Sinhala Maha Sabha. He was the only son of Sir Solomon Dias Bandaranike, the Maha Mudaliyar, the chief Ceylonese representative and advisor to the Governor of Ceylon. Her mother Sirima Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike, was the daughter of Barnes Ratwatte Dissawa, Rate Mahatmaya of Balangoda during British colonial rule, who was a descended from Ratwatte Dissawa, Dissawa of Matale, a signatory on behalf of the Sinhalese to the Kandyan Convention of 1815.

Young Chandrika grew up in comfort of the wealthy Bandaranaike family at their mansion at Rosmead Place in Colombo and at their family seat of Horagolla Walauwa, which was her father's constituency. Her early years saw her father's rising political career as he became the first Cabinet Minister of Health and Local Government when Ceylon gained its independence in 1948 and his dramatic departure from the governing party to form his own party, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) with his follows of the Sinhala Maha Sabha in 1951. Contesting the elections that followed and strengthening the SLFP in the periods between elections; Bandaranaike became the Leader of the Opposition in 1952 and Prime Minister in 1956. As prime minister he initiated several controversial legislation that struct racial discords in the island and he was assassinated in 1959, when Chandrika was fourteen. Following the assassination Bandaranaike's grieving widow took over the leadership of the SLFP and led it to an election victory making her the first female prime minister in the world, in 1960. Therefore, Chandrika was involved in politics from a young age along with her siblings as she was the second of three children in the family. Her elder sister Sunethra Bandaranaike became a socialite and her younger brother Anura Bandaranaike joined active politics, going on to become a cabinet minister and Speaker of the Parliament of Sri Lanka.

Chandrika was educated at the St Bridget's Convent, Colombo, and enrolled at the Roman Catholic Aquinas University College, Colombo to study for a law degree. However, in 1967, she left Aquinas without completing her law studies to France on a scholarship from the Institute of French Studies. There she spent one year at the Institut d'études politiques d'Aix-en-Provence following a course in the French language and culture. In 1968, she went on to study at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) graduating with a diploma in political science in 1970, thereafter enrolling in a PhD program in development economics, at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, where she studied from 1970 to 1973 She is fluent in Sinhala, English and French.

She returned to Ceylon in 1972, where her mother had become prime minister for a second time in 1970 and launched a wide-ranging programme of socialist reform and faced a violent communist insurrection in 1971. After returning she enrolled in and became active in the SLFP which had been founded by her father and now led by her mother. In 1974, she became an executive committee member of its Women's League.

She was appointed as an Additional Principal Director in the Land Reforms Commission (LRC) which acquired nearly 228,000 hectares of private land to the state under the Land Reform Law, which imposed a ceiling of twenty hectares on privately owned land. Leaving the LRC in 1976, she became the chairman of the Janawasa Commission, which established collective farms from land acquired by the LRC. Following the defeat of her mother's SLFP government in the 1977 general election, she left government service and acted as a consultant to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations till 1979.

In 1978, she married Vijaya Kumaratunga a leading actor and LSSP turned SLFP political activist. She supported his election campaign in the by-election in Mahara in 1983, where he lost in the recount. She left the SLFP in 1984, when Vijaya Kumaratunga formed his own party the Sri Lanka Mahajana Pakshaya (SLMP) supporting his political activities against the policies of the mainstream parties. She served as the Vice President of the SLMP. This resulted in her falling out with her mother and brother who were leading the SLFP at the time. On 16 February 1988, Vijaya Kumaratunga was assassinated in front of his home in Narahenpita by gunmen in the presence of his wife. Chandrika Kumaratunga briefly took over the leadership of her husband's party, and formed the United Socialist Alliance with the Communist Party of Sri Lanka, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, and the Nava Sama Samaja Party. Although it was well organized, it lacked votes. Fearing for her life, she soon fled the country in 1988, seeking refuge in the United Kingdom. There she worked for World Institute for Development Economics Research at the United Nations University. During her absence the SLMP had split into two factions during this time and had ousted her from its leadership.

Following the end of the second JVP insurrection, Chandrika began visiting Sri Lanka in 1990 and re-engaging politics. In September 1991, the governing United National Party which had been dominating the political landscape was greatly weakened when Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake left the UNP and formed the Democratic United National Front following a failed impeachment against President Ranasinghe Premadasa. DUNF soon mobilized the opposition against the Premadasa government. Having return permanently in 1991, Chandrika rejoined SLFP and got actively involved in politics. In 1993, Athulathmudali and Premadasa were assassinated. Following Athulathmudali's assassination Chandrika became the principle opposition candidate in the Western provincial council election, in which she was elected as the Chief Minister of the Western Province on 21 May 1993.

