Barbara Ehrenreich is a well-known investigative reporter and social commentator. She has been called a myth buster and a muckraker for her unflagging devotion to uncovering the silent and contradictory spaces in our national persona. A chemist with a doctorate in cellular immunology, Ehrenreich has chosen to focus her life's work on changing the national discourse on …
Rose Winslow on Hungry for the Vote
"God knows we donât want other women ever to have to do this over again.â Rose Winslow  was brought as a baby to the United States by her Polish parents so that she could grow up in a free democratic country. Her father labored as a coal miner and steel worker and as a child …
Victoria Woodhull on the 47%
Victoria Claflin Woodhull, the first woman candidate for the presidency of the United States, ran for office in 1872, sixty years before women had the right to vote. The first woman stockbroker, opening a brokerage firm on Wall Street with her sister in 1870, and first woman newspaper publisher, Woodhull was born poor, received only three years of …
Beatrice Potter Webb on Ruling the World
Beatrice Potter Webb (1858-1943) is best known for the work she did as a social reformer and economist with her husband Sidney Webb and for coining the term collective bargaining. Together they published the book The History of Trade Unionism and traveled England trying to break down the poor laws. In 1895 they founded the …
Virginia Penny On Womenâs Employment
 To write her book The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Womenâs Work (1863) Viginia Penny interviewed hundreds of women across the country. In the book she listed five hundred possible occupations for women, railed against the artificial barriers that prevented women from entering certain fields of works, and critiqued the wage differential between men and women. When …
Women, Words, and Wisdom 