Women Activists Educational Posters, “Ba...-Bi...-”
for the social studies classroom, home schoolers and theme decor.

Ella Baker
Anna Laetitia Barbauld
Clara Barton
Marie Bashkirtseff

Simone de Beauvoir
Lydia Becker
Aphra Behn

Ella Baker
b. 12-13-1903; Norfolk, VA
d. 12-13-1986; NYC

Ella Josephine Baker, a leading African American civil rights and human rights activist beginning in the 1930s, worked behind-the-scene over five decades.

Ella Baker quotes ~
• “One of the things that has to be faced is the process of waiting to change the system, how much we have got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.”
• “I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed peoples to depend so largely upon a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight. . .”

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, née Aikin
b. 6-20-1743; Leicestershire, England
d. 3-9-1825; Stoke Newington

Ann Laetitia Barbauld is remembered most today as a teacher and author of primers for children. In the Georgian era she was highly respected as poet, essayist, political writer, editor, and critic, writing on citizen ethics, identity politics, church-state relations, and empire. After her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven critizing England's participation in the Napoleonic Wars was savaged by critics, she never published again.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld quote ~
• “I do not know how to rejoice at this victory, splendid as it is, over Buonaparte [sic], when I consider the horrible waste of life, the mass of misery, which such gigantic combats must occasion.”

• Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment

Clara Barton
b. 12-25-1821; Oxford, MA
d. 4-13-1912

Humanitarian Clara Barton was a teacher and nurse who is remembered for her work with wounded in the American Civil War and organizing the American Red Cross. The International Committee of the Red Cross had been established in Europe “to protect the victims of international and internal armed conflicts ... the war wounded, prisoners, refugees, civilians, and other non-combatants.” Barton could only ‘sell’ the idea of the Red Cross with the expanded vision including any great national disaster because post-Civil War Americans could not imagine the US would ever be involved in another conflict as horrendous as the Civil War.

Clara Barton quotes ~
• “I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.”
• “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay.”

Marie Bashkirtseff
b. 11-11-1858; Ukraine
d. 10-31-1884; Paris (tuberculosis)

Marie Bashkirtseff, born to a wealthy Russian noble family, studied painting and wrote articles for Hubertine Auclert's French feminist newspaper, La Citoyenne. She is most noted today for her personal journals, published as "I am the Most Interesting Book of All: The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff", describing, among other things, the struggles of women artists.

Daisy Bates
b. 11-11-1914; Huttig, AR
d. 11-4-1999; Little Rock, AR

Publisher, writer and civil rights activist Daisy Bates played a leading role in the Little Rock integration crisis of 1957.

Bates was elected president of the Arkansas State Conference of NAACP branches in 1952; wrote her memoir, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, a winner of the 1988 National Book Award; worked in Lyndon Baines Johnson's anti-poverty program; served the Democratic National Committee; and was awarded the 1959 Spingarn Medal with the Little Rock Nine.

Simone de Beauvoir
b. 1-9-1908; Paris, France
d. 4-14-1986

Simone de Beauvoir was a feminist, existentialist philosopher, and social theorist. Her metaphysical novels include She Came to Stay and The Mandarins though she is best remembered for her treatise The Second Sex, an analysis of women's oppression.

Simone de Beauvoir quotes
• “Change your life today. Don't gamble on the future, act now, without delay.”
• “Art is an attempt to integrate evil.”
• “All oppression creates a state of war.”
• “No one is more arrogant toward women, more aggressive or scornful, than the man who is anxious about his virility.”
• “If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat.”
• “It is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with life. Old age is life's parody, whereas death transforms life into a destiny: in a way it preserves it by giving it the absolute dimension. Death does away with time.”

Lydia Becker
b. 2-24-1827; Manchester, England
d. 7-18-1890

Lydia Becker, an aspiring amateur biologist and astonomer, was a leader in the early British suffrage movement arguing that there was no natural difference between the intellect of men and women.

In 1870 Becker established the Women's Suffrage Journal, the first national paper covering the women's suffrage campaign, proposing a non-gendered educational system in Britain.

Aphra Behn (née Johnson)
b. 7-10-1640; England
d. 4-16-1689

Alphra Behn is considered to be one the first woman to earn a living by writing in England.

Behn's protagonists reflect her own passion for life, a spirit which led her to write in a letter to a male colleague: “All I ask is the privilege... to tread in those successful paths my predecessors have so long thrived in ... If I must not because of my sex, have this freedom, but that you will usurp all to yourselves; I lay down my quill and you shall have no more of me.”

• Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works

Annie Besant (née Wood)
b. 10-1-1847; England
d. 9-20-1933; India

Annie Besant was a political and women's rights activist, writer, and Theosophist, or one who holds that each religion holds a portion of truth to help humanity evolve to greater perfection.

Annie Besant quotes ~
• “Better remain silent, better not even think, if you are not prepared to act.”
• “Refusal to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all outside of our own limited experience is absurd.”
• “Liberty is a great celestial Goddess, strong, beneficent, and austere, and she can never descend upon a nation by the shouting of crowds, nor by arguments of unbridled passion, nor by the hatred of class against class.”

• Annie Besant: An Autobiography

Mary McLeod Bethune Carl Van Vechten photograph

Mary McLeod Bethune
b. 7-10-1875; Mayesville, SC
d. 5-18-1955; Daytona Beach, FL

Mary McLeod Bethune, daughter of former slaves, was a tireless educator best remembered as a the founder of the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls in 1904. The school evolved into the Bethune-Cookman University.

Mary McLeod Bethune quotes ~
• “Invest in the human soul. Who knows, it might be a diamond in the rough.”
• “If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves. We should, therefore, protest openly everything . . . that smacks of discrimination or slander.”
• “Cease to be a drudge, seek to be an artist.”
• “The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.”
• “The true worth of a race must be measured by the character of its womenhood.”
• “Next to God we are indebted to women, first for life itself, and then for making it worth living.”

• Black History posters

Saint Hildegard von Bingen
b. 1098; Germany
d. 9-17-1179

Saint Hildegard von Bingen should be considered a “polymath” (a person with varied knowledge and learning). She was an “abbess, artists, author, counselor, linguist, naturalist, teacher, scientist, philosopher, physician, herbalist, poet, activist, visionary, and composer”.

• Hildegard of Bingen: Scivias