Premiership (1994)

With general elections called for in 1994, she became the de facto leader of the SLFP forming a coalition called the People's Alliance, which contested the general elections. In the election Chandrika was elected to parliament from the Gampaha District in August 1994. Achieving a slim majority in parliament by gaining the support of the Ceylon Workers' Congress, the PA formed a government with Chandrika as prime minister with her mother as a minister in the cabinet on 19 August 1994. She also succeeded her mother as the leader of the SLFP. Soon thereafter presidential elections were called for in November.

Presidency (1994-2005)

First term (1994-1999)

Prime Minister Kumaratunga backed by the PA contested against Gamini Dissanayake, who was the leader of the opposition backed by the UNP. However Dissanayake was soon assassinated by a LTTE suicide bomber and his widow Srima Dissanayake took over his nomination. Chandrika won the presidential election in 1994 gaining 62.28% of the vote. Becoming the first female President of Sri Lanka in November 1994, she appointed her mother to succeed her as prime minister.

Her government continued the open economic policies of the UNP, with increase in the major revenue earners; the apparel industry, foreign remittances from migrant unskilled labor, tea exports. Much of her major economic projects failed and the country was in recession by 2001.

She privatized several profitable state corporations such as Sri Lanka Insurance Corporation, State Distilleries Corporation, Air Lanka among others which were found to be controversial with Kumaratunga accused of taking large bribes for the sales and years later the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka annulled several such sales. She was fined by court a sum of three million rupees by court over an unlawful land acquisition and subsequent sale of such land for the Water's Edge development project.

She further followed a policy of strong prosecution of UNP, by appointing Presidential Committees to investigate actions of the UNP tenure and leading members of the opposition personally such as the leader of the opposition, Ranil Wickremasinghe. Her administration was criticized for its attacks and intimidation of journalists; rigged elections and in 2000 with the run up to the elections tried to arrest and imprison her main political opponent Wickremasinghe.

Early in her term she made conciliatory moves towards the separatist Tamil Tigers (LTTE) in an attempt to end the ongoing civil war. These overtures failed, when the LTTE broke the cease-fire and blew up two Sri Lanka Navy gunboats known as SLNS Sooraya and SLNS Ranasuru on 19 April 1995. She thereafter pursued a more military-based strategy against them launching several major offensives such as Operation Riviresa which captured the Jaffna peninsula from the LTTE. However she suffered major set back due to the Battle of Mullaitivu in 1996 and Battle of Kilinochchi in 1998. Her government thereafter launched Operation Jayasikurui which soon bogged down with heavy casualties.

Her government, led by Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar succeeded in increasing the recognition and acceptance of Sri Lanka on the international stage, which had been greatly affected by the riots and suppression of insurgency in the 1980s. She succeeded in having the LTTE banned internationally; with the United States and the United Kingdom proscribed the LTTE on 8 October 1997 and 28 February 2001 respectively, thereby depriving that organisation of a primary source of funding. Her government reestablished formal diplomatic ties with Israel in 2000, which had become a major supplier of weapons to the island.

Second term (1999-2005)

In October 1999, Kumaratunga called an early presidential election. She lost vision in her right eye (permanent optic nerve damage) in an assassination attempt, by the Tamil Tigers, at her final election rally at Colombo Town Hall premises on 18 December 1999. She managed to defeat Ranil Wickremasinghe in the election held on 21 December and was sworn in for another term the next day.

Her second term saw the civil war aggravating with her government suffering major defeats against the LTTE such as the Second Battle of Elephant Pass and Bandaranaike Airport attack. 2001 saw the country's economy going into recession for the first time in history.

UNP Government 2001-2004

In December 2001, her party the People's Alliance lost the parliamentary election to the UNP, and her political opponent, Ranil Wickremasinghe, became Sri Lanka's new prime minister. She continued as president of Sri Lanka although her relationship with the Wickremasinghe government was a strained one.

