New biographies at fembio.org

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

2024-01-30T17:41:00+00:00

*9 January, 1875 in New York, NY
†18 April, 1942 in New York, NY

US-American sculptor and patron of American art and artists; founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art (1930)

With courage and determination, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney broke the shackles of her family’s massive wealth and elevated but limiting social position to find meaning and fulfilment in the world of art. Lamenting her superficial and controlled existence as the highly eligible daughter of New York’s wealthiest family, Gertrude early wished to be a boy, and at age 4 even cut off her curls to get closer to that goal. She nevertheless followed her predestined path and married a suitably wealthy man. As the marriage relationship deteriorated, however, she cultivated her interest in art and became a recognized sculptor. Skillfully leveraging her extreme wealth and powerful connections, moreover, she supported living American artists in a uniquely effective way and founded the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first such US museum, in 1930, paving the way for a new appreciation of these artists and their modernist approaches. The fourth child of the immensely wealthy, socially prominent…

Prudence Crandall

2023-09-01T21:31:00+00:00

Born September 3, 1803, Carpenter's Mills, Rhode Island
Died January 28, 1890, Elk Falls, Kansas

US-American teacher, abolitionist,
founder of a school for black girls
in Canterbury, Connecticut;
Connecticut State Heroine
220th birthday September 3, 2023

“I contemplated for a while the manner in which I might best serve the people of color. As wealth was not mine, I saw no other means of benefiting them, than by imparting to those of my own sex that were anxious to learn, all the instruction I might be able to give, however small the amount.”…“My whole life has been one of opposition.” – Prudence Crandall Prudence Crandall, a young white woman originally from Rhode Island, always wanted to be a teacher. Nearly thirty years before the beginning of the American Civil War, she opened a Female Boarding School in the town of Canterbury in eastern Connecticut to young black girls exclusively. A firm believer in peaceful values and interactions between whites and blacks, Crandall – as she began to put her strong abolitionist views into practice – did not yet know just how incendiary her actions would soon become. Early…

Amanda Gorman

2023-02-20T16:03:00+00:00

born March 7, 1998 in Los Angeles

US-American poet
25. birthday on March 7, 2023

Amanda Gorman stepped up to the microphone in a canary-yellow coat, with a piled high Afro hairstyle and a red hairband. It was January 20th, 2021 in Washington and cold that day in the American capital. The sun came and went during the inauguration of the new president, Joe Biden. The 22-year old Amanda Gorman recited her poem “The Hill We Climb”. The poem - performed gracefully with sweeping gestures as if she were conducting an orchestra of one, in the rhythmic tradition of rap and slam poetry - and the pictures of the young black woman, both went halfway around the world and enchanted millions. “The Hill We Climb” addressed the painful rift through Amanda Gorman’s country and its communal healing. The Capitol sits on top of a rise called simply the Hill, where the United States Congress meets. The storming, invasion and breaching of the center of American democracy on January 6th, 2021, two weeks before the inauguration, became emblematic of a country that has been deeply…

Mary Anning

2022-07-21T15:23:00+00:00

born on May 21, 1799 in Lyme Regis, County of Dorset, Great Britain
died on March 9, 1847 in Lyme Regis

British fossil collector, paleontologist
225th birthday on May 21, 2024

Not only was Mary Anning one of the founders of paleontology, she herself was a master of the science. The name of this great paleontologist is also closely associated with the restrictions women faced in a feudal, deeply patriarchal society where female strength, opinions, and self-determination mattered as little as their rights to education, property or participation in political decision-making processes. Mary Anning is famous and celebrated today for her discovery, excavation and description of the fossils of enormous ichthyosaurs and pterosaurs and of marine invertebrates from the Lyme Regis coast in southwestern England. Her specimens — some unsurpassed to this day in terms of completeness and preparation — were instrumental in changing scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth. She was one of the first to put forward the idea that the Earth had developed, laying the groundwork for the theory of evolution. In 1859, just twelve years after her…

Erika Danneberg

2022-06-09T11:15:00+00:00

born on January 9, 1922 in Vienna
died on June 29, 2007 in Vienna

Austrian writer, psychoanalyst and peace activist
15th anniversary of death on June 29, 2022

Erika Danneberg's youth was shaped by her experiences during the Second World War in Vienna. She grew up in a German-nationalist home, but deeply rejected National Socialism. She was part of the circle of the Jewish welfare worker Franziska Löw and helped to provide Jewish prisoners in the collection camps in Vienna with the necessities of survival. After 1945, Erika Danneberg sought orientation in the literary scene in Vienna. She finished her German studies, from which she had been excluded from 1943 on because of her lack of political commitment. She published numerous texts in magazines and was active in the group around Hans Weigel, an influential promoter of the post-war literary generation. In 1949 Danneberg married the Jewish author Hermann Hakel and converted to Judaism. Together with him she edited, among other things, the magazine "Lynkeus," one of the rare literary magazines of the postwar years. During this time she also worked as a translator, editor and as the…

Denise Levertov

2022-05-26T09:30:00+00:00

Born October 24, 1923 in Ilford, Essex, UK
Died December 20, 1997 in Seattle, WA, USA

