Women Who Dared II Educational Posters Details
Composite posters of twenty famous women with images & short biography.

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WOMEN WHO DARED II

Composite posters of twenty famous women-

Josephine Baker
Sarah Bernhardt
Ida Wells-Barnett
Carrie Chapman Catt
Gabrielle Chanel
Mourning Dove
Karen Horney
Wangari Maathai
Wilma Mankiller
Margaret Mead
Gabriela Mistral
Lucretia Mott
Georgia O’Keeffe
Jeannette Rankin
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Aung San Suu Kyi
Edith Spurlock Sampson
Bessie Smith
Junko Tabei
Sojourner Truth

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Josephine Baker (American, 1906-1975) danced in vaudeville houses and joined a traveling dance troupe when she was sixteen. In 1923 she landed a chorus line spot in a Broadway show, but it was in Paris two years later that she stepped fully into the spotlight in La Revue Negre. She was irreverent and exotic, known for her magnetic stage presence and outrageous promotional antics. A politically courageous woman, Baker spoke and acted against racism throughout her life and was member of the French Resistance in World War II, for which she was awarded the Legion of Honor.
more Josephine Baker posters | Black History posters | WWII posters

Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) was arguably the most commanding personality in the history of Western theater, and she was virtually an entity unto herself as an artist. Educated in a convent, she discovered acting in early adolescence and seemingly fell at once onto her life’s path. Like many great “naturals,” however, Bernhardt studied and labored incessantly at her art, seeking to approach it through every aspect of life. A woman of many talents and interests, in her final years she had to undergo the amputation of a leg – prompting this note to a friend: “To-morrow they are going to take off my leg. Think of me, and book me some lectures for April.”
more Sarah Bernhardt posters

Ida Wells-Barnett (1862-1931) fought all her life against racial injustice but is today honored most for her courageous journalistic campaign against racial lynching. Her first editorials on the subject, in 1892, resulted in threats on her life and the destruction of her Memphis newspaper office by a mob, but this only spurred her to further, stronger and louder action. In New York City and later in Chicago, she continued to train a harsh and unrelenting light on the national disgrace of lynching, while organizing for woman suffrage and African-American self-empowerment.
Black History posters

Gabrielle Chanel (French, 1883-1971) opened her first boutique (Deauville, France) in 1914, when women still had not shaken the external vestiges of nineteenth-century restriction: the corsets, petticoats and impossibly ruffly getups of the day’s fashion. Chanel, who had been making her own clothes for several years, virtually invented the concept of sports-wear and developed a vision of uncomplicated female dress, the impact of which was unequaled by any designer of the twentieth century. She built a fashion empire on providing women with comfortable clothes, as well as her Chanel No. 5 perfume, still the best seller on the planet.

Carrie Chapman Catt (1859-1947) was Susan B. Anthony’s hand-picked successor to lead the woman suffrage movement nationally, and for two decades she painstakingly engineered the final path to victory with equal measures of tactical savvy, doggedness and velvet diplomacy. All proved crucial to the passing and ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment – and bespoke the arrival of a new level of practical female power on the public stage. A teacher and newspaperwoman by profession, Catt also founded the League of Women Voters and later became a prominent figure in the internationalist and pacifist movements that arose in the wake of World War I.
Wisconsin posters

Mourning Dove (Okanogan, c. 1882-1936), an Okanogan Indian of the Northwest coast, was sent to a mission school as a child. She put her mission education to use in the service of her native culture by becoming a writer. She became an important chronicler of the life ways of her people, thus preserving a great deal of knowledge that otherwise might have been lost. Mourning Dove’s best-known book, Coyote Stories, first published in 1933 and still in print today, is one of the first collections of native stories that was gathered and transcribed by a Native American.
more Native American posters

Karen Horney
(German, 1885-1952) was a giant of twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory and practice. She liberated Freudian theory not only from its more pronounced androcentric blinders but also from the cult of sterile dogmatism that had come to envelop it by the 1920s. Her theories of feminine psychology sought to extend Freud's work to encompass female reality as well as dynamic factors of culture and environment. Horney's work helped form the basis of modern humanistic psychology.
Jung and Freud posters

Wangari Maathai
(b. 1940) founded Kenya's Green Belt Movement, a reforestation project also designed to unleash the energies of rural women and foster improved self-esteem among them. Begun in 1975, the project planted some ten million trees in its first fifteen years and became one of the most effective and acclaimed environmental movements in the world. Maathai, a biologist and academic pathbreaker in her country, has also gained prominence – and persecution – as a political and social activist there, agitating on behalf of democratic reforms and against quick-buck, destructive development. her accomplishments, vision and fearlessness have made Maathai one of the most respected figures of the world environmental movement.
more Africa posters | Noble Prize Winners | environmental posters

Wilma P. Mankiller (b. 1945) became the first woman to be elected chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, in July 1987. By that time she had become one of the best-known and most successful organizers of grass roots programs for social and environmental betterment of Native American communities; her work continues to inspire hope and action among them today. Trained in social work and community planning, Mankiller's fund raising and development efforts have ranged from water systems to horticulture, and her innovative and untiring work has gained her numerous honors and breathed fresh life into the movement for Native American self-help and empowerment.
Wilma Mankiller, Contemporary Native Americans poster