In February 2002 Wickremasinghe's government and the LTTE signed a permanent ceasefire agreement, paving the way for talks to end the long-running conflict. In December, the government and the rebels agreed to share power during peace talks in Norway. President Kumaratunga believed Wickremasinghe was being too lenient towards the LTTE, and in May 2003 she indicated her willingness to sack the prime minister and government if she felt they were making too many concessions to the rebels. On 4 November 2003, while Prime Minister Wickremasinghe was on an official visit to the US, Kumaratunga prorogued Parliament and took over Defense, Interior and Media ministries herself. Her opponents criticised her, calling her behaviour dictatorial.

UPFA Government 2004-2005

Kumaratunga's PA and the leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna or JVP (People's Liberation Front) formed the United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) in January 2004 and dissolved Parliament. Having won the election held on 2 April 2004 the UPFA formed a government with Mahinda Rajapaksa as prime minister. This marked the first time in history that the JVP became a partner in a Sri Lankan government. However, in June 2005, the JVP left Kumaratunga's government over a disagreement regarding a joint mechanism with LTTE rebels sharing foreign aid to rebuild the tsunami-devastated Northern and Eastern areas of Sri Lanka.

Kumaratunga's six-year term ended that year in 2005. She argued that since the 1999 election had been held one year early, she should be allowed to serve that leftover year stating that she had a secret swearing in for her second term a year after her formal swearing in to the second term. The Supreme Court rejected this stating that her term ended in 2005.

In the presidential elections that followed, Mahinda Rajapaksa gained 50.29% and succeeded her as president, leading all 25 parties in the UPFA. She was listed 25th by Forbes magazine in its "100 most powerful women" in 2005.

In 2006, having remained the leader of the SLFP after leaving office, she "temporally" stepped down from the party leadership citing "continuous harassment she has faced after Mahinda Rajapaksa took office as president" and soon after left the country to self-imposed exile in the United Kingdom.

Kumaratunga is a member of the Council of Women World Leaders and the Global Leadership Foundation. In November 2009, Kumaratunga was appointed to the 12-member board of directors of the Club de Madrid. She is a frequent panelist and member of the Clinton Global Initiative and advisor to its annual meeting held every September.

Kumaratunga noted in 2007: ″I sincerely tried to reach a political consensus to solve the ethnic question, and tried to introduce a pluralistic constitution that would cater to the political aspirations of the Tamil people without dividing the country.″ In September 2009, Kumaratunga, on a personal visit to Kerala, India told reporters "I too care for my life. Even though the current government is a government of my party (Sri Lanka Freedom Party) I don't feel safe." She continued, "There is an overall lack of freedom and an atmosphere of fear prevails in the country. The basic rights of the people and media freedom are restricted in Sri Lanka." In February 2017, Kumaratunga accepted an invitation to join the eminent international Council of Patrons of the Asian University for Women (AUW) in Chittagong, Bangladesh.

On 21 November 2014 Kumaratunga formally announced her return to active politics at a press conference held by the country's opposition coalition, following weeks of speculation regarding her involvement in the coalition's decision-making. She successfully endorsed Maithripala Sirisena as common candidate of the opposition in the 2015 Presidential election, who defeated Mahinda Rajapaksa. In the same year, Kumaratunga supported the United National Party in the General elections to avoid Rajapaksa becoming Prime Minister. In 2015 she was appointed as the chairperson of office for national unity and reconciliation to overlook national unity in Sri Lanka.

In the aftermath of the 2018 Maldivian presidential election it was revealed that Kumaratunga was instrumental in forming the opposition alliance against the incumbent President Abdulla Yameen. Kumaratunga coordinated with opposition leaders both in the Maldives and in Sri Lanka bridging trust between the disputing opposition parties to form a coalition.

During the 2018 Sri Lankan constitutional crisis, Kumaratunga remained silent and she later claimed that she was not invited to the special convention of the SLFP 4 December 2018.

Kumaratunga supported Sajith Premadasa for the Presidential Election 2019.

Chandrika married movie star and politician Vijaya Kumaratunga in 1978, who was assassinated on 16 February 1988, outside his residence in the presence of Chandrika and their two children, then aged five and seven.

Their daughter, Yasodhara Kumaratunga born in 1980 and educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and at St George's, University of London became a medical doctor and married Roger Walker a consultant medical practitioner from Dorset. Their son, Vimukthi Kumaratunga born in 1982 and educated at the University of Bristol became a veterinary surgeon.

