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HerStory: Where It All Began @ NUS connect

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Last Women's History Month NUS Women's Campaign teamed up with the HerStory project to address the lack of women in UK curricula. Susuana, NUS Women's Officer caught up with Alice Wroe the founder of HerStory to learn more about the project. What is the HerStory UK Project?

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Also known as the the godmother of rock’n’roll

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the godmother of rock & roll: sister rosetta tharpe

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The Godmother of Rock & Roll: Sister Rosetta Tharpe - BBC Four

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Documentary about gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who influenced the early rockers.

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he is a British filmmaker and novelist of Indian and South African heritage, who has made two films about lesbian relationships that are more or less modern classics within LGBT+ communities: I Can't Think Straight and The World Unseen.

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Shamim Sarif: The stories we tell ourselves

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http://inktalks.com As an award-winning writer and director, Shamim Sarif has built a career on creating strong female protagonists-and in doing so, has earned legions of fans around the world. In this contemplative talk, Shamim examines the importance of storytelling as a way to both understand ourselves and to create the lives we long for.

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Her experiments with theoretical physics are responsible for many telecommunications developments including the touch tone telephone, the portable fax, caller ID, call waiting, and the fiber optic cables that make overseas phone calls crystal clear.

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Dr Shirley Ann Jackson on Women in Science

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Dr Shirley Ann Jackson on Women in Science and her life as a scientist.

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Austrian and American film actress and inventor and inventor of WiFi. She developed a "Secret Communications System" to help combat the Nazis in World War II.

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Selma James is founder of the International Wages for Housework Campaign and author of The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, and Sex, Race, and Class – the Perspective of Winning.

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The last time Selma James was interviewed by the Guardian was in 1976, by the feminist columnist Jill Tweedie. At that time, James was a household name - in feminist households at least - and this is how Tweedie began: "To many women in the women's movement, the Wages for Housework campaigners come over like Jehovah's Witnesses ... Selma James and her sister enthusiasts ... harangue conferences, shout from soapboxes, gesticulate on television, burn with a strange fever ... On the street corner they go down well. Within the movement ... they set up a high level of irritation. Eyes roll heavenwards, figures slump in seats as yet another campaigner leaps for the platform."

Many years have passed, and James has long since been dismissed by many of her feminist contemporaries as an irrelevant, or even ridiculous, figure. Her work has been neglected; her key demand - wages for housework - written off. And yet James herself has neither stopped, nor slowed down for a moment. When we meet, she is fresh from a trip to the US. There to promote the new anthology of her writing, she became embroiled in a row that rocked the presidential race. One of Obama's team said Mitt Romney's wife Ann, a mother of five, had "never worked a day in her life", and in a flash, there was James, gesticulating on television again (the Amy Goodman show this time), explaining, yet again, about the significance of women's unwaged labour in the home. The gleam is still in her eye, she still burns with a strange fever. She is 82.

The anthology, Sex Race and Class (Merlin) is a collection of speeches, articles - mainly from now defunct leftist newspapers - and essays originally published as campaigning pamphlets. Every piece is rooted not in academic study but in activism: a campaign to defend family allowance (1973); an occupation of a church to defend prostitutes against the police (1983); a speech about Jewish anti-Zionism (2010); an account of her work with death row prisoner and "jailhouse lawyer" Mumia Abu-Jamal (2011). In the first essay, "A Woman's Place", James describes the frustrations of women's lives as housewives, mothers and workers, and ends with the words: "Things can't go on the way they are. Every woman knows that." Written in 1952, it is a prescient piece of work.

Her campaigning and her writing - the two are indivisible - spring from one central insight: that "housework" (not just vacuuming, but all the work involved in meeting the physical and emotional needs of others, from cradle to grave) is central to the reproduction of humanity, and therefore to capitalism. By focusing on the unwaged, Wages for Housework revolutionises our idea of what work is, and who the working class are. It allows us to see the potential collective power of those who are most isolated and seem powerless: women stuck at home changing nappies. And it goes straight to the heart of a dilemma that still plagues many women: "I started," James says now, "as a housewife refusing housework. As a mother, doing this work that is so central to society, I was locked in and impoverished. But this work is not like other work: we hate it, and we want to do it. By demanding payment for housework we attack what is terrible about caring in our capitalist society, while protecting what is great about it, and what it could be. We refuse housework, because we think everyone should be doing it."

She was born Selma Deitch in Brooklyn in 1930. Hers was one of four working-class Jewish families who lived in a house on the corner of Ralph Avenue and Dean Street, where the Jewish ghetto met the black ghetto: "Our front door faced on to the black street, but our address was on the white street. By the time I was six I understood a lot about racism. I could smell it in the people I knew." From day one, anti-racism was central to James's feminism. So, too, was the left. "The movement was everywhere," she remembers. Her truck-driver father was a trade unionist when that meant beatings from the mafia and regular spells in jail, her mother a housewife who struggled to make ends meet and battled for justice for the welfare mothers on her street. Aged six, James was combing the streets with her sisters, collecting foil cigarette wrappers for the Spanish Republicans: "We'd roll them into these huge bullets. What they used them for, I don't know."

When she was still a girl, James joined a splinter group of the Workers party (WP) called the Johnson Forest Tendency. The group's leader was the Trinidadian historian and anti-colonialist, CLR James. It was a tiny group, at war with the WP leadership. At its height, there were only 70 Johnsonites: "Seventy people scattered across a big country - not a lot. But the leader was a black man, an immigrant from the West Indies and a historian; his two closest colleagues were women, one a Russian immigrant, the other first-generation Chinese-American ... We were multiracial. We were confident. We felt we were 'going somewhere' ... building not a vanguard party so we could one day be the state, but a movement."

James started attending CLR's classes in slavery and the civil war and he noticed her: "He said to my sister: 'When I mention the dialectic, your sister's eyes light up.'" She was 14 when they first met; he was 44. It was CLR who persuaded her to write, to speak up. "He shaped my mind. But it was the mind I wanted. I always wanted to know how to think, and there was this man who knew."

At 17, she married a fellow factory worker; by 18 she'd given birth to their son, Sam. The marriage, she says, was over before it began, and they eventually separated four years later. By then, McCarthyism was in full swing: "phones tapped, mail interfered with, visits from the FBI. Some of us lost our jobs (I lost mine), some were blacklisted". CLR James was sent to Ellis Island, where Selma wrote to him regularly; slowly, they fell in love. On his release, and fearing deportation, CLR left for London. Selma and her son went with him and shortly afterwards, they married. What was it like, being in a mixed-race marriage then? Finding a flat was difficult, she admits, but London in the mid-50s was not as racist as it later became: "You'd see mixed marriages all the time. Working-class people found their way to each other, and there was not a problem."

They were together for almost 30 years. Ostensibly, he was the intellectual, she his audiotypist (she typed Beyond a Boundary so many times, she says, that she could recite the entire book from memory) but she always held her own. Journalist and activist Darcus Howe, CLR James's nephew, remembers "this tiny white woman" working alongside black people, and "always asking so many profound and serious questions". She was formidable, he says: "That finger-pointing, those eyes flashing!" Was he intimidated? "Oh, no. I liked her very much."

In 1958 James went with CLR to Trinidad, where he edited the pro-independence party's newspaper. She fell in love with the West Indies. "What the people did with the language was Shakespearean! They opened the language, transformed it." Even now, her Brooklyn accent is softened by a West Indian lilt, as if she absorbed the essence of the place. But she was not impressed by those who led the independence movement: "I saw the state close up. It was an enormous education. Almost all of them were awful. It is the ambition, it makes people awful." By the time she left, she had "had enough of the middle class, of the intelligentsia. I thought, I am going to be with working-class people from now on."

