Women's History Profile: Judy Chicago

When most of us picture the word ‘feminist’ we probably picture an activist, marching in a crowd of people for suffrage or equal rights, or burning her bra, hair flailing in the air. But feminism expands from beyond the political into the areas of culture, economics and sociology. Judy Chicago, an artist born in 1939 was not out campaigning for women’s rights on the political field with the likes of Susan B. Anthony, but progressing feminism from her studio by her own terms. For her, art was a ‘vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change,’ and she was committed to creating an equal role for women in the art world.

Judy Chicago started Feminist Art in 1970. She coined the term when she started a feminist art program for women at California State University Fresno and then started the CalArts Feminist Art Project. During the next 20 years, Chicago worked on a number of ground breaking pieces, often in collaboration with the women from the Feminist Art Project. These pieces demonstrated, for the first time an openly female point of view and established a centralized focus within women’s art which recognizes an established female imagery.

Women's History Profile: Hannah Senesh

My first Women’s History Month feature is a woman that I didn’t hear about until way into my college education. I took a class focused on women as diarists/memoirists using this book as a text. Seriously, it’s a great read and I highly recommend it.

Anyway, one of the diarists highlighted is Hannah Senesh. I don’t know what it was about her life or her diary entries that made her stand out from the many other fascinating women we read but here I am, ten years later, anxious to let the blogosphere know my devotion to her story.

Hannah Senesh was born in 1921 in Hungary. In the face of religious oppression, she and her family were Jewish, her mother managed to ensure an excellent education for Hannah (for three times the rate that Protestants were paying).

A side note here: I loved that Hannah’s mother was clearly a strong feminist in her own right. I didn’t know too much about her until recently but I have written in the margins of my copy Hannah’s diary “Moms!” and “I wonder what her mothers story is?” more on this later, though.

Women's History Profile: Margaret Sanger

I am sure everyone is exhaling a sigh of relief today in Pittsburgh. It's March 1st which means February's dreaded reign is officially over. Here's hoping the first week of this month is more lamb like than lion. What you may not know is that today is also the first day of Women's History Month. This year's theme is "Writing Women Back into History." When the National Women's History Project began its mission in 1980, less than 3% of the content of teacher training textbooks mentioned the contributions of women. It is all of our responsibilities to recognize the impact of great women in history. PPWP will be blogging all month on the women we've been influenced by.

Today, I thought it was only fitting to do a profile on Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and pioneer of the birth control movement.

Margaret Sanger was the sixth of eleven children born to Anne Purcell Higgins and Michael Hennessy Higgins, a devout Catholic family in New York. As a child, Margaret was profoundly influenced by her mother's seemingly constant state of pregnancy. She often played caretaker to her younger siblings. After her mother's death from tuberculosis and cervical cancer in 1896, Margaret enrolled in a nursing program paid for by her sisters' wages.