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Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga ( Sinhala: චන්ද්‍රිකා බණ්ඩාරනායක කුමාරතුංග, Tamil: சந்திரிகா பண்டாரநாயக்க குமாரதுங்க; born 29 June 1945) is a Sri Lankan politician who served as the fifth President of Sri Lanka, from 12 November 1994 to 19 November 2005.

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Name: Malala Yousafzai

Era: 1997-

Nationality: Pakistani

Occupation: Activist for female education, Mala Fund founder.

Social Status: Lower-middle class family, respected in their community.

Family: Daughter to an illiterate homemaker mother and a father, an education equality activist and owner of a chain of private schools. She has two younger brothers. The household was a hive of political and social discussion, with Mala’s father, and Malala being open activists for anti-Taliban oppression and pro equal rights for female education (which led to her being shot by the Taliban).

Workplace: Graduated from Oxford Uni in 2020. Work of global influence held in UN assembly meetings and the Mala Fund office.

Influence: Her activism through her BBC blogging as an 11 year old and a documentary participant had such influence that the Taliban targeted her. Her UN speeches and being the youngest recipient of the UN Peace prize have influenced both powerful politicians and ordinary students around the world. Her continued work on the Mala Fund and its website content, continues to educate and inspire to both increase gender equality in Education and to inspire activism in young girls and women.

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Name: Geena Davis

Era: 1956-

Nationality: American

Occupation: Actor, gender equality advocate (the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media), model, executive producer.

Social Status: Middle class. Public school education but had the opportunity to be an exchange student in Sweden.

Family: Daughter of a teacher’s assistant (mother) and a Civil Engineer and church deacon (father). Has a brother. Has been married three times and has three children.

Workplace: Hollywood (gendered #MeToo), Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

Influence: Her voice during the #MeToo movement in Hollywood was influential but it’s her work on gender equality in the media industry that will see lasting change. Her on-the-ground efforts to increase female representation in film and TV characters, and to also reduce harmful gendered stereotypes of women and girls, plus to see an increase of character diversity in all its forms, have awarded her two Humanitarian Awards.

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Virginia Elizabeth " Geena" Davis (born January 21, 1956) is an American actor and producer. She is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award.

After studying drama at Boston University, Davis made her acting debut in the film (1982) and eventually starred in the thriller (1986), which proved to be one of her first box office hits. While the fantasy comedy Beetlejuice (1988) brought her to prominence, the drama The Accidental Tourist (1988) earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She established herself as a leading lady with the road film Thelma & Louise (1991), for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress, and the sports film A League of Their Own (1992), garnering a Golden Globe Award nomination. However, Davis's roles in the box office failures Cutthroat Island (1995) and The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), both directed by then-husband Renny Harlin, were followed by a lengthy break and downturn in her career.

Davis starred as the adoptive mother of the titular character in the Stuart Little franchise (1999-2005) and as the first female president of the United States in the television series Commander in Chief (2005-2006), winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Television Series Drama for her role in the latter. Her later films include Accidents Happen (2009) and Marjorie Prime (2017). She has portrayed the recurring role of Dr. Nicole Herman in Grey's Anatomy (2014-2015, 2018) and that of Regan MacNeil/Angela Rance in the first season of the horror television series The Exorcist (2017).

In 2004, Davis launched the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which works collaboratively with the entertainment industry to dramatically increase the presence of female characters in media. Through the organization, she launched the annual Bentonville Film Festival in 2015, and executive produced the documentary This Changes Everything in 2018. Thanks to the organization, she was awarded with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award bestowed by the Academy Awards in 2019 and with the Governors Award given by the Primetime Emmy Awards in 2022.

Davis was born on January 21, 1956, in Wareham, Massachusetts. Her mother, Lucille (), was a teacher's assistant, and her father, William F. Davis, was a civil engineer and church deacon. Both were from small towns in Vermont. Davis has an older brother, Danforth ("Dan").

She became interested in music at an early age. She learned piano and flute and played organ well enough as a teenager to be organist at her Congregational church in Wareham. Davis was also a cheerleader and was cheer captain her senior year of high school. She attended Wareham High School and was an exchange student in Sandviken, Sweden, where she became fluent in Swedish. She wanted to study acting at Boston University but missed the required audition during her year in Sweden, so she began her college education at New England College before transferring to Boston University; she didn't earn enough credits to graduate, having received an incomplete in at least one class and an F in movement class. Her first post-university work was as a model for window mannequins at Ann Taylor; she then signed with New York's Zoli modeling agency.

