Gloria Steinem: Wonder Woman

Gloria Steinem’s name is synonymous with feminism. As a leader of the second wave of feminism, she brought a new concern to the fore—the importance of self-esteem for women. Her childhood did little to bolster her sense of self or predict the successful course her life would take. Her father, an antique dealer, traveled a lot for work, and her mother suffered from severe depression and was often bedridden and self-destructive. Because they moved so often, Gloria didn’t attend school until she was ten, after her family was deserted by her father and Gloria assumed the roles of housewife and mother to her mother and sister. Escaping through books and movies, Gloria did well at school and eventually was accepted to Smith College, where her interest in women’s rights, sparked by her awareness that her mother’s illness had not been taken seriously because “her functioning was not necessary to the world” began to take hold.

After a junket in India, she started freelancing; her goal was to be a political reporter. Soon she hit the glass ceiling; while she made enough money to get by, she wasn’t getting the kind of serious assignments her male colleagues were—interviewing presidential candidates and writing on foreign policy. Instead she was assigned in 1963 to go undercover as a Playboy Bunny and write about it. She agreed, seeing it as an investigative journalism piece, a way to expose sexual harassment. However, after the story appeared, no editors would take her seriously; she was the girl who had worked as a Bunny.

But she kept pushing for political assignments and finally, in 1968, came on board the newly founded New York magazine as a contributing editor. When the magazine sent her to cover a radical feminist meeting, no one guessed the assignment would be transformational. After attending the meeting, she moved from the sidelines to stage center of the feminist movement, cofounding the National Women’s Political Caucus and the Women’s Action Alliance.

The next year, Steinem, with her background in journalism, was the impetus for the founding of Ms., the first mainstream feminist magazine in America’s history. The first issue, with shero Wonder Woman on the cover, sold out the entire first printing of 300,000 in an unprecedented eight days, and Ms. received an astonishing 20,000 letters soon after the magazine hit the newsstands, indicating it had really struck a chord with the women of America. Steinem’s personal essay, “Sisterhood,” spoke of her reluctance to join the movement at first because of “lack of esteem for women—black women, Chicana women, white women— and for myself.”

The self-described “itinerant speaker and feminist organizer” continued at the helm of Ms. for fifteen years, publishing articles such as the one that posited Marilyn Monroe as the embodiment of fifties women’s struggle to keep up the expectations of society. She penned Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions in 1983, urging women to take up the charge as progenitors of change. This was followed by Revolution from Within in 1992, illuminating her despair at having to take care of her emotionally disturbed mother as well as her struggles with self-image, feeling like “a plump brunette from Toledo, too tall and much too pudding-faced, with…a voice that felt constantly on the verge of revealing some unacceptable emotion.” Steinem stunned her reading public with such self-revelatory confessions. Who would have guessed that this crack editor and leading beauty of the feminist movement had zero self-image?

Gloria Steinem’s real genius lies in her ability to relate to other women, creating the bond of sisterhood with shared feelings, even in her heralded memoir. Still a phenomenally popular speaker and writer, Gloria Steinem crystallizes the seemingly complicated issues and challenges of her work by defining feminism as simply, “the belief that women are full human beings.”

“The sex and race caste systems are very intertwined and the revolutions have always come together, whether it was the suffragist and abolitionist movements or whether it’s the feminist and civil rights movements. They must come together because one can’t succeed without the other.”

— Gloria Steinem

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

Dolores Ibarruri: La Pasionaria

The shero of the Spanish Civil War, Dolores Ibarruri was born in 1895 to a Basque miner. She worked as a servant until she joined the Partido Socialista and began writing incendiary political diatribes under the pseudonym, La Pasionaria: “The Passion Flower.” She and her husband Julian Ruiz helped found the first Communist parties in Spain in 1920. The mother of six children with Ruiz, Ibarruri didn’t let motherhood slow her down; not only did she continue writing for the El Mundo Obrero workers’ newspaper, in 1934, she organized a women’s group called Agrupacion de Mujereres Antifascistas.