She arrived back in London in 1969, just as the women's liberation movement invented itself. The British feminist, Bea Campbell - no friend of James - remembers it as "a torrid, marvellous time, with groups being formed suddenly, and everywhere". Campbell was 22, and recalls a movement as "full of women in their 20s". Enter James: "She was 40, fully-formed, fortified," says Campbell. "She knew how to do battle. A small Trotskyist sect formed her, and she has remained schismatic ever since. Schismatic, sectarian, polarising: Selma got on women's nerves."

That's not how James remembers it. The schism was not about age, she insists, but class: "I brought a reality to the movement they didn't want to acknowledge: that there is a struggle going on, and we have to decide whose side we're on." And all that talk of liberation through work! James had spent years working a double day in a factory and as a housewife: she knew what working-class women felt about factory work: "They walk in, they run out." Too many women in the movement simply "didn't know anything about the world".

And it was about race, too. James was living "a double life" at that time. Her best friends were not white feminists, but the West Indian nurses she knew though her anti-racist activism. Selma remembers the time her great friend, Earla Campbell met Juliet Mitchell, the eminent feminist psychologist: "It was one of these early women's liberation demos, and I took Earla along. Afterwards, she said to me: 'Do you know how much Juliet's shoes cost? Fifteen pounds!' Earla was making £15 a week. She said, what are you doing with these people?" James is on a roll now, finger pointing, eyes flashing: "When Michael [Rabiger, a BBC producer] asked me to make a film about the women's movement, Juliet Mitchell was horrified. She said to him: 'Not Selma! She'll make a film about black power!' The idea that, because I was part of the black movement, I could not at the same time have as my focus women is beyond belief stupid. But that's who [the leading 70s feminists] were. They objected to me because I was standing in the way of what they wanted their political direction to be."

The 70s was a productive period for James, albeit one punctuated by fighting. A collaboration with the Italian feminist, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, producedThe Power of Women and the Subversion of the Communit y in 1972, published first under Dalla Costa's name alone, but claimed by James in the anthology as a joint work. The two later fell out, for reasons that are unclear. The same year James wrote Women, the Unions and Work, Or ...What Is Not to Be Done. This pamphlet, written in four hours, Xeroxed, and distributed on the coach up to the 1972 Women's Liberation conference, contains six demands, beginning with "We demand the right to work less," and including, for the first time, "We demand wages for housework."

Many women were hostile. "One woman asked, will it institutionalise women in the home? I said, I don't know. It hadn't crossed my mind. But I said to myself: 'Maybe it will. Wouldn't that be wonderful!' I thought, if it did, I could stop typing and listen to my music! Some said women must go out to work to raise their consciousness. But others said: 'No, my mother's been out working for 20 years and she wants to come home.' And I said, this is it! This is Wages for Housework."

These arguments are rehearsed by Tweedie in her 1976 Guardian article, in which she questions, with great honesty, her own irritable reaction to Wages for Housework. "What do I feel?" Tweedie asks: "The horrid resentment of the mind bred to slavery and faced with freedom."

In the wider women's movement, though, James lost the argument. Women coalesced around other demands, the first of which was "equal pay for equal work". Middle-class women began to enter male professions. A wrong turn, according to James: "Every time we build a movement a few people get jobs, and those who can get the jobs claim this was the objective of the movement."

James, meanwhile, spent the first few years of the 70s living on grants, benefits and typing, and talking about Wages for Housework: "Increasingly I found out what Wages for Housework was." It was not simply a demand at all, but "a political perspective, a class perspective that began with the unwaged rather than the waged. There was no section of the working class that was left out of this perspective, neither in the third world nor in the industrial world. I thought: look what was in it! I never knew! By 1975 the debate was over for us; it was time to put the perspective into practice."

Her Crossroads Women's Centre began as a squat in a red-light area near Euston station in 1975; in May this year it moved to smart new premises. In the years between they have faced eviction several times, but the centre was always saved - on one occasion by squatters, including Bengali families, who had received support from the women there. It is, as far as James knows, the oldest surviving women's centre in London, if not the UK, and it is currently home to more than 15 groups, including the English Collective of Prostitutes, Legal Action for Women, Women Against Rape and - naturally - the International Wages for Housework Campaign. Links have been made with domestic workers in Peru, Trinidad and Tobago, rural women in India and Uganda, and sex workers in the Philippines.

There have been struggles, and triumphs, some of which are documented in Sex, Race and Class. "The UN Decade for Women - An Offer We Couldn't Refuse" tells the story of a painstaking 10-year struggle to force the UN to recognise women's unpaid work. "Hookers in the House of Lords", an account of a prostitutes' occupation of a church in 1982, is a hoot, and has clear parallels with contemporary occupations: "We were very sorry to leave ... We were physically exhausted and we craved a bath and bed. Yet we were loath to re-enter the flat atmosphere of daily life. In masks [worn by the occupiers to protect the prostitute women's anonymity] we had glimpsed what could happen: we created change. Taking off the masks, our collective power was as hidden as the reality it had penetrated ... It was hard to remember we had won."

A new generation of feminists is discovering James's work. Academic Nina Power and writer and blogger Laurie Penny, for example, both cite her as an influence. In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Jenny Turner launched a serious reappraisal of James's campaign. Meanwhile, James's call for a guaranteed income, her insistence that a post-work world might be possible, finds echoes in contemporary movements, from Occupy to the Pirates party. None of this is lost on James. The Occupy movement delights her, and she was an enthusiastic participant in last year's feminist Slutwalk, where she strung a placard around her neck with the words "Pensioner Slut" scrawled above a little red heart.

Today she seems happy. She lives with her fellow campaigner and partner of 19 years, Nina Lopez, in a modest flat in London. A bronze head of CLR James looks down from the mantelpiece, surrounded by photos of James, Nina and their collie dogs. Her son, Sam Weinstein, is a radical trade unionist in America, and she is fiercely proud of him. She remains actively involved in the Crossroads Women's Centre and is busy, always. The movement, as she would say, is everywhere.

The final essay in Sex, Race and Class is called "Striving for Clarity and Influence". It is a fierce defence of CLR James's political legacy against those who would see his achievements in purely literary terms. In it she writes: "Politics, if it is fuelled by a great will to change the world, rather than by personal ambition, offers a chance to know the world, and to be more self-conscious of the actual life you are living rather than being taken over by what you are told you should feel: a chance to live, in other words, an authentic life. Such politics are a unique enrichment, not a sacrifice."

For anyone interested in CLR James, the essay is fascinating. But when I read it, I think of Selma.
Topics

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The last time Selma James was interviewed by the Guardian was in 1976, by the feminist columnist Jill Tweedie. At that time, James was a household name - in feminist households at least - and this is how Tweedie began: "To many women in the women's movement, the Wages for Housework campaigners come over like Jehovah's Witnesses ...

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The Wolverhampton-born writer recently added playwrighting to her lengthy CV - which includes credits for screenwriting, novels and creating and starring in TV show Goodness Gracious Me - when she wrote the story for the Lloyd-Webber super -musical Bombay Dreams.

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Anita and Me, which has been compared to To Kill a Mockingbird, tells the story of Meena, the daughter of the only Punjabi family in the ...