In her 2022 memoir, she states that her brother came up with the nickname Geena shortly after her birth to differentiate her from her Aunt Virginia, who went by the nickname Ginny.

Davis was working as a model when she was cast by director Sydney Pollack in his film (1982) as a soap opera actor, whom she has described as "someone who's going to be in their underwear a lot of time". It was the second most profitable film of 1982, received ten Academy Awards nominations and is considered a classic. She next won the regular part of Wendy Killian in the television series Buffalo Bill, which aired from June 1983 to March 1984; and had a writing credit in one episode. Despite the series' eleven Emmy Awards nominations, lukewarm ratings led to its cancellation after two seasons. Davis concurrently guest-starred in Knight Rider, , Family Ties and Remington Steele, and followed with a series of her own, , which lasted 13 episodes. During this period, she also auditioned for the 1984 science fiction/action filmThe Terminator, reading for the lead role of Sarah Connor, which eventually went to Linda Hamilton. In (1985), an action comedy, she appeared with Chevy Chase as the colleague of a Los Angeles Times undercover reporter trying to expose drug trafficking on the beaches of Los Angeles. She also starred in the horror comedy Transylvania 6-5000 as a nymphomaniac vampire alongside future husband Jeff Goldblum. They also starred in the sci-fi thriller (1986), loosely based on George Langelaan's 1957 short story of the same name, where Davis portrayed a science journalist and an eccentric scientist's love interest. It was a commercial success and helped establish her as an actor. In 1987 she appeared with Goldblum again in the offbeat comedy Earth Girls Are Easy.

Davis at the 61st Academy Awards in 1989

Director Tim Burton cast Davis in his film Beetlejuice (1988) as one of a recently deceased young couple who become ghosts haunting their former house; it also starred Alec Baldwin, Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder. It made $73.7 million from a budget of $15 million, and Davis's performance and the overall film received mostly positive reviews.

Davis took on the role of an animal hospital employee and dog trainer with a sickly son in the drama The Accidental Tourist (1988), opposite William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. Critic Roger Ebert, who gave the film four stars out of four, wrote: "Davis, as Muriel, brings an unforced wackiness to her role in scenes like the one where she belts out a song while she's doing the dishes. But she is not as simple as she sometimes seems [...]". The film was a critical and commercial success, and she received an Oscar as Best Supporting Actress for her appearance in it.

Davis appeared as the girlfriend of a man who, dressed as a clown, robs a bank in midtown Manhattan, in the comedy Quick Change (1990). Based on a book of the same name by Jay Cronley, it is a remake of the 1985 French film starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. Despite modest box office returns, the Chicago Tribune found the lead actors "funny and creative while keeping their characters life-size". Davis next starred with Susan Sarandon in Ridley Scott's road film Thelma & Louise (1991), as friends who embark on a road trip with unforeseen consequences. A critical and commercial success, it is considered a classic, as it influenced other films and artistic works and became a landmark feminist film. Davis received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her role. It also featured Brad Pitt in his breakout role as a drifter; in his 2020 acceptance speech for Best Supporting Actor, Pitt thanked director Ridley Scott and Geena Davis for "giving me my first shot."

In 1992, Davis starred alongside Madonna and Tom Hanks in A League of Their Own as a baseball player on an all-women's team. It reached number one at the box office, became the tenth highest-grossing film of the year in North America, and brought Davis a Best Actress Golden Globe Award nomination. She played a television reporter in the comedy (also 1992) alongside Dustin Hoffman and Andy Garcia. Although it flopped at the box office, Roger Ebert felt Davis was "bright and convincing as the reporter (her best line, after surviving the plane crash, is shouted through an ambulance door: "This is my story! I did the research!")".

In 1994's , Davis played an office worker who lives in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn and dreams of a better life. The film received mixed reviews from critics, despite much praise for Davis, and was a commercial failure. In her other 1994 release, Speechless, Davis reunited with Michael Keaton to play insomniac writers who fall in love until they realize that both are writing speeches for rival candidates in a New Mexico election. Despite negative reviews and modest box office returns, she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Musical or Comedy for her performance.