Noted for her keen political mind, fearlessness, and charisma, Ibarruri was elected to Parliament in 1936 and was freed from a stint in jail so that she could serve. She began making speeches on behalf of the Popular Front Government, rousing audiences with her impassioned pleas to halt the tide of Fascism. When full-scale civil war broke out in Spain, La Pasionaria exhorted her fellow loyalists to remain steadfast with cries of “No Pasaran!” (They shall not pass!) When Franco grabbed the power seat, she left the Spain she had fought for to live in the USSR. During the mass exodus of Communists from Spain, the great Spanish matriarch met photographer Tina Modotti. Modotti was so trusted by the exiled Spaniards, she was one of two people guarding Ibarruri’s hospital room when she fell ill with a bad case of hepatitis.

In Soviet Russia, Ibarruri served as a Secretary-General of the Spanish Communist Party from 1942 until she assumed the presidency in 1960, a post she held until 1977. When Franco died later that year, La Pasionaria moved back home to Spain, and in Spain’s first elections in forty years, was reelected to Parliament. She was eighty-one years old, fierce as ever, and accorded a shero’s welcome back to the country that lionized her. La Pasionaria, whose career was based on dedication to her crusade for freedom, received much recognition for her incredible courage and self-sacrifice; she won the Lenin Peace Prize and was named honorary vice president of the International Democratic Federation of Women. She will always be remembered for her valor in the face of great danger and for her belief that, “It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees!”

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

Emma Goldman: Radical Rhetorician

Teenage immigrant Emma Goldman had escaped from Russia in 1885 after witnessing the wholesale slaughter of the idealist political rebel anarchists who called themselves the Nihilists. Two years later in America, the young woman “born to ride the whirlwinds” as someone once said, saw it happen again with the new trial and killings of the Haymarket anarchists who had opposed Chicago’s power elite. Rather than scare her off the politics of idealism forever, young Emma was drawn even more toward the kind of political passion that risked death for principles. She “devoured every line on anarchism I could get,” she notes in her autobiography Living My Life, “and headed for New York City, command central in the 1890s for radicals of many stripes.”

In New York, Emma met one of the anarchists whose writing she’d been devouring, Johann Most, who encouraged her to develop her gift for public speaking. Emma worked as a practical nurse in New York’s ghettos where she saw the price women paid for want of any birth control. Soon she was taking to the soapbox to air her views on this lack of available contraception and the resulting reliance on back-room abortions: “Thanks to this Puritan tyranny, the majority of women soon find themselves at the ebb of their physical resources. Ill and worn, they are utterly unable to give their children even elementary care. That, added to economic pressure, forces many women to risk utmost danger rather than continue to bring forth life.” Her campaign reached the ears of Margaret Sanger and influenced the development of a national birth control campaign.

But birth control was only one of her bailiwicks; what she was really advocating was anarchism: a classless, governmentless society made up of small groups in
free, humanistic cooperation with one another. She had a tremendous gift for verbal rhetoric. Nicknamed “Red Emma,” she traveled the United States lecturing—often six months of the year, five nights a week—making frequent stops at Mabel Dodge’s infamous salon, and publishing her monthly magazine, Mother Earth, a vehicle for her twin concerns of women’s liberation and the rights of the working class. Reporter Nellie Bly was delighted to note that “Red Emma” was very pretty “with a saucy turned up nose and very expressive blue-gray eyes…(brown hair) falling loosely over her forehead, full lips, strong white teeth, a mild, pleasant voice, with a fetching accent.”

In 1893, she was jailed for a year for exhorting a crowd of unemployed men who believed “it was their sacred right” to take bread if they were starving. Later she came to believe that the ends do not always justify the means, and she repudiated violence as a tool to create change. She continued to mesmerize crowds with her impassioned speeches until 1917 when her opposition to World War I led to a two-year imprisonment. She was subsequently deported, the Justice Department fearful of allowing her to continue her antiwar campaign: “She is womanly, a remarkable orator, tremendously sincere, and carries conviction. If she is allowed to continue here she cannot help but have great influence.”