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Frida Kahlo's work was influenced by traumatic physical and psychological events from her childhood and early adulthood. In addition to personal issues, Kahlo's often brooding and introspective subject matter also deals with questions of national identity.

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"Feet what do I need them for if I have wings to fly?"

Synopsis

Small pins pierce Kahlo's skin to reveal that she still 'hurts' following illness and accident, whilst a signature tear signifies her ongoing battle with the related psychological overflow. Frida Kahlo typically uses the visual symbolism of physical pain in a long-standing attempt to better understand emotional suffering. Prior to Kahlo's efforts, the language of loss, death, and selfhood, had been relatively well investigated by some male artists (including Albrecht Durer, Francisco Goya, and Edvard Munch), but had not yet been significantly dissected by a woman. Indeed not only did Kahlo enter into an existing language, but she also expanded it and made it her own. By literally exposing interior organs, and depicting her own body in a bleeding and broken state, Kahlo opened up our insides to help explain human behaviors on the outside. She gathered together motifs that would repeat throughout her career, including ribbons, hair, and personal animals, and in turn created a new and articulate means to discuss the most complex aspects of female identity. As not only a 'great artist' but also a figure worthy of our devotion, Kahlo's iconic face provides everlasting trauma support and she has influence that cannot be underestimated.

Key Ideas

Kahlo made it legitimate for women to outwardly display their pains and frustrations and to thus make steps towards making sense of and understanding them. It became crucial for women artists to have a female role model and this is the gift of Frida Kahlo.

As an important question for many Surrealists, Kahlo too considers: What is Woman? Following repeated miscarriage, she asks to what extent does motherhood or the absence of this impact on female identity. She alters the meaning of maternal subjectivity irreversibly. It becomes clear through umbilical symbolism (often shown by ribbons) that Kahlo is connected to all that surrounds her, and that she is still a 'mother' without children.

Finding herself often alone, she worked obsessively with self-portraiture. Her reflection fuelled an unflinching interest in identity. She was particularly interested in her mixed German-Mexican ancestry, as well as in her divided roles as artist, lover, and wife.

Kahlo uses religious symbolism throughout her oeuvre. She appears as the Madonna holding her 'animal babies', and becomes the Virgin Mary as she cradles her husband and famous national painter Diego Rivera. She identifies with Saint Sebastian, and even fittingly appears as the martyred Christ. She positions herself as a prophet when she takes to head of the table in her Last Supper style painting, and her accident when impaled on a metal bar (and covered in gold dust when lying injured) recalls the crucifixion and suggests her own holiness.

Women prior to Kahlo who had attempted to communicate the wildest and deepest of emotions were often labeled hysterical or condemned insane - while men were alinged with the 'melancholy' character type. By remaining artistically active under the weight of sadness, Kahlo revealed that women too can be melancholy rather than depressed, and that these terms should not be thought of as gendered.

Most Important Art

Frida Kahlo Artworks in Focus:

Frida Kahlo Overview Continues Below

Biography

Childhood

Magdalena Carmen Frieda Kahlo Calderon was born at La Casa Azul (The Blue House) in Coyoacan, a town on the outskirts of Mexico City in 1907. Her father, Wilhelm Kahlo, was German, and had moved to Mexico at a young age where he remained for the rest of his life, eventually taking over the photography business of Kahlo's mother's family. Kahlo's mother, Matilde Calderon y Gonzalez, was of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry, and raised Frida and her three sisters in a strict and religious household (Frida also had two half sisters from her father's first marriage who were raised in a convent). La Casa Azul was not only Kahlo's childhood home, but also the place that she returned to live and work from 1939 until her death. It later opened as a National Museum dedicated to Kahlo.

Frida Kahlo with her family (1927). Whilst her sisters wear the typical and fashionable dresses of the day, Kahlo (approximately 20 years old) wears a man's suit and positions herself as a rebel. She confronts convention and reveals that her identity extends beyond the confines of young womanhood.

Aside from her mother's rigidity, religious fanaticism, and tendency toward hysteric outbursts, several events in Kahlo's childhood affected her deeply for the rest of her life. At age six, Kahlo contracted polio; a long recovery isolated her from other children and permanently damaged one of her legs, causing her to walk with a limp after recovery. Wilhelm, with whom Kahlo was very close, and particularly so after the experience of being an invalid, enrolled his daughter at the German College in Mexico City and introduced Kahlo to the writings of European philosophers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Arthur Schopenhauer. All of Kahlo's sisters instead attended a convent school so it seems that there was a thirst for expansive learning noted in Frida that resulted in her father making different decisions especially for her. Kahlo was grateful for this and despite a strained relationship with her mother, always credited her father with great tenderness and insight. Still, she was interested in both strands of her roots, and her mixed European and Mexican heritage provided life-long fascination in her approach towards both life and art.

Kahlo had a horrible experience at the German School where she was sexually abused and thus forced to leave. Luckily at the time, the Mexican Revolution and the Minister of Education had changed the education policy, and from 1922 girls were admitted to the National Preparatory School. Kahlo was one of the first 35 girls admitted and she began to study medicine, botany, and the social sciences. She excelled academically, became very interested in Mexican culture, and also became active politically.

Early Training

When Kahlo was 15, Diego Rivera (already a renowned artist) was painting the Creation mural (1922) in the amphitheater of her Preparatory School. Upon seeing him work, Kahlo experienced a moment of infatuation and fascination that she would go on to fully explore later in life. Meanwhile she enjoyed helping her father in his photography studio and received drawing instruction from her father's friend, Fernando Fernandez - for whom she was an apprentice engraver. At this time Kahlo also befriended a dissident group of students known as the "Cachuchas", who confirmed the young artist's rebellious spirit and further encouraged her interest in literature and politics. In 1923 Kahlo fell in love with a fellow member of the group, Alejandro Gomez Arias, and the two remained romantically involved until 1928. Sadly, in 1925 together with Alejandro (who survived unharmed) on their way home from school, Kahlo was involved in a near fatal bus accident.

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Frida Kahlo Biography Continues

Kahlo suffered multiple fractures throughout her body, including a crushed pelvis, and a metal rod impaled her womb. She spent one month in the hospital immobile, and bound in a plaster corset, and following this period, many more months bedridden at home. During her long recovery she began to experiment in small-scale autobiographical portraiture, henceforth abandoning her medical pursuits due to practical circumstances and turning her focus to art.

During the months of convalescence at home after her bus accident Kahlo's parents made her a special easel, gave her a set of paints, and placed a mirror above her head so that she could see her own reflection and make self-portraits. Kahlo spent hours confronting existential questions raised by her trauma including a feeling of dissociation from her identity, a growing interiority, and a general closeness to death. She drew upon the acute pictorial realism known from her father's photographic portraits (which she greatly admired) and approached her own early portraits (mostly of herself, her sisters, and her school friends) with the same psychological intensity. At the time, Kahlo seriously considered becoming a medical illustrator during this period as she saw this as a way to marry her interests in science and art.

