299 Women Who Shaped World History

Born: May 4, 1916, Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S. Jane Jacobs is a Canadian urbanologist noted for her clear and original observations on urban life and its problems.After graduating from high school, she became a reporter on the Scranton Tribune, moving to New York City about a year later. While working as a free-lance writer, she met […]

Born: 1932, BelgiumIrigaray is a French feminist psychoanalyst and philosopher who examined the uses and misuses of language in relation to women.Irigaray was a member of the Freudian School of Paris, founded by Jacques Lacan, and taught at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes from 1968 until she was dismissed in 1974 because of her doctoral

Born: March 8, 1895, Melo, UruguayDied: July 1979, Montevideo Juana de Ibarbourou was a Uruguayan poet who achieved great popularity throughout the Spanish-speaking world through her early collections of simple poems with easy rhythms, celebrating love and Nature. Her success in her native country and abroad prompted the Uruguayan government to take the unprecedented step

Born: January 7, 1891, Notasulga, Alabama, U.S.Died: January 28, 1960, Fort Pierce, Florida Zora Neale Hurston was an American writer and folklorist, whose anthropological study of her racial heritage, at a time when black culture was not a popular field of study, influenced the Harlem Renaissance writers of the 1930s. Hurston’s work also had an

Born: July 1967, London Jhumpa Lahiri is a famous Indian American author of Bengali origin. Her first novel, “The Namesake” was a major national bestseller and was named the New York Magazine Book of the Year. Jhumpa Lahiri became the first Asian to win the Pulitzer Prize when she won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for

Born and died—(c. 935-1000), regarded as the first German woman poet Hrosvitha also called Roswitha, was a German poet and chronicler. As a young woman she entered the Benedictine convent of Gandersheim, near Göttingen. Her works, all in Latin, comprise eight religious poems: two historical chronicles in verse, one on the deeds of Holy Roman

Born: Nov 20, 1923, Springs, Transvaal, South Africa Nadine Gordimer is a South African novelist and short- story writer, known for her realistic character dialogue and passionate writing. She won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1991. Fueled by feelings of frustration with the social and political predicament of a racially divided South Africa, Gordimer’s

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,