She continued to exercise influence from abroad; in 1922 Nation magazine proclaimed that she was one of “the twelve greatest living women.” She was allowed back into the country after her death when the government decided that her silenced corpse posed no risk, and she was buried in Chicago with the Haymarket martyrs.

“The more opposition I encountered, the more I was in my element and the more caustic I became with my opponents.”

— Emma Goldman

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

Eslanda Goode Robeson: “Africans Are People”

Eslanda Goode Robeson was the wife of the famous singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson. However, she was an important shero in her own right, distinguishing herself both in political activism and as an anthropologist.

The daughter of a freed slave, Essie, born in 1896, was passionately interested in Africa and the conditions that made the mother continent vulnerable. Her mother, Eslanda Cardoza Goode, was of mixed race, born among South Carolina’s free blacks to an octoroon mother and a wealthy Spanish Jew, Isaac Nunez Cardoza. Essie’s uncle Francis Louis Cardoza was named as “the most highly educated Negro in America” by Henry Ward Beecher. When Essie was six, her father died of alcohol abuse and the family moved to New York City just in time for the birth of the Harlem Renaissance. Essie was well educated herself, attending Teachers College at Columbia University and one year of medical school, ultimately receiving her degree in chemistry from Columbia. Her other interests included a strong proclivity for politics and the desire to fight for racial equality. Essie was on her way to becoming a model for the new equality when she became the first black person to work in the pathology and surgery departments of Columbia Presbyterian, where she ran the lab. In the twenties, she met and married Paul Robeson; after hearing him sing at a party, Essie became convinced he had a future in show business. She talked him into performing and soon his career was launched. By the mid-twenties, Paul was the toast of Europe and America; Essie quit her job to travel with Paul and manage his career. However, over and over the duo suffered the sickening hypocrisy of a white society that lauded Paul as the toast of stage and screen while not allowing Essie and him to eat in the same restaurants as the white music patrons. To avoid the pain, Essie began to stay home and focus upon their shared dream of a modern black family— emancipated, educated, and enlightened.

In the thirties, the ever intellectually restless Essie developed an intense interest in anthropology and in Africa. Studying at London University and the London School of Economics, she became even more radicalized: “I soon became fed up with white students and teachers ‘interpreting’ the Negro mind and character to me,” she wrote later. “Especially when I felt, as I did very often, that their interpretation was wrong.”

She decided to make her own conclusions. She traveled to Africa several times, exploring widely, up the Congo and into the heartland by any means available. Her exploration led her to emphasize the importance of racial pride in overcoming racism, and she banded with other black people to found the Council of African Affairs. She was always extremely outspoken about the plight of her people as a result of slavery and colonialism and never backed down from a debate. She drew fire when she suggested the Soviet Union had created a better foundation for equality than the United States. In the forties, during World War II, she was especially vocal, perceiving that the war against Fascism was an opportunity for a more racially united and equal opportunity America. Her book, African Journey, was published in 1945; that same year, as a representative of the Council on African Affairs, Essie participated in the conference that founded the United Nations.

In the fifties, the activity and views of the Robesons were brought to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy who called her before the House Un-American Activities Committee. McCarthy was no match for the brilliance and verbal dexterity of Essie, who turned the tables on him, drilling him with questions about the black civil rights issue. But McCarthy got his revenge, revoking both their passports, reducing Paul’s income from international concert tours to almost nil.

This only spurred Essie on to greater activism—ultimately her passport was reinstated and she traveled to Germany to receive the Peace Medal and the Clara Zetkin Medal, a governmental award for women who have fought for world peace. She continued to write articles and give speeches on behalf of equality and justice until she died in 1965. No matter what the personal cost, Essie fought to free her people from the invisible bonds that still held them back. Her work was invaluable in the civil rights movement; her call for absolute racial equality rang clear and true: “No man can be free until all men are free.”