By 1927, Kahlo was well enough to leave her bedroom and thus re-kindled her relationship with the Cachuchas group, which was by this point all the more political. She joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) and began to familiarize herself with the artistic and political circles in Mexico City. She became close friends with the photojournalist Tina Modotti and Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella. It was in June 1928, at one of Modotti's many parties, that Kahlo was personally introduced to Diego Rivera who was already one of Mexico's most famous artists and a highly influential member of the PCM. Soon after, Kahlo boldly asked him to decide, upon looking at one of her portraits, if her work was worthy of pursuing a career as an artist. He was utterly impressed by the honesty and originality of her painting and assured her of her talents. Despite the fact that Rivera had already been married twice, and was known to all to have an insatiable fondness for women, the two quickly began a romantic relationship and were married in 1929. According to Kahlo's mother, who outwardly expressed her dissatisfaction with the match, the couple were 'the elephant and the dove'. Her father however, unconditionally supported his daughter and was happy to know that Rivera had the financial means to help with Kahlo's medical bills. The new couple moved to Cuernavaca in the rural state of Morelos where Kahlo devoted herself entirely to painting.

Mature Period

By the early 1930s, Kahlo's painting had evolved to include a more assertive sense of Mexican identity, a facet of her artwork that had stemmed from her exposure to the modernist indigenist movement in Mexico and from her interest in preserving the revival of Mexicanidad during the rise of fascism in Europe. Kahlo's interest in distancing herself from her Germanic roots is evidenced in her name change from Frieda to Frida, and furthermore in her decision to wear traditional Tehuana costume (the dress from earlier matriarchal times). At the time, two failed pregnancies augmented Kahlo's simultaneously harsh and beautiful representation of the specifically female experience through symbolism and autobiography.

During the first few years of the 1930s Kahlo and Rivera lived in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York whilst Rivera was creating various murals. Kahlo also completed some seminal works including Frieda and Diego Rivera (1931) and Self-Portrait on the Borderline between Mexico and The United States (1932) with the latter expressing her observations of rivalry taking place between nature and industry in the two lands. It was during this time that Kahlo met and became friends with Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston. She also met Dr. Leo Eloesser while in San Francisco, the surgeon who would become her closest medical advisor until her death.

Soon after the unveiling of a large and controversial mural that Rivera had made for the Rockefeller Centre in New York (1933), the couple returned to Mexico as Kahlo was feeling particularly homesick. They moved into a new house in the wealthy neighborhood of San Angel. The house was made up of two separate parts joined by a bridge. This set up was appropriate as their relationship was undergoing immense strain. Kahlo had numerous health issues while Rivera, although he had been previously unfaithful, at this time had an affair with Kahlo's younger sister Cristina which understandably hurt Kahlo more than her husband's other infidelities. Kahlo too started to have her own extramarital affairs at this point. Not long after returning to Mexico from the States, she met the Hungarian photographer Nickolas Muray, who was on holiday in Mexico. The two began an on-and-off romantic affair that lasted 10 years, and it is Muray who is credited as the man who captured Kahlo most colorfully on camera.

While briefly separated from Diego following the affair with her sister and living in her own flat away from San Angel, Kahlo also had a short affair with the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The two highly politically and socially conscious artists remained friends until Kahlo's death.

In 1936, Kahlo joined the Fourth International (a Communist organization) and often used La Casa Azul as a meeting point for international intellectuals, artists, and activists. She also offered the house where the exiled Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky and his wife, Natalia Sedova, could take up residence once they were granted asylum in Mexico. In 1937, as well as helping Trotsky, Kahlo and the political icon embarked on a short love affair. Trotsky and his wife remained in La Casa Azul until mid-1939.

During a visit to Mexico City in 1938, the founder of Surrealism, André Breton, was enchanted with Kahlo's painting, and wrote to his friend and art dealer, Julien Levy, who quickly invited Kahlo to hold her first solo show at his gallery in New York. This time round, Kahlo traveled to the States without Rivera and upon arrival caused a huge media sensation. People were attracted to her colorful and exotic (but actually traditional) Mexican costumes and her exhibition was a success. Georgia O'Keeffe was one of the notable guests to attend Kahlo's opening. Kahlo enjoyed some months socializing in New York and then sailed to Paris in early 1939 to exhibit with the Surrealists there. That exhibition was not as successful and as she became quickly tired of the over-intellectualism of the Surrealist group. Kahlo returned to New York hoping to continue her love affair with Muray, but he broke off the relationship as he had recently met somebody else. Thus Kahlo traveled back to Mexico City and upon her return Rivera requested a divorce.

Later Years and Death

Following her divorce, Kahlo moved back to La Casa Azul. She moved away from her small tin paintings and began to work on much larger canvases. In 1940 Kahlo and Rivera remarried and their relationship became less turbulent as Kahlo's health deteriorated. Between the years of 1940-1956, the suffering artist often had to wear supportive back corsets to help her spinal problems, she also had an infectious skin condition, along with syphilis. When her father died in 1941, this exacerbated both her depression and her health. She again was often housebound and found simple pleasure in surrounding herself by animals and in tending to the garden at La Casa Azul.

Meanwhile, throughout the 1940s, Kahlo's work grew in notoriety and acclaim from international collectors, and was included in several group shows both in the United States and in Mexico. In 1943, her work was included in Women Artists at Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century Gallery in New York. In this same year, Kahlo accepted a teaching position at a painting school in Mexico City, 'La Esmeralda', and acquired some highly devoted students with whom she undertook some mural commissions. She struggled to continue making a living from her art, never accommodating to clients wishes if she did not like them, but luckily received a national prize for her painting Moses (1945) and then The Two Fridas painting was bought by the Museo de Arte Moderno in 1947. Meanwhile, the artist grew progressively ill. She had a complicated operation to try and straighten her spine, but it failed and from 1950 onwards, she was often confined to a wheelchair.

She continued to paint relatively prolifically in her final years while also maintaining her political activism, and protesting nuclear testing by Western powers. Kahlo exhibited one last time in Mexico in 1953 at Lola Alvarez Bravo's gallery, her first and only solo-show in Mexico. She was brought to the event in an ambulance, with her four-poster bed following on the back of a truck. The bed was then placed in the center of the gallery so that she could lie there for the duration of the opening. Kahlo died in 1954 at La Casa Azul.

Legacy

Frida Kahlo, 1932 photographed by Imogen Cunningham

As an individualist who was disengaged from any official artistic movement, Kahlo's artwork has been associated with primitivism, indigenism, Magic Realism, and Surrealism. Posthumously, Kahlo's artwork has grown profoundly influential for feminist studies and postcolonial debates, while Kahlo has become an international cultural icon. The artist's celebrity status for mass audiences has at times resulted in the compartmentalization of the artist's work as representative of interwar Latin American artwork at large, distanced from the complexities of Kahlo's deeply personal subject matter. Recent exhibitions, such as Unbound: Contemporary Art After Frida Kahlo (2014) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago have attempted to reframe Kahlo's cultural significance by underscoring her lasting impact on the politics of the body and Kahlo's challenge to mainstream aesthetics of representation. Dreamers Awake (2017) held at The White Cube Gallery in London further illustrated the huge influence that Frida Kahlo and a handful of other early female Surrealists have had on the development and progression of female art.

The legacy of Kahlo cannot be underestimated or exaggerated. Not only is it likely that every female artist making art since the 1950s will quote her as an influence, but it is not only artists and those who are interested in art that she inspires. Her art also supports people who suffer as result of accident, as result of miscarriage, and as result of failed marriage. Through imagery, Kahlo articulated experiences so complex, making them more manageable and giving viewers hope that they can endure, recover, and start again.

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Frida Kahlo Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works

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"Feet what do I need them for if I have wings to fly?" Small pins pierce Kahlo's skin to reveal that she still 'hurts' following illness and accident, whilst a signature tear signifies her ongoing battle with the related psychological overflow.

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She is a Japanese artist who is acclaimed in the contemporary art world and  the international graffiti and street art scene.