Margaret Mead (American, 1901-1978) did more than perhaps any other person in our century to develop and communicate the science of anthropology. She lived within, studied and compared a variety of cultures and wrote about them in more than thirty books – the first of which, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), is still the best-selling anthropology volume of all time, A tireless student, teacher and humanitarian, Mead expressed with her life her won fondest hope: to build “from a hundred cultures, one culture which does what no culture has ever done before – gives a place to every human gift.”
Women of Science composite poster

Gabriela Mistral (Chilean, 1889-1957) in known in Chile as “the spiritual queen of Latin American.” A poet and educator, she was an activist on behalf of homeless children, reorganized the library and rural school systems of Mexico, and became the first Latin American writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945.
Gabriela Mistral portrait | more Latinos posters, Author posters

Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) was among the most beloved, fearless and effective of the first generation of activists for women’s rights in the United States, Like the younger Susan Anthony, Mott was born to a tradition of Quaker activism and was a well-known figure in both the abolitionist and suffragist movements. She was a key intellectual influence on many of her juniors, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with whom she organized the historic 1848 Seneca Falls convention for women's rights. Behind Mott’s serene, pious demeanor – which did much to belie the popular notion of suffragists as crazed, hateful imitation-men – lay nerves of steel and an unbending determination to battle all manner of inhumanity and inequity.
Lucretia Mott portrait

Georgia O’Keeffe (American, 1887-1986) wanted to be a painter from the time she was twelve. By the time of her death at age ninety-nine, she had left a more profound mark on American art than perhaps any other woman save Mary Cassatt, with a style that was uncategorizable yet instantly recognizable as her own. O'Keeffe enigmatic and uncompromising personality have become almost as legendary as her work – some aspects of which, such as her alliance with pioneering art photographer Alfred Stieglitz, have had enormous impact on twentieth-century art.
more Georgia O’Keeffe posters

Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973), one of the more far-seeing feminists and social reformers of her time, was also an unrelenting pacifist. As a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, she voted against U.S. entry into both world wars – on the grounds, as she put it, that “you can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake,” Both times it cost her her House seat, but her devotion to her beliefs and commitment to action never wavered throughout her life. At age eighty-seven she led five thousand women in a march on Washington to protest the Vietnam War.
peace posters

Edith Spurlock Sampson (1901-1979) was a trailblazer in the legal profession, not only as an African-American female but also as an attorney and jurist who’s hallmarks came to be innovativeness, common sense and a legal sensibility that put the human being in the center. Born in Philadelphia, Sampson was first drawn to social work but was steered into law by a teacher who recognized her ability. It was in Chicago that she made her reputation as a lawyer, both in private practice and in the juvenile court system, and later as the first African-American woman judge. Sampson’s contributions still reverberate in many ways; for example it was she who, appearing at a high school “career day” in Houston, inspired the young Barbara Jordan to become a lawyer.
Black History posters

Aung San Suu Kyi (b. 1945), daughter of Burmese national hero Aung San, was educated in Burma, India and Britain. She returned to Burma in 1988 to care for her dying mother, in a visit that happened to coincide with a popular uprising against the ruling military regime. Determined to take action on behalf of the movement for restoring democracy, Aung San Suu Kyi united a previously leaderless revolt despite her arrest and detention without trial or charge. Though still under house arrest, Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts on behalf of human rights in her country.
Nobel Peace posters

Bessie Smith (1894-1937) remains a key figure in the development of American popular music – a performer whose personal and musical power as a blues and jazz stylist extended the boundaries of both female and African-American expression for a new mass audience. A protege of the great “Ma” Rainey, Smith made her first recording in 1923 (“Downhearted Blues”), and it quickly established her as the most successful black recording artist of the day. Smith's embodiment of the strong, proud blues woman was as true offstage as on, and though she was no stranger to tumult and tragedy, she lived as hard and lustily as she sang.
Black History posters | women in music posters

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), in the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, penned this simple yet still-earthshaking amendment to Jefferson's Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.” Stanton remains the towering “foremother” in the history of women's rights in the United States. Known s a strategist who, over the initial trepidation of her compatriots, dared to demand the vote, she was also a visionary reformer who for more than fifty years turned her wide-ranging, passionate and fiercely brilliant intellect upon every institution and mindset that served to thwart or constrain the self-development of women – and men – as free and equal human beings.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton posters

Junko Tabei (b.1939) was the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, in 1975. By virtue of that and numerous triumphs before and since, she has become one of the legendary women climbers of our time. From her early embrace of climbing as a means of deep self-expression, Tabei has met every challenge, from raising large sums for expeditions to raising a child as a dutiful Japanese wife and mother–while maintaining a steady focus on her dreams. In 1991 she told a reporter: “I’ve climbed to the summits of the highest mountains in 20 of the 167 countries that are members of the United Nations. So my plan is to do the same in the remaining 147 countries.”
Japan posters.

Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) was a freedom fighter, orator and American original whose legend seems to grow with successive generations – and whose capacity to inspire seems to cross all lines of race and gender. Born into slavery, Truth fled successive masters and fought the system in the courts as well. In 1843, responding to a “command from God”, she took both the name Sojourner Truth and the itinerant preacher’s life it bespoke. As an African-American woman Truth powerfully embodied the fight for both black and female liberation, refusing to compromise one for the other. Her famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech of 1851 was but one of many in which she attacked – in typically electrifying fashion – religious hypocrisy, white privilege and sexism. More Black History posters