“I believe there will never be peace in the world until people have achieved what they fought and died for.”

— Eslanda Goode Robeson

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

Sophie Scholl: Stood Up for Her Beliefs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Scholl

Sophie Scholl was a German student and political activist who studied at the University of Munich during World War II. She spread anti-war leaflets at the university with the help of her brother as part of the White Rose, an organization that encouraged peaceful resistance against the Nazi regime. She was eventually caught and questioned by the Gestapo, but she dutifully protected the identities of other White Rose members. She was found guilty of treason and was executed by guillotine in 1943. Her courage in putting her life on the line to resist the Nazis left a huge impact, and her memory will continue to be honored for years to come.

“I am, now as before, of the opinion that I did the best that I could do for my nation.”

—Sophie Scholl

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Girls by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

Yara Shahidi: Using Her Platform for Good

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yara_Shahidi

In 2014, Yara Shahidi landed the role of Zoey Johnson on the TV show Black-ish. She has since then used her platform to encourage young people to become more politically involved. She started an organization called We Vote Next (formerly Eighteen x 18) that encourages young adult voter registration and increased voter turnout. She also started a digital meet up platform for high schoolers to discuss self-improvement and higher education.

“I don’t think I’d be doing the work I’m doing if I wasn’t constantly inspired by the other young people doing this work, by the other young people doing work I didn’t even realize had to be done. I feel like we constantly educate one another.”

—Yara Shahidi

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Girls by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

Zhan Haite: Empress of Education

https://bit.ly/3yNJcmR

Zhan Haite is an educational activist in China. She bravely stood up for what she believed in despite objections from her parents and a government with a poor track record of accepting civilian criticism. She challenged the Chinese government’s practice of refusing migrant workers the opportunity to take their high school entrance exams. Thousands of students were denied the chance to improve their lives and ease the adversities wrought on them by poor economic situations. Even though the odds were stacked against her, her efforts did not go in vain—the government took steps to loosen some of the regulations that discriminated against these migrant workers.

“My idols are Martin Luther King and Aung San Suu Kyi. Both paid a heavy price in the pursuit of equality, freedom, and democracy.”

—Zhan Haite

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Girls by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

Eslanda Goode Robeson: “Africans Are People”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eslanda_Goode_Robeson

The daughter of a freed slave, Eslanda Goode Robeson distinguished herself both in political activism and as an anthropologist.

Robeson, born in 1896, was passionately interested in Africa and the conditions that made the mother continent vulnerable. Her mother, Eslanda Cardoza Goode, was of mixed race, born among South Carolina’s free Black people to a mixed-race mother and a wealthy Jewish Spaniard, Isaac Nunez Cardoza. Her uncle Francis Louis Cardoza was named “the most highly educated Negro in America” by Henry Ward Beecher. When she was six, her father died of alcohol abuse and the family moved to New York City just in time for the birth of the Harlem Renaissance. Robeson was well educated herself, attending Teachers College at Columbia University and one year of medical school, ultimately receiving her degree in chemistry from Columbia. Her other interests included a strong proclivity for politics and the desire to fight for racial equality. Robeson was on her way to becoming a model for the new equality when she became the first Black person to work in the pathology and surgery departments of Columbia Presbyterian, where she ran the lab. In the twenties, she met and married Paul Robeson; after hearing him sing at a party, she became convinced he had a future in show business. She talked him into performing and soon his career was launched. By the mid-twenties, Paul was the toast of Europe and America. Robeson quit her job to travel with Paul and manage his career. However, over and over the duo suffered the sickening hypocrisy of a White society that lauded Paul as a champion of stage and screen while not allowing he and Robeson to eat in the same restaurants as the White music patrons. To avoid the pain, Robeson began to stay home and focus on their shared dream of a modern Black family—emancipated, educated, and enlightened.