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For all those seeking freedom, the streets' call is more than appealing. Between the walls, dark corners and all other places suitable for painting - it's more than a belonging. It's a world where artistic urges are mutually understood by those who dwell in it. Lady , born as Aiko Nakagawa, is a Japanese-born street artist who's been living in the USA since the 90's. She's a female in a world dominated by omnipresent male figures like Banksy or Shepard Fairey, but that doesn't discourage her in any way. Driven out of the studio by the combination of freedom offered by the streets and the thrill that comes with the uncertainty and uncontrollability of the process itself, she's been recognized as one of the most influential and popular street artists in the world.

From Japan to the United States

Born and raised in Shinjuku, Tokyo, she's been very creative from an early age. Living in a concrete jungle, there wasn't many places or nature where she could play as a child. So she spent a lot of time at home, just creating something: paintings, drawings, collages and doing paper cuts. In Tokyo, Aiko studied graphic design and filmmaking and was interested in making documentary films. Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam are the places she visited with the intention of documenting the local lifestyles. All of that gave her an idea that she would like to travel even more, step into different scenes, discover new people and face new challenges. Her artistic career took off after one of the travel decisions - she moved to the USA without even speaking English! Takashi Murakami offered her apprenticeship, and she worked for him until the late 1990's, documenting his 1998's solo exhibition Superflat along the way. After leaving his studio, she continued to practice her own art, and began her studies at The New School in New York City where she received her MFA in Media Studies. In 1999, Aiko met Patrick Miller and Patrick McNeil, and the three of them went on to establish a group known as FAILE. For seven years the group worked locally and internationally, and in 2006, she left them and began a solo career, establishing herself on the street art scene as Lady Aiko. She rarely collaborates, but when she does, it is with a well-known artist, including the famous Lady Pink and Martha Cooper, but also with Banksy for his award-winning documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop in 2010.

She's been creative from an early age

Love as Style

Aiko, which is one of the most common Japanese names, means love. And love's been in the center of her entire life, from childhood days onwards. As a little girl, just for fun, she would make art for everyone around her, her mother, classmates, family. She enjoyed (and still does) creating something that is beautiful, full of love and can be shared with anyone. Images related to romantic moments, kisses and lover are the dominant theme in her work, with subjects always being about everyday life's sexy girls, lovers, and romantic stories. One of her most famous pieces, titled Lovers, is the epitome of her entire practice. Being one the images that she cut out in 2007, it has become her signature artwork. Its deep emotional connection with the artist originates from two sources: firstly, the inspiration for it came from the old Japanese magazine from the 60's, where she discovered a small picture that made her think of her own romantic moments. The style of the images from the 60's, but also the 70's and 80's creates a nice sentiment for her, and the final look of the piece is actually a combination of the found images, stencils, and her street photography; secondly, when she started doing her own projects as Aiko in 2006, one of the first stencils she did was an (above shown) bunny holding a spray can. Having lost some of the motivation working in FAILE, she regained momentum and began enjoying making stencils on the street even more. Seeking a new image that would make her happy to work on the streets one again, she created the Bunny along with some images of sexy girls and some other romantic scenarios. The Lovers was created around that time and it soon became one of the first iconic Aiko stencils, being depicted throughout the world, from Istanbul, Rome, Berlin, Shanghai, and in various places in the United States.

Love is always at the center of her work

The Walls - Breaking the Stereotypes of Contemporary Street Art Culture

Lady Aiko painted the Wynwood Walls in 2009, and it was one of the first big walls that was painted by a woman. Curated by Jeffrey Deitch and Tony Goldman, the piece received good attention, as more and more people became acquainted with her work, realizing that female artists can paint big walls just as successfully as the male ones. Another recognition of her work came in 2012 when she got asked to do a Bowery Street mural. As she admits, since the establishment of the mural in 2008, she always knew she was going to paint it one day. After waiting patiently for four years, the call came, and Aiko joined the prestigious group of artist who had an honor of painting that particular wall in tribute to Keith Haring's noted 1982 Bowery mural. Os Gêmeos, Shepard Fairey, Barry McGee, Crash - are just some of the famous artists who had painted the wall.

In terms of street art, Lady Aiko is a great artist, one of the best

One of the Best Artists

After more than twenty years of living in the United States, Aiko's training in Japanese traditional aesthetics has been mixed with the essence of the American contemporary art movements such as Abstractionism , POP Art , Graffiti and Street Art, leading to the creation of a hybrid style, widely popular and acclaimed. Often placed among some other great names of the street art scene, such as Faith47 and MadC, Lady Aiko is not just one of the most famous female artists today, she is undoubtedly one of the most popular artists in the contemporary street art scene.

She is represented by Kumi Contemporary.

Lady Aiko lives and works in New York.
Fetured image: Lady Aiko - portrait, photo credits Sal Rodriguez/photo313
All other images courtesy of the artist

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For all those seeking freedom, the streets' call is more than appealing. Between the walls, dark corners and all other places suitable for painting - it's more than a belonging. It's a world where artistic urges are mutually understood by those who dwell in it.

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She was the lead engineer on the Apollo project and wrote the code to take man to the moon

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Margaret Hamilton wasn't supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work. Hamilton, a 24-year-old with an undergrad degree in mathematics, had gotten a job as a programmer at MIT, and the plan was for her to support her husband through his three-year stint at Harvard Law. After that, it would be her turn-she wanted a graduate degree in math.

But the Apollo space program came along. And Hamilton stayed in the lab to lead an epic feat of engineering that would help change the future of what was humanly-and digitally-possible.

As a working mother in the 1960s, Hamilton was unusual; but as a spaceship programmer, Hamilton was positively radical. Hamilton would bring her daughter Lauren by the lab on weekends and evenings. While 4-year-old Lauren slept on the floor of the office overlooking the Charles River, her mother programmed away, creating routines that would ultimately be added to the Apollo's command module computer.

"People used to say to me, 'How can you leave your daughter? How can you do this?'" Hamilton remembers. But she loved the arcane novelty of her job. She liked the camaraderie-the after-work drinks at the MIT faculty club; the geek jokes, like saying she was "going to branch left minus " around the hallway. Outsiders didn't have a clue. But at the lab, she says, "I was one of the guys."

Then, as now, "the guys" dominated tech and engineering. Like female coders in today's diversity-challenged tech industry, Hamilton was an outlier. It might surprise today's software makers that one of the founding fathers of their boys' club was, in fact, a mother-and that should give them pause as they consider why the gender inequality of the Mad Men era persists to this day.

'When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West.' - Margaret Hamilton

As Hamilton's career got under way, the software world was on the verge of a giant leap, thanks to the Apollo program launched by John F. Kennedy in 1961. At the MIT Instrumentation Lab where Hamilton worked, she and her colleagues were inventing core ideas in computer programming as they wrote the code for the world's first portable computer. She became an expert in systems programming and won important technical arguments. "When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn't teach it," Hamilton says.

This was a decade before Microsoft and nearly 50 years before Marc Andreessen would observe that software is, in fact, "eating the world." The world didn't think much at all about software back in the early Apollo days. The original document laying out the engineering requirements of the Apollo mission didn't even mention the word software, MIT aeronautics professor David Mindell writes in his book Digital Apollo. "Software was not included in the schedule, and it was not included in the budget." Not at first, anyhow.

Hamilton and her daughter Lauren.

"Little Old Ladies" of Raytheon.