Davis in 2004

Davis teamed up with her then-husband, director Renny Harlin, for the films Cutthroat Island (1995) and The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), with Harlin hoping that they would turn her into an action star. While The Long Kiss Goodnight managed to become a moderate success, Cutthroat Island flopped critically and commercially and was once listed as having the "largest box office loss" by Guinness World Records. The film is credited to be a contributing factor in the demise of Davis as a bankable star. By the mid and late 1990s, Davis's film career had become less noteworthy and critical acclaim had waned. She divorced Harlin in 1998 and took an "unusually long" two years off to reflect on her career, according to The New York Times. In a 2016 interview with Vulture, she recalled: "Film roles really did start to dry up when I got into my 40s. If you look at IMDb, up until that age, I made roughly one film a year. In my entire 40s, I made one movie, Stuart Little. I was getting offers, but for nothing meaty or interesting like in my 30s. I'd been completely ruined and spoiled. I mean, I got to play a pirate captain! I got to do every type of role, even if the movie failed." She appeared as Eleanor Little in the well-received family comedy Stuart Little (1999), a role she reprised in Stuart Little 2 (2002) and again in Stuart Little 3: Call of the Wild (2005).

Davis starred in the sitcom The Geena Davis Show, which aired for one season on ABC during the 2000-01 U.S. television season. She went on to star in the ABC television series Commander in Chief, portraying the first female president of the United States. While this role garnered her a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama Series in 2006, the series was cancelled after its first season; Davis admitted she was "devastated" by its cancellation in a 2016 interview. "I still haven't gotten over it. I really wanted it to work. It was on Tuesday nights opposite , which wasn't ideal. But we were the best new show that fall. Then, in January, we were opposite American Idol. They said, 'The ratings are going to suffer, so we should take you off the air for the entire run of Idol, and bring it back in May. I put a lot of time and effort into getting it on another network, too, but it didn't work". She was also nominated for an Emmy Award and a SAG Award for Outstanding Female Actor in a Drama Series. She was awarded the 2006 Women in Film Lucy Award.

Davis was the only American actor to be cast in the Australian-produced film Accidents Happen (2009), portraying a foul-mouthed and strict mother. She stated that it was the most fun she had ever had on a film set, and felt a deep friendship and connection to both of the actors who played her sons. Written by Brian Carbee and based on his own childhood and adolescence, the film received a limited theatrical release and mixed reviews from critics. Variety found it to be "led by a valiant Geena Davis", despite a "script that mistakes abuse for wit".

Following a long period of intermittent work, Davis often ventured into television acting, and through her organization, the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, saw her career expand during the 2010s. In 2012, she starred as a psychiatrist in the miniseries , based on the 1977 novel by Robin Cook and the subsequent 1978 film. She played a powerful female movie executive in the critically acclaimed comedy (2013), the directorial debut of Lake Bell. Bell found her only dialogue to be her favorite in the film and called it her "soapbox moment".

In 2014, Davis provided her voice for the English version of the Studio Ghibli animated film When Marnie Was There, as she was drawn to the film's abundant stories and strong use of female characters. She played the recurring role of Dr. Nicole Herman, an attending fetal surgeon with a life-threatening brain tumor, during the 11th season of Grey's Anatomy (2014-15). In 2015, Davis launched an annual film festival to be held in Bentonville, Arkansas, to highlight diversity in film, accepting films that prominently feature minorities and women in the cast and crew. The first Bentonville Film Festival took place from May 5-9, 2015. Davis appeared as the mother of a semi-famous television star in the comedy (2016).

In the television series The Exorcist (2016), based on the 1973 film of the same name, Davis took on the role of grown-up Regan MacNeil, who has renamed herself Angela Rance to find peace and anonymity from her ordeal as a child. The Exorcist was a success with critics and audiences. In 2017, Davis starred in the film adaptation Marjorie Prime, alongside Jon Hamm, playing the daughter of an 85-year old experiencing the first symptoms of Alzheimer's disease, and appeared as the imaginary god of a heavyset 13-year-old girl in the comedy Don't Talk to Irene. Vanity Fair wrote that she stole "every scene" in Marjorie Prime, while Variety, on her role in Don't Talk to Irene, remarked: "There's no arguing the preternatural coolness of Geena Davis-a fact celebrated in self-conscious fashion by Don't Talk to Irene, a familiar type of coming-of-age film whose most distinguishing feature is the presence of the actress".