In the thirties, the ever intellectually restless Robeson developed an intense interest in anthropology and in Africa. Studying at London University and the London School of Economics, she became even more radicalized: “I soon became fed up with white students and teachers ‘interpreting’ the Negro mind and character to me,” she wrote later. “Especially when I felt, as I did very often, that their interpretation was wrong.”

She decided to make her own conclusions. She traveled to Africa several times, exploring widely, up the Congo and into the heartland by any means available. Her exploration led her to emphasize the importance of racial pride in overcoming racism, and she banded with other Black people to found the Council of African Affairs. She was always extremely outspoken about the plight of her people as a result of slavery and colonialism, and never backed down from a debate. She drew fire when she suggested the Soviet Union had created a better foundation for equality than the United States. In the forties, during World War II, she was especially vocal, perceiving that the war against fascism was an opportunity for a more racially united and equal-opportunity America. Her book African Journey was published in 1945; that same year, as a representative of the Council on African Affairs, Robeson participated in the conference that founded the United Nations.

In the fifties, the activity and views of the Robesons were brought to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who called her before the House Un-American Activities Committee. McCarthy was no match for the brilliance and verbal dexterity of Robeson, who turned the tables on him, drilling him with questions about the Black civil rights issue. But McCarthy got his revenge, revoking both their passports, reducing Paul’s income from international concert tours to almost nil.

This only spurred Robeson on to greater activism—ultimately her passport was reinstated, and she traveled to Germany to receive the Peace Medal and the Clara Zetkin Medal, a governmental award for women who have fought for world peace. She continued to write articles and give speeches in support of equality and justice until she died in 1965. No matter what the personal cost, Robeson fought to free her people from the invisible bonds that still held them back. Her work was invaluable in the civil rights movement; her call for absolute racial quality rang clear and true: “No man can be free until all men are free.”

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Black Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

ESTELLA JUAREZ: MILITARY DAUGHTER WITH A CAUSE

https://www.nbcboston.com/news/politics/decision-2020/estela-juarez-11-reads-letter-to-trump-about-moms-deportation-at-dnc-you-tore-our-world-apart/2180733/

Unfortunately, heartbreak does not escape the young and innocent.
Estella Juarez was just nine years old when her immigrant mother was deported to Mexico. Her father, a member of the United States military who served in Iraq, voted for President Trump in 2016, believing that he would “protect military families.” Estella was asked to speak at the 2020 Democratic National Convention at age eleven, and read a letter addressed to President Trump. In the letter, she claimed that her father would not vote for Donald Trump this term. Also, in her heartbreaking letter, she voiced the pain that many families have felt as their family was torn apart. She articulately described that these people are not “animals” and that children should not be held in cages. Estella proves that even the youngest of us can have a strong voice and make a difference.

“We are American families. We need a president who will bring people together, not tear them apart.”

—Estella Juarez

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Girls by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

ROWAN BLANCHARD: GIRL MEETS WORLD (AND MAKES IT A BETTER PLACE)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_Blanchard

Rowan Blanchard played the character of Riley Matthews on Girl Meets World, a Disney Channel show that acted as a sequel to the ‘90s classic Boy Meets World. While that role is what she is most well-known for, it is her youth activism and essays on intersectional feminism that have put her over the edge. At just thirteen years old, the actress spoke at the UN Women US National Annual Conference about gender equality. Also, in January of 2015, she addressed a crowd of 75,000 people at the Women’s March in Los Angeles. Rowan said, “I believe in the effable power of community. If women, if queer people, if people of color have survived this long in a world that refuses to represent them, that must amount to a force much greater than one man with nothing more to invest in but his ego.”

“People used to always talk down to me, like, ‘Oh, you’re so young,’ but now I recognize that my age is an advantage; there’s a lot more I can do.”

—Rowan Blanchard

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Girls by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.