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Women Who Changed the World (Virtual Exhibit)

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Violeta Parra was a widely known folk artist who represented the joys and concerns of the common people of Chile and all of Latin America. She was one of the founders of the politically charged Nueva Canción (new song) movement. It is also known as canción de protesta (protest song) or canción comprometida (politically engaged song) because it accompanied the rise of social protests of the 1960s. For this movement, the songwriter is a compiler, a chronicler, a poet, and an activist of the struggle against injustice. The themes of the songs are about the lives and struggles of the laboring classes, class differences, and exploitation, but they are also about liberation and revolution. Though most famous as a composer and singer of folk music, Parra also painted, wrote poetry, sculpted, and wove arpilleras (folk tapestries). Her best-known song is “Gracias a la Vida” (“Thanks to Life”) which endures throughout the West as a beloved and poignant song. Parra maintained ties with members of Chile’s Socialist and Communist Parties, taking issue with the wealthy landowning elite of Chilean society, as well as with the church and the military, all of whom, in her view, bore some measure of responsibility for the social and economic plight of Chile’s disenfranchised poor.

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Elizabeth Warren is currently serving as a United States Senator for the State of Massachusetts. Before she served in the Senate, she was a special education teacher, a professor, and a researcher. During her research days, Warren published two books that are held in high regard in academia: As We Forgive Our Debtors (1989) and The Fragile Middle Class (2000). When Warren was a professor at Harvard, she moved into the world of politics by accepting the invitation to serve as a senior advisor on the National Bankruptcy Commission during the administration of President Bill Clinton. After serving for four years, Warren was driven to go further and become a politician. She delivered a forceful speech at the Democratic National Convention and won the U.S. Senate election for Massachusetts with more than 53 percent of the vote. In 2013, she introduced the Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act which would allow students to take out loans at the same low interest rates offered to major banks when they borrow money.

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Harriet Tubman was a brave abolitionist and suffragist. She was born around 1820 into slavery. Due to what is presumed as early trauma in slavery, Tubman spoke out against the institution of slavery and eventually ran with her freed husband to Pennsylvania. Impressively, she returned to the south to free other slaves using the Underground Railroad system and successfully freed an estimated 300 slaves. In addition, Tubman was a spy, scout, and nurse in the Civil War. In June 1863 through the Combahee River expedition, Tubman accompanied Colonel James Montgomery and 150 black troops as they engaged in guerilla warfare and liberated 756 slaves. For her work as a nurse in hospitals for black soldiers in South Carolina and Virginia, Tubman was rewarded for her efforts. She was compensated $300, (equivalent in purchasing power to about $4,910.33 in 2020), which she used to help support freedwomen in Florida. After the war, Tubman invested her efforts in women’s suffrage.

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Justice Ruth Ginsburg is an American role model and a tireless advocate for women’s rights. Ginsburg dealt with institutional discrimination as a student, advocate, law professor, and judge. She rose past those hurdles and aided in charting litigation strategies that led the Supreme Court’s first constitutional rulings limiting sex discrimination laws. Ginsburg achieved her success through the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project which she founded. While Ginsburg was at Harvard Law School, she cared for her infant daughter, helped her husband complete his studies while he was diagnosed with cancer, and made Law Review at Harvard. After her graduation from law school and some time practicing as a lawyer, she became a law professor at Columbia Law School and was the first woman to receive tenure. When Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court, she was the second woman and first Jewish woman to serve in this capacity. In her most important early opinion, she wrote the landmark ruling in 1996 ordering that women be admitted to the previously all-male Virginia Military Institute. Ginsburg continues to defend and uphold women’s rights by supporting abortion rights, advocating for equal pay between the sexes, and aiding in the deconstruction of institutional sex discrimination.