But as the Apollo project unfolded, the centrality of software in accomplishing the mission started to become clear. In 1965, Hamilton became responsible for the onboard flight software on the Apollo computers. It was an exciting time, and the US was depending on the work that she was doing. But sometimes the pressure kept Hamilton up at night. Once, after a late-night party, she rushed back to the computer lab to correct a piece of code she'd suddenly realized was flawed. "I was always imagining headlines in the newspapers, and they would point back to how it happened, and it would point back to me."

By mid-1968, more than 400 people were working on Apollo's software, because software was how the US was going to win the race to the moon. As it turned out, of course, software was going to help the world do so much more. As Hamilton and her colleagues were programming the Apollo spacecraft, they were also hatching what would become a $400 billion industry.

For Hamilton, programming meant punching holes in stacks of punch cards, which would be processed overnight in batches on a giant Honeywell mainframe computer that simulated the Apollo lander's work. "We had to simulate everything before it flew," Hamilton remembers. Once the code was solid, it would be shipped off to a nearby Raytheon facility where a group of women, expert seamstresses known to the Apollo program as the "Little Old Ladies," threaded copper wires through magnetic rings (a wire going through a core was a 1; a wire going around the core was a 0). Forget about RAM or disk drives; on Apollo, memory was literally hardwired and very nearly indestructible.

Apollo flights carried two near-identical machines: one used in the lunar module-the Eagle that landed on the moon-and the other for the command module that carried the astronauts to and from Earth. These 70-pound Apollo computers were portable computers unlike any other. Conceived by MIT engineers such as Hal Laning and Hamilton's boss, Dick Batton, it was one of the first important computers to use integrated circuits rather than transistors. As Mindell tells the story, it was the first computerized onboard navigation system designed to be operated by humans but with "fly-by-wire" autopilot technology-a precursor to the computerized navigation systems that are now standard on jetliners.

The system stored more than 12,000 "words" in its permanent memory-the copper "ropes" threaded by the Raytheon workers-and had 1,024 words in its temporary, erasable memory. "It was the first time that an important computer had been in a spacecraft and given a lot of responsibility for the mission," says Don Eyles, who worked on the lunar module code while at MIT's IL. "We showed that that could be done. We did it in what today seems an incredibly small amount of memory and very slow computation speed." Without it, Neil Armstrong wouldn't have made it to the moon. And without the software written by Hamilton, Eyles, and the team of MIT engineers, the computer would have been a dud.

This became clear on July 20, 1969, just minutes before Apollo 11 touched down on the Sea of Tranquility. Because of what Apollo software engineer Don Eyles has termed a "documentation error," the Apollo computer started spitting out worrying error messages during this critical phase of the mission. But here's where the technical arguments won by Hamilton and others saved the day. The error messages were popping up because the computer was being overwhelmed, tasked with doing a series of unnecessary calculations when, in fact, it was most needed to land the module on the surface of the moon. Back in Houston, engineers knew that because of Apollo's unique asynchronous processing, the computer would focus on the task at hand-landing the Eagle on the Sea of Tranquility. When the software realized it didn't have enough room to do all the functions it was supposed to be doing, it went through its error detection process and focused on the highest priority job, Hamilton says.

'That would never happen'

One day, Lauren was playing with the MIT command module simulator's display-and-keyboard unit, nicknamed the DSKY (dis-key). As she toyed with the keyboard, an error message popped up. Lauren had crashed the simulator by somehow launching a prelaunch program called P01 while the simulator was in midflight. There was no reason an astronaut would ever do this, but nonetheless, Hamilton wanted to add code to prevent the crash. That idea was overruled by NASA. "We had been told many times that astronauts would not make any mistakes," she says. "They were trained to be perfect." So instead, Hamilton created a program note-an add-on to the program's documentation that would be available to NASA engineers and the astronauts: "Do not select P01 during flight," it said. Hamilton wanted to add error-checking code to the Apollo system that would prevent this from messing up the systems. But that seemed excessive to her higher-ups. "Everyone said, 'That would never happen,'" Hamilton remembers.

But it did. Right around Christmas 1968-five days into the historic Apollo 8 flight, which brought astronauts to the moon for the first-ever manned orbit-the astronaut Jim Lovell inadvertently selected P01 during flight. Hamilton was in the second-floor conference room at the Instrumentation Laboratory when the call came in from Houston. Launching the P01 program had wiped out all the navigation data Lovell had been collecting. That was a problem. Without that data, the Apollo computer wouldn't be able to figure out how to get the astronauts home. Hamilton and the MIT coders needed to come up with a fix; and it needed to be perfect. After spending nine hours poring through the 8-inch-thick program listing on the table in front of them, they had a plan. Houston would upload new navigational data. Everything was going to be OK. Thanks to Hamilton-and Lauren-the Apollo astronauts came home.

Also thanks to Hamilton and the work she led, notions of what humanity could do, and be, changed not just beyond the stratosphere but also here on the ground. Software engineering, a concept Hamilton pioneered, has found its way from the moon landing to nearly every human endeavor. By the 1970s, Hamilton had moved on from NASA and the Apollo program. She went on to found and lead multiple software companies. Today her company, Hamilton Technologies, is just a few blocks away from MIT, where her career began-a hub of the code revolution that's still looking toward the stars.

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Her Code Got Humans on the Moon-And Invented Software Itself

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Margaret Hamilton wasn't supposed to invent the modern concept of software and land men on the moon. It was 1960, not a time when women were encouraged to seek out high-powered technical work.

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It’s impossible to fight for a society where women are seen as equals when our efforts are constantly marginalised or completely written out of history all together because of the systematic sexism in education. That’s why, NUS Women’ Campaign has teamed up with the HerStory project to kick off this initiative to help students to get more women in the curriculum. We've worked with students to create this online resource of women that we think should have a place in the curriculum. You can also contact HerStory UK to organise a workshop at your campus!

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Why is our curriculum pale, stale and male? What was the representation of the women like in your curriculum? NUS Womens' Officer Susuana Amoah asks you to send in the names of women who you think should be more present in what we learn: http://bit.ly/1LbjBrY #InternationalWomensDay

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Dr. Maya Angelou is celebrated poet, memoirist, educator, dramatist, producer, actress, historian, filmmaker, and civil rights activist.

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Her x-ray diffraction work in the early 1950s at King's College London that was essential to the  discoveries of the molecular structure of DNA. Rosalind's work was shared with Watson and Crick without her permission, allowing them to correctly model the double helix, and win the nobel prize for it, whereas Franklin is rarely mentioned in history books.

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Born: London, England, July 25, 1920

Died: London, England, April 16, 1958

Pioneer Molecular Biologist

T here is probably no other woman scientist with as much controversy surrounding her life and work as Rosalind Franklin. Franklin was responsible for much of the research and discovery work that led to the understanding of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA. The story of DNA is a tale of competition and intrigue, told one way in James Watson's book The Double Helix, and quite another in Anne Sayre's study, Rosalind Franklin and DNA. James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins received a Nobel Prize for the double-helix model of DNA in 1962, four years after Franklin's death at age 37 from ovarian cancer.

Franklin excelled at science and attended one of the few girls' schools in London that taught physics and chemistry. When she was 15, she decided to become a scientist. Her father was decidedly against higher education for women and wanted Rosalind to be a social worker. Ultimately he relented, and in 1938 she enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1941. She held a graduate fellowship for a year, but quit in 1942 to work at the British Coal Utilization Research Association, where she made fundamental studies of carbon and graphite microstructures. This work was the basis of her doctorate in physical chemistry, which she earned from Cambridge University in 1945.