In 2018, Davis returned to Grey's Anatomy, reprising the role of Dr. Nicole Herman in the show's 14th season, and executive produced the documentary This Changes Everything, in which she was also interviewed about her experiences in the industry. The film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was named first runner-up for the People's Choice Award: Documentaries. In 2019, she joined the voice cast of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power as Huntara, and executive produced CBS educational show Mission Unstoppable through her organization. The same year, she joined the cast of as Sandy Devereaux St. Clair, a former showgirl turned entertainment director of the Fan-Tan Hotel and Casino. In 2022, Davis' likeness was used for the character of Poison Ivy in the DC Entertainment comic book series , set between the events of Batman Returns (1992) and (2023).Davis has been a frequent guest narrator at Disney's Candlelight Processional, appearing at Disneyland in 2015 and Disney World in 2011, 2012, and 2019.

In October 2022, HarperOne published Davis's Dying of Politeness: A Memoir of her journey from childhood conventional New England femininity and trauma to feminist "badassery", one role at a time, on screen and in the real world.

Davis and her ex-husband Reza Jarrahy in 2009

Davis began dating restaurateur Richard Emmolo in December 1977 and moved in with him a month later. The two married on March 25, 1981, but separated in February 1983 and divorced on June 27, 1984. She then dated future Thelma & Louise co-star Christopher McDonald, to whom she was briefly engaged.

In 1985, she met her second husband, actor Jeff Goldblum, on the set of Transylvania 6-5000. The couple married on November 1, 1987, and appeared together in two more films: and Earth Girls Are Easy. Davis filed for divorce in October 1990, and it was finalized the following year. In 2022, Davis told that her relationship with him "was a magical chapter in my life."

Bodyguard Gavin de Becker was Davis' boyfriend during the early 1990s. After a five-month courtship, she married filmmaker Renny Harlin on September 18, 1993. He directed her in Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight. Davis filed for divorce on August 26, 1997, a day after her personal assistant Tiffany Browne gave birth to a child fathered by Harlin. The divorce became final in June 1998.

In 1998, Davis started dating Iranian-American craniofacial plastic surgeon Reza Jarrahy, and allegedly married him on September 1, 2001. They have three children: a daughter born April 2002, and fraternal twin sons born May 2004. In May 2018, Jarrahy filed for divorce from Davis, listing their date of separation as November 15, 2017. Davis responded by filing a petition in which she claimed that she and Jarrahy were never legally married. Their divorce became final in December 2021. They agreed to change the last names of their two sons from "Davis-Jarrahy" to "Jarrahy".

Geena Davis in April 2011 with Dr. John Gallin at the National Institute of Health to discuss the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

Davis is a supporter of the Women's Sports Foundation and an advocate for Title IX, an Act of Congress focusing on equality in sports opportunities, now expanded to prohibit gender discrimination in American educational institutions.

In 2004, while watching children's television programs and videos with her daughter, Davis noticed an imbalance in the ratio of male to female characters. She went on to sponsor the largest-ever research project on gender in children's entertainment (resulting in four discrete studies, including one on children's television) at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. The study, directed by Stacy Smith, showed that there were nearly three male characters to every female one in the nearly 400 G, PG, PG-13, and R-rated movies analyzed. In 2005, Davis teamed up with the non-profit group Dads and Daughters to launch a venture dedicated to balancing the number of male and female characters in children's television and movie programming.

Davis launched the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media in 2007, which works collaboratively with the entertainment industry to increase the presence of female characters in media aimed at children, and to reduce inequality in Hollywood and the stereotyping of females by the male-dominated industry. For her work in this field she received an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Bates College in May 2009; and an honorary Oscar, the Academy's Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, in 2019.

In 2011, Davis became one of a handful of celebrities attached to USAID and Ad Council's FWD campaign, an awareness initiative tied to that year's East Africa drought. She joined Uma Thurman, Chanel Iman and Josh Hartnett in television and internet ads to "forward the facts" about the crisis.

In July 1999, Davis was one of 300 women who vied for a semifinals berth in the U.S. Olympic archery team to participate in the Sydney 2000 Summer Olympics. She placed 24th and did not qualify for the team, but participated as a wild-card entry in the Sydney International Golden Arrow competition. In August 1999, she stated that she was not an athlete growing up and that she entered archery in 1997, two years before her tryouts.

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Virginia Elizabeth " Geena" Davis (born January 21, 1956) is an American actor and producer. She is the recipient of various accolades, including an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award. After studying drama at Boston University, Davis made her acting debut in the film (1982) and eventually starred in the thriller (1986), which proved to be one of her first box office hits.