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Maria Monetessori was a physician, an educational reformer, and an advocate for children and peace. Monetessori was Italy's first medical doctor from the University of Rome in 1894. In addition to being a physician, she was an educational reformer and an advocate for children and peace. She is most widely known for designing the educational Montessori system that is used in over 8,000 schools on five continents. The Montessori educational system is a method of free discipline with the teacher supplying materials and guiding children through a spontaneous learning process without formal rewards or punishments, which was in defiance of contemporary educational theories. In 1922, Montessori was appointed as Inspector of Schools in Italy. Shortly after, she was exiled from Italy for opposing Mussolini's fascist regime. As a devout pacifist, she did not believe in training children to be soldiers and advocated for world peace. Montessori fled to Spain, but left for Larden, Netherlands, in 1934. It was there she opened the Montessori Training Center. Her work continued to spread worldwide and training centers were founded in London and India. Throughout her life she advocated for peace, and in 1949, 1950, and 1951 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

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Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician who calculated and analyzed flight paths of space crafts with National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA). Her work aided in sending astronauts to the moon. In 1953, Johnson began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)’s West Area Computing unit, a group of African American women who manually performed complex mathematical calculations for the program’s engineers. The women, known as the West Computers, analyzed test data and provided mathematical computations that were essential to the success of the early U.S. space program. During this time the program was segregated and became desegregated in 1958 with the name change of NACA to NASA. At NASA, Johnson was a member of the Space Task Group. In 1960, she co-authored a paper about calculations for placing a spacecraft into orbit. It was the first time a woman in her division received credit as an author of a research report. Johnson authored or co-authored 26 research reports during her career. She received numerous awards and honors for her work, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2015). In 2016, NASA named a building, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, after her.  Johnson recently passed away at the age of 101 on February 24, 2020.

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Shirley Chisholm was the first African American woman elected to the United States Congress in 1969. Through her role as a politician, Chisholm was a forceful advocate on behalf of children, the economically disadvantaged, and Americans of color. When running for a House of Representative position for the 12th District of New York in 1968, she overcame racist and sexist opposition to win her party's nomination. While in office, Chisholm served on the Veterans Affairs Committee, the Committee on Education and Labor, the Rules Committee, the Committee on Organization and Review, the powerful Ways and Means Committee, and the Committee on Agriculture in her fourteen years of service. In 1972, Chisholm again made history by seeking the Democratic nomination for president. Despite a poorly financed campaign and opposition from the party establishment, Chisholm refused to abandon the race. She got 150 votes from convention delegates on the first ballot. Although Chisholm failed to win the nomination, she characteristically influenced the party's platform and debates beyond expectations.

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Coretta Scott King was a civil rights activist and a feminist. As an undergraduate college student, King was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People as well as the Young Progressives serving as a student delegate. In an effort to raise money for civil rights events she performed at “freedom concerts”. In 1962, King served as a delegate for the Women’s Strike for Peace to the 17-Nation Disarmament Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. In addition, she served on the board of directors of the National Organization for Women. King struggled to find a balance between serving in the Civil Rights and Feminist movements and raising her four children. Once King was widowed from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she committed herself to continue her husand’s work while adding her own feminist views to them. On June 19, 1968 at the Lincoln Memorial, King called upon women to “unite and form a solid block of woman power to fight the three great evils of racism, poverty, and war”. King was the driving force behind the adoption of Martin Luther King Jr.’s national holiday and its commitment to a day of service.

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Eleanor Roosevelt was a well-known humanitarian, an advocate for women and others without the right to vote, and a delegate to the United Nations. Roosevelt grew up in a wealthy family that emphasized a great value to public and civic service. While in the White House with President Franklin D. Roosevelt as First Lady, she began the practice of regular press conferences with women correspondents. This forced wire services, which had not previously employed women, to hire and train women. In 1939, Mariah Anderson, an African-American opera singer, was not allowed to perform in Constitution Concert Hall in Washington D.C. per the Daughters of the American Revolution’s guidelines. In response, Roosevelt resigned her membership and set up the concert at Lincoln Memorial. In 1946, President Harry Truman appointed Eleanor Roosevelt as a delegate to the United Nations, where she was the chair of the Commission on Human Rights. In this role, Roosevelt was a major component in the drafting and adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In her celebratory address, Roosevelt showed her concern and care for minorities of all backgrounds. Her defense of all minorities, the youth, and the poor helped bring groups into government that were formerly alienated from the political process.