After Cambridge, she spent three productive years (1947-1950) in Paris at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de L'Etat, where she learned X-ray diffraction techniques. In 1951, she returned to England as a research associate in John Randall's laboratory at King's College, London.

It was in Randall's lab that she crossed paths with Maurice Wilkins. She and Wilkins led separate research groups and had separate projects, although both were concerned with DNA. When Randall gave Franklin responsibility for her DNA project, no one had worked on it for months. Wilkins was away at the time, and when he returned he misunderstood her role, behaving as though she were a technical assistant. Both scientists were actually peers. His mistake, acknowledged but never overcome, was not surprising given the climate for women at the university then. Only males were allowed in the university dining rooms, and after hours Franklin's colleagues went to men-only pubs.

But Franklin persisted on the DNA project. J. D. Bernal called her X-ray photographs of DNA, "the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken." Between 1951 and 1953 Rosalind Franklin came very close to solving the DNA structure. She was beaten to publication by Crick and Watson in part because of the friction between Wilkins and herself. At one point, Wilkins showed Watson one of Franklin's crystallographic portraits of DNA. When he saw the picture, the solution became apparent to him, and the results went into an article in Nature almost immediately. Franklin's work did appear as a supporting article in the same issue of the journal.

A debate about the amount of credit due to Franklin continues. What is clear is that she did have a meaningful role in learning the structure of DNA and that she was a scientist of the first rank. Franklin moved to J. D. Bernal's lab at Birkbeck College, where she did very fruitful work on the tobacco mosaic virus. She also began work on the polio virus. In the summer of 1956, Rosalind Franklin became ill with cancer. She died less than two years later.

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Rosalind Elsie Franklin: Pioneer Molecular Biologist

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T here is probably no other woman scientist with as much controversy surrounding her life and work as Rosalind Franklin. Franklin was responsible for much of the research and discovery work that led to the understanding of the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA.

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Dee Rees is an American screenwriter and director best known for her feature films Pariah and Bessie.

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Living Color Mr. & Mrs. Brooks Have Fallen

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'Pariah' Director Dee Rees and Kim Wayans Talk With Colorlines.com

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"We'd go to pitch meetings and the moment we said 'black, lesbian, coming of age,' they would turn around, validate our parking and hand us a bottle of water," Rees tells Colorlines.com in reflecting on her feature-film directorial debut. Watch the interview. http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/01/colorlinescom_talks_race_and_film_with_pariah_director_dee_rees_and_kim_wayans.html

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Agnès Varda, the grandmother of the French New Wave and one of my idols. Her films, photographs, and art installations focus on documentary realism, feminist issues, and social commentary.

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Agnes Varda was one of the leading figures of the French New Wave film movement, amongst such leading cinematic lights as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. Now, in recognition of her life's work, the 82 year old has been awarded the prestigious Carosse D'Or award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

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Feminist artist who's famous works include, The art installation Woman House and The Dinner Party.

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"I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling, that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized world. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism."

Synopsis

Judy Chicago was one of the pioneers of Feminist art in the 1970s, a movement that endeavored to reflect women's lives, call attention to women's roles as artists, and alter the conditions under which contemporary art was produced and received. In the process, Feminist art questioned the authority of the male-dominated Western canon and posed one of the most significant challenges to modernism, which was at the time wholly preoccupied with conditions of formalism as opposed to personal narrative and political activity. Seeking to redress women's traditional underrepresentation in the visual arts, Chicago focused on female subject matter, most famously in her work The Dinner Party (1979), which celebrates the achievements of women throughout history, scandalizing audiences with her frank use of vaginal imagery. In her work, Chicago employed the "feminine" arts long relegated to the lowest rungs of the artistic hierarchy, such as needlework and embroidery. Chicago articulated her feminist vision not only as an artist, but also as an educator and organizer, most notably, in co-founding of the Feminist Art Program at Cal State Fresno as well as the installation and performance space, Womanhouse.

Key Ideas

Most Important Art

Judy Chicago Artworks in Focus:

Biography

Childhood

Judy Chicago was born Judy Cohen in 1939 in Chicago, Illinois, in the last year of the Great Depression. She grew up in a liberal environment; unusual for the time, her intellectual Jewish parents both worked to support their children and openly articulated their left-wing politics. Chicago began drawing at the age of three and attending classes at the Institute of Chicago starting in 1947. In 1948, her father, Arthur Cohen, left his union job in the midst of the McCarthy blacklist and the controversy surrounding the family's "Communist" leanings. Two years later, he died from a massive stomach ulcer.

Early Training

Having attended art classes at the Art Institute of Chicago throughout her teens, Chicago went on to train at UCLA, where she received her M.F.A. in 1964. Her early paintings were bold depictions of female sexual expression, but rejection from her peers soon persuaded Chicago to turn her attention to sculpture, creating casts strung with heavy ropes and large, clay forms in a less representational style. By the 1960s, Chicago-now married and with the last name of Gerowitz-began gaining recognition for these Minimalist, geometric works that suited 1960s art-world tastes. However, for Chicago, these works constituted an insipid version of her original vision, a suppression of her real concerns and forms of expression to fit in with a male-dominated aesthetic.

In 1961, Chicago's husband died in a car accident. Her use of imagery in the aftermath of this tragedy became notably more expressive and personal, rooted in her feelings and grief. In work from this period, there is the re-emergence of the body as theme and inspiration-still in abstract form, but recognizable as the female unwillingly dominated by the male, a visual motif for the obstacles Chicago felt she faced in life. The subsequent years reflect Chicago's continuing attempt to reconcile her identity as a woman and an artist. Attending graduate and later auto-body school, she learned both sculptural and spray-painting techniques. Chicago began to take risks with her increasingly representational depiction of the vulva, demonstrating a stubborn refusal to succumb to the abstract aesthetic prevailing in the patriarchally defined art world. Her first solo exhibition, occurring in 1965, was largely Minimalist, but through the mid-1960s and 1970s, her work became increasingly dominated by explicitly feminist themes. In 1969, Chicago remarried, but this time she rejected the tradition of taking her husband's name, selecting instead a new surname-Chicago-as a statement of independence as well as a tribute to her hometown.

In 1970, Chicago pioneered a radical educational experiment fundamental to the emerging women's movement. Chicago, along with fellow artist Miriam Schapiro, ran a women-only art course at California State University in Fresno before moving it to the California Institute of Arts in Valencia. The course focused on the development of technique and expression through the process of "consciousness-raising," which recognized female identity and independence through the group's art practice, combining object-making, installation, and performance. From this experiment emerged Womanhouse, an art space created by Chicago and her students to provide a forum for teaching, performance, exhibition, discussion, and expression. Although successful, the project was frequently beset with tension over leadership within the group. Chicago resented the inequality of the educational institution within which the project was based, and felt the need to create an "alternative system" far from Cal Arts. In 1973, she founded the Feminist Studio workshop in an entirely separate location in Los Angeles. There, Womanhouse expanded to become the Woman's Building in a site among numerous other creative feminist organizations. The female arts community in Los Angeles was now firmly established, and has become a major symbol of the 1970s feminist movement.