British-American poet
100^th birthday October 24, 2023

"And I walked naked / from the beginning // breathing in / my life, / breathing out poems, //" (A Cloak. Relearning the Alphabet. 1970) From a young age, Denise Levertov had a strong belief in her calling as a poet. Born near London in 1923, Denise Levertov spent her formative years in England. She was home-schooled by a Welsh mother, who adored her and imbued her and her older sister Olga with languages, the literature of the nineteenth century from Jane Austen to Leo Tolstoy, art, music, a deep knowledge of Christianity, and love for the natural world. Her Russian-Jewish father was a prolific scholar and Anglican priest who—after having converted to Christianity—devoted his life to the reconciliation of Christians and Jews. Her parents supported refugees from Nazi Germany and instilled a strong social conscience in her. During World War Two she worked as a civilian nurse in London, experiencing first-hand the constant danger and the "drabness" of life at war. Her first book of…

Gertrud Bäumer

2022-02-01T11:00:00+00:00

born September 12, 1873 in Hohenlimburg (now part of Hagen), Germany
died March 25, 1954 in Bethel near Bielefeld, Germany

German women's rights activist, politician and writer
150th birthday on September 12, 2023

For three decades, from 1900 on, Gertrud Bäumer stood with Helene Lange at the head of the “moderate wing” of the bourgeois women's movement in Germany. Together they edited the monthly journal Die Frau and the Handbuch der Frauenbewegung. Today many high schools in Germany bear Lange's or Bäumer's name, for they campaigned for equal rights particularly in the areas of women's education, training and employment. As a politician, Bäumer worked in the Reichstag (parliament), the Ministry of the Interior and the League of Nations. When she was dismissed from these posts in 1933, she turned to writing and experienced equal success as an author. Gertrud Bäumer was born in Hohenlimburg, now a district of Hagen, in 1873. Her paternal ancestors spanned "generations of pastors." Her father Emil was a pastor who however had to serve in schools, due to “his frank and audacious views," which were at odds with official church doctrine. "Our mother was - the mother." (Bäumer, Lebensweg 10) Emil…

Nina Simone

2022-01-21T23:15:00+00:00

Born February 21, 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, USA
Died April 21, 2003 in Carry-le-Rouet (Bouches-du-Rhône), France

US-American singer-songwriter, pianist, composer-arranger and civil rights activist
90. birthday February 21, 2023

The spectacularly talented musician performed jazz, blues, folk, pop and protest songs to devoted fans in the US, England, Europe and Africa for decades. Trained as a classical pianist, she began singing in clubs to earn money. Her rapid rise as a popular performer who could play and sing anything did not prevent her from being exploited by record companies and managers, and her subsequent life-long sense that she needed a strong male protector did not always serve her well. Nonetheless, between 1958 and 1974 she recorded more than 40 albums. From 1964 to 1974 Simone dedicated herself to the US civil rights movement, inspiring activists young and old with her powerful songs against racist oppression. She wrote the passionate “Mississippi Goddam” in 1963 after Medgar Evers was murdered and four little Black girls were killed in a racially motivated church bombing. She later wrote: it “was my first civil rights song, and it erupted out of me quicker than I could write it down” (S/C 90).…

Lotte Laserstein

2022-01-09T08:06:00+00:00

born on November 28, 1898 in Preussisch-Holland, now Paslek/ Poland
died on January 21, 1993 in Kalmar/ Sweden

German-Swedish painter
125th birthday on November 28, 2023

Lotte Laserstein had already won several awards when in 1929 the Berliner Abendblatt wrote: “We will have to remember the name of this artist; one of the very best of the younger generation, she is surely headed for a brilliant future." She had also just reached the final round of a national competition, which gave her even greater recognition throughout the Weimar Republic. Lotte Laserstein was proud to belong to the first generation of women who, after the introduction of women's suffrage in 1919, had been granted the right to attend universities and thus also gained access to art academies. She began her studies in 1921 with the painter and graphic artist Erich Wolfsfeld, whom she regarded as her personal "Meister," and he remained a crucial presence and artistic mentor throughout her life. She later admitted that she would have liked to have taken up a love relationship with him, but that he had harbored "only" fatherly feelings for her. She graduated in 1927 and immediately…

Stella Rotenberg

2021-11-25T10:01:00+00:00

geboren am 27. März 1916 in Wien, Österreich-Ungarn
gestorben am 3. Juli 2013 in Leeds, Großbritannien

österreichisch-britische Schriftstellerin und Lyrikerin

Her work is shaped by her exile experiences, as well as by the murder of a large part of her family. And it makes clear that it is possible to write poetry even after Auschwitz. Life Born Stella Siegmann, she grew up in Vienna with her older brother in an assimilated Jewish family in a sheltered atmosphere. She attended a humanist high school, where she learned French and ancient languages, and became involved in the Association of Socialist Middle School Students. She was 18 when, in 1934, the civil war in Austria put an end to hopes of democratic development. She had to witness that suspects could be sent to camps without trial. Freedom was no longer a matter of course for her as a result, and she became an insecure person. On a trip through Europe with her brother and a friend in the summer of 1934, which took her to Italy, where she had already met refugees from Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, she became aware of the anti-Semitism that was growing stronger. She…