Born: March 23, 1814, Puerto Príncipe, CubaDied: Feb 1, 1873, Madrid, Spain Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda was a Cuban author. Avellaneda is known as a leading proponent of Spanish romantic literature. She was born in Camagüey, a Cuban town then known as Puerto Príncipe. After breaking an engagement to marry, Avellaneda moved to Cádiz, Spain, […]
Born: July 3, 1860, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.Died: Aug. 17, 1935, Pasadena, California Charlotte Anna Perkins Gilman was American feminist and writer, best known for her book Women and Economics (1898), which has become a feminist classic. She was born Charlotte Anna Perkins in Hartford, Connecticut. She was educated at the Rhode Island School of Design
Born: February 4, 1921, Peoria, Illinois, U.S. Betty Naomi Friedan is an American feminist leader and author, born in Peoria, Illinois, and educated at Smith College. Her book The Feminine Mystique (1963) challenged several long-established American attitudes, especially the notion that women could find fulfillment only as wives and mothers. Friedan’s phrase “feminine mystique” refers
Born: June 12, 1929, Frankfurt am Main, GermanyDied: March 1945, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp,near Hannover, Germany Anne Frank was a German diarist, born in Frankfurt am Main. In 1933, she and her family, who were Jewish, left Nazi Germany and settled in Amsterdam. In July 1942, they and four other exiles went into hiding in the
Born: Nov 22, 1819, Chilvers Coton, Warwickshire, EnglandDied: Dec 22, 1880, London George Eliot pseudonym of Mary Ann or Marian Evans, was a English novelist, whose books, with their profound feeling and accurate portrayals of simple lives, give her a place in the first rank of 19th-century English writers. Her fame was international, and her
Born: September 26, 1946, Camden, New Jersey, U.S.Died: April 9, 2005, Washington, D.C. Dworkin was an American feminist and author, an outspoken critic of sexual politics, particularly of the victimizing effects of pornography on women.Dworkin began writing at an early age. During her undergraduate years at Vermont’s Bennington College (B.A., 1968), she became involved with
Born: Jan 10, 1797, Schloss Hülshoff, near Münster, Westphalia [Germany]Died: May 25, 1848, Meersburg, Baden Annette Elisabeth Freiin von Droste-Hülshoff was a German poet and story-writer, born in Hülshoff, Westphalia. Her intense spirituality is reflected in Gedichte (Poems, 1838) and the later Das geistliche Jahr (The Spiritual Year), a poetry cycle corresponding to the ecclesiastical
Born: Aug 4, 1936, Cherchell, Algeria Assia Djebar is an Algerian writer and motion-picture director, known for her works about women in the Islamic societies of North Africa. She is one of a generation of female writers offering a view of history that gives women a central role. Central concerns in her work include voice,
Born: October 12, 1904, Anfu [now Linli],Hunan province, ChinaDied: March 4, 1986, Beijing Ding Ling was the assumed name of Chiang Wei-Chih, Chinese novelist, whose works include Wei Hu (1930) and The Sun Shines over the Sangkan River (1948).She was imprisoned by the Kuomintang (Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists) in the 1930s. She was wrongly labelled as
Born: April 17, 1885, Rungsted, DenmarkDied: September 7, 1962, Rungsted Isak Dinesen, pseudonym of Baroness Karen Christence Blixen-Finecke, née Dinesen was a Danish writer, born in Rungsted. She studied painting in various European cities. In 1914 she married her cousin, Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke, and went to live in British East Africa (now Kenya) on a
Born: Dec. 10, 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.Died: May 15, 1886, Amherst Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was, with Walt Whitman, one of the two foremost American poets of the 19th century. She was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, of an old Connecticut River valley family. Her grandfather, her father, Edward, and her older brother Austin served as the
Born: November 12, 1651, San Miguel Nepantla, Viceroyalty of New Spain [now in Mexico]Died: April 17, 1695, Mexico City Juana Ines was a poet, dramatist, scholar and nun, an outstanding writer of the Latin-American colonial period and of the Hispanic Baroque.Juana Ramírez had thirst for knowledge from her earliest years and throughout her life. As
Born: Jan 28, 1873, Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, FranceDied: Aug 3, 1954, Paris Colette, pen name of Sidonie Gabrielle Claudine Colette French novelist, who probed deeply into the life of the senses and into human, particularly physical, relationships.Colette was born in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in the province of Burgundy. In 1893 she married the first of her three husbands, the
Born: June 5, 1937, Oran, Algeria Héléne Cixous is a French feminist critic and theorist, novelist and playwright. Cixous’s first language was German. She was reared in Algeria, which was then a French colony, a circumstance that, by her own account, gave her the undying desire to fight the violations of the human spirit wrought
Born: Sep 3, 1938, London, EnglandCaryl Churchill is a British playwright, whose political perspective and experimentation with theatrical forms made her one of the most important contemporary female playwrights in Britain. Churchill’s writing focuses on issues of class and economics and their effect on women. She was born in London and lived in Montréal, Canada,