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Judy Chicago Biography Continues

In 1974, Chicago began her most significant and most controversial work. In her drive to reinstate women's stories into mainstream historic narrative, she was drawn to art-making techniques dismissed by the fine art world as craft, such as ceramic decoration and embroidery. Working collaboratively using the needlework and glass-based practices of artisans, Chicago created an installation that celebrated the forgotten women of Western civilization. The Dinner Party (1979) was a monumental thirty-nine place dinner table presented in a triangular form with a plate to mark each guest's place, many of which were inscribed with symbols of the vulva. The Dinner Party opened in March 1979 at the San Francisco Museum to over five thousand attendees and much discussion. Dismissed as "kitsch," "bad art," and "obscene" by Hilton Kramer and other art critics, the piece was famously dismantled and stored away, rejected by institutions throughout the country. Three decades of protest and controversy surrounding the piece followed until it was finally reinstalled in 2007 in a permanent exhibition space at the Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art in Brooklyn, New York. Amid the development of feminist thought that has occurred since the time of its creation, the work's association of womanhood with the overt physicality has most frequently provoked the criticism that Chicago essentializes women's experience as basic biological attributes, that being a woman can be reduced to simply having a vagina. The Dinner Party remains both an important symbol of the women's movement and a work of contention to this day.

Late Years

In her later years, Chicago's focus shifted gradually from a solely feminist perspective to a broader concern with the underrepresentation of female experience in visual media. After The Dinner Party came the Birth Project. From 1980 to 1985, Chicago was in contact with women throughout the globe to create needlework pieces in response to a perceived absence of birth imagery in both historic narratives and the visual arts in general. The artist then turned her attention to exploring the manifestations of masculinity in a series of large-scale paintings entitled Powerplay, and then moved on to explore her identity as a woman of the Jewish faith. Working with the photographer and her soon-to-be third husband Donald Woodman, Chicago directed an eight-year-long project dedicated to unearthing Holocaust imagery and culminating in a multimedia installation, The Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light. Like much her work, The Holocaust Project toured the U.S. to widespread acclaim and controversy.

Working again with experienced needleworkers, from 1994 to 2001 Chicago was occupied in creating Resolutions: A Stitch in Time, which reinvented traditional proverbs to promote lost social values for a contemporary multicultural society. In 1999, in partnership with Woodman, she returned to teaching, expanding her pedagogical approach significantly from the 1970s to incorporate a male influence. Chicago's three most recent projects have seen her documenting her cats in a humorous book, developing glass-blowing techniques, and engaging in a piece entitled Atmospheres, which recalls a project she began back in the 1970s. Using pyrotechnics, the latter work will be a smoke-and-firework piece that will be shown as part of Pacific Standard Time, an exhibition documenting and celebrating southern California art from 1945 to 1980, a period coinciding with Chicago's own activity.

Legacy

Judy Chicago's work is significant for furthering the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and for the recognition and reinstatement of women's roles throughout history, as well as for her dedication to the deconstruction of traditional hierarchies of fine art and craft, her zeal for the rediscovery of forgotten or undervalued technique, and for her vision of collaborative art-making. Her commitment to female subject matter provided a critical example followed by several generations of contemporary artists, such as video and performance artist Martha Rosler, while Chicago's embrace of "female" art forms such as needlework and embroidery influenced many practitioners of textile art, including the contemporary textile artists Orly Kogan and Gillian Strong. Chicago's legacy is also felt in her role as teacher, writer, and moving force behind such ventures as Womanhouse and Through the Flower, dedicated to using art to prevent the erasure of women's achievements. Chicago has written eight major books documenting her and other female artists' work, including Women and Art: Contested Territory.

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Judy Chicago Biography, Art, and Analysis of Works

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"I believe in art that is connected to real human feeling, that extends itself beyond the limits of the art world to embrace all people who are striving for alternatives in an increasingly dehumanized world. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism."

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Ntozake Shange, writer of the choreopoem - For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide - Its a fantastic piece of work on the experiences of black women in society who face racism, sexism, violence and mental health issues

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Author of for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo, and Ellington Was Not a Street

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Before 1917, she was a secretary for the editorial board of Iskra (a Marxist revolutionary newspaper) and was a key organiser for the paper. From 1905, she was on the Central Committee for the Bolshevik Party. Following the Revolution in 1917, she became Deputy Commissar for Education, and took charge of the Adult Education Division.

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Archive of Marxist writer Nadezhda K. Krupskaya

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One of the earliest women to make a living through writing - also spied for Charles II - Her plays, 'The Rover' and 'The Emperor of the Moon' are still funny and her novel 'Oroonoko' is an important anti-slavery document from the very start of the slave trade.

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Read a biography of the first female professional writer in the 17th century - Aphra Behn. What was her famous novel called?

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She is a contemporary female philosopher who has views on British society today.

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Women Philosophers has 6 ratings and 0 reviews. This selection consists of extracts from writings of women concerned solely with the pursuit of abstract ...

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Amazing Jewish anarca - feminist thinker

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Anarchism and Other Essays has 4,152 ratings and 165 reviews. Nathan N.R. said: I have been an anarchist for twenty years. Twenty years ago I came to u...

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Challenged slavery and helped to bring about abolition. One of the early pioneers of slavery and the women's rights movement that is very rarely remembered

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Sojourner Truth is best known for her extemporaneous speech on racial inequalities, "Ain't I a Woman?" delivered at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in 1851.

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She is one of the only popular Black lesbian filmmakers, and her film The Watermelon Woman is a great work about race, sexuality, history and self-determination.

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Trailer del film The Watermelon Woman di Cheryl Dunye. Con Cheryl Dunye e Guinevere Turner

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Aided in many disability rights movements and shared her story in amazing books. An American politician who fought for equality for all.

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Harriet McBryde Johnson (July 8, 1957 - June 4, 2008) was an American author, attorney, and disability rights activist. She was disabled due to a neuromu...

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Work on the Prison Industrial Complex and the role it has played in oppression and the exacerbation of poverty within Western countries and across the globe. She has done important work on the role of corporations and cheap labour (sweatshops) in exacerbating social inequalities both in the West and developing countries. Has done some work on the anti-immigration rhetoric and of course racial oppression. She is also one of the pioneers of intersectionality, an approach that is vital to effectively understanding any kind of politics

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Women, Race, and Class has 7,704 ratings and 266 reviews. ONTD said: LJ user gingersomething:I really think this should be required reading for middle ...

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Crenshaw has coined the term intersectionality, which is all about diversity and political failures, which our politics and arts education seems to be forgetting about. University is a stage of life where we are ready to learn and we should be educated on the importance of intersectionality in our future practices.

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Kimberlé Crenshaw: Intersectionality and Gender Equality

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She was one of the "naive" painters discovered by Wilhelmina Uhde. She was actually a cleaning lady in France during WW2 and painted in secret to appease her 'guardian angel' (schizophrenic), making all her own materials and was very poor. She was one of the only significant female artists of that genre but only gained fame in her old age which triggered a mental breakdown and she was sectioned for the rest of her life.

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She is a successful black, gay Scottish woman. Her literature covers LGBT+ issues, something that gets little coverage in English Literature taught in Scottish universities. She is also currently the  Makar, the Scottish poet laureate. She was also adopted by  a white family and writes about this in her autobiography, Red Dust Road.

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BBC Bitesize - GCSE English Literature - Jackie Kay on her poem 'Brendan Gallacher'

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Akala meets Jackie Kay to explore her poem 'Brendon Gallacher'.

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She contributed to emerging practises of performance, spiritual and emotion based artwork.

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Who is Ana Mendieta? has 83 ratings and 16 reviews. This fiery account of Ana Mendieta is also a snapshot of the turbulent times in which she lived. In e...