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Malala Yousafzai advocates for women’s education rights against the Taliban. At twelve years old, she started writing a blog for BBC under the pseudonym Gula Makai detailing her fears of the school she was attending being shut down, or of being killed on the way home. Eventually, her fear came true as the school bus that escorted them was attacked by the Taliban in October of 2012. Despite the fact that she was severely injured and had a long road to recovery, Malala (as she is most commonly known) spoke at the United Nations ‘Education First’ initiative enforcing and inspiring the world to aid in global education initiatives. In 2014, Malala was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her heroic struggle in speaking out for the right of girls to education.

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Florence Nightingale developed modern nursing and was a leader in sanitation reform. Her most famed position was as the superintendent to female nursing in the military hospitals of Turkey during the Crimean War. Nightingale was able to attain these positions in her time period as her father believed in women's education and educated the family in mathematics, philosophy, and languages. From a young age, she displayed an interest in nursing by caring for aging relatives and household staff. There she learned basic nursing skills, the value of patient observation, and fundamental hospital design. As Nightingale was allowed access to the wards during the Crimean War, she began to address the most serious problems by establishing the operational rules for the nurses. She kept exceptional records of causes of death of the soldiers that revealed the predominant reason was from “preventable” causes. Through her improvements, the death rate declined as the hospital was cleaned, adequate nutrition was provided, and the nurses met basic care needs of clean dressings. However, it was the agenda of innovation and restructuring of nursing that she designed and implemented for the remaining 40 years of her life that distinguished her as a social reformer.

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Helen Keller was a passionate feminist, socialist, and antiwar activist during World War I. As a child, Keller encountered a severe fever which left her blind and deaf. Her family had monetary connections to provide a tutor for her to learn braille, speak, and navigate the world. Through these resources, Keller became famous and used that fame to become an educated woman. Mark Twain helped create a fund for her to go to school. During her studies, Keller learned that poor people were more likely to go blind and/or deaf than the rich. With this knowledge, she adopted socialist ideals and joined the Socialist party. After her education, Keller began educating others on blindness and other disabilities along with the downfalls of capitalism. In addition, Keller fought for women’s suffrage and the civil rights of African Americans. Keller stated that women “cannot rely on men’s chivalry to give them justice,” in one of her speeches fighting for suffrage. In 1917, Keller donated money to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a new and controversial civil rights organization, and wrote for its magazine in hopes of achieving civil rights for African Americans.

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Tu Youyou is a Chinese pharmaceutical chemist and has spent her entire career as a researcher at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing. Her inspiration for working in the field of medicine came from her own suffering of tuberculosis for two years when she was a teenager. She worked on a secret military project, Project 523, initiated by the Chinese Communist party in the late 1960’s. The reason for this work was because North Vietnam, the then communist part of Vietnam, asked for medical help for Malaria, an illness that plagued their country. During this time of work, Youyou had to make personal sacrifices to focus on her work, such as not  seeing her children for three years when travelling to the Chinese island, Hainan Island, that was plagued by Malaria as well. At this time, Youyou and her team discovered artemisinin, a drug derived from the sweet wormwood plant and is now part of the standard antimalarial treatment. In addition, when the drug was first being tested, she volunteered to be the first human subject. In 2015, she was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this discovery. The other half of the prize was shared by William Campbell and Satoshi Omurawho developed a treatment for infections caused by Roundworm parasites. With this achievement, she is the first mainland Chinese scientist to receive a Nobel Prize in a scientific category, and she did so without a doctorate, a medical degree, or training abroad.