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

The Pankhursts
Rosa Parks
Lucy Parsons

Alice Paul
Elizabeth Peabody
Frances Perkins

Christabel Pankhurst DBE
b. 9-22-1880; Manchester, England
d. 2-13-1958; Los Angeles, CA

Christabel Pankhurst, along with her mother Emmeline, sisters Sylvia and Adela, and others, founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. As a suffragette she was jailed and participated in a hunger strike. Later in life, Pankhurst, who was educated as a lawyer, became an evangelist lecturing on the Second Coming.

Christabel Pankhurst quotes ~
• “Ability is sexless.”
• “It is our duty to make this world a better place for women.”
• “Never lose your temper with the Press or the public is a major rule of political life.”

• Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography

Rosa Parks
b. 2-4-1913; Tuskegee, Alabama
d. 10-24-2005; Detroit, MI

"I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people."

Described by some as “the mother of the civil rights movement,” Rosa Parks is best known for being arrested for refusing to giver her seat to a white man on a racially segregated Montgomery, AL, bus. Her action led to a successful 380-day boycott of Montgomery buses and a Supreme Court ruling against segregation.

• more Rosa Parks posters
• more Black History Pioneers posters

Lucy Parsons
b. c. 1853; Texas
d. 3-7-1942

“We are the slaves of slaves.
We are exploited more ruthlessly than men.”
- Lucy Parsons

Lucy Parsons, radical American labor organizer and anarchist, is remembered as a powerful orator and author. In 1871 she married former Confederate soldier Albert Parsons; they were forced from Texas to Chicago by intolerant reactions to their interracial marriage. Albert was hanged for his supposed envolvement in the Haymarket Riot.

• Lucy Parsons: Freedom, Equality & Solidarity - Writings & Speeches, 1878-1937

• Black History posters
• Native American posters
• Hispanic Latino History posters

Alice Paul
b. 1-11-1885; New Jersey
d. 7-9-1977

Alice Paul, along with Lucy Burns and others, successfully used tactics like demonstrations, parades, mass meetings, picketing, suffrage watch fires, and hunger strikes that resulted in the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920. Paul was also the author of the original 1923 Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that did not get to the Senate until 1972.

Alice Paul quotes ~
• “I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.”
• “There will never be a new world order until women are a part of it.”
• “It occurred to me that I just didn't see how I could go ahead and continue to eat meat. It just seemed so... cannibalistic to me. And so, I'm a vegetarian, and I have been ever since.”

• Alice Paul and the American Suffrage Campaign
• Iron Jawed Angels (2004), DVD

Elizabeth Peabody
b. 5-16-1804; Billerica, MA
d. 1-3-1894; Jamaica Plain, MA

Transcendentalist, abolitionist, and gifted teacher Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, best remembered as one of the accomplished Peabody sisters, opened the first English language kindergarten in the United States, ran a bookstore from her home where Margaret Fuller held “Conversations”, and worked for the rights of the Paiute Indians. Her tutor for Greek was Ralph Waldo Emerson and she was a teaching assistant to Amos Bronson Alcott (Louisa May Alcott's father).

Elizabeth's sisters, Mary (1805-1887) and Sophia (1809-1871), also made marriages to notable men: Mary became the wife of Horace Mann and Sophia married Nathaniel Hawthorne.

• The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism

Frances Perkins
b. 4-10-1882; Boston, MA
d. 5-14-1965; New York

Frances Perkins, FDR's Secretary of Labor from 1933-1945, was the first woman appointed to the U.S. Cabinet, the most senior appointed advisors in the executive branch of the federal government. As chairwoman on the President's Committee on Economic Security Perkins was involved in all aspects of the reports and hearings that ultimately resulted in the Social Security Act of 1935. Frances Perkins also was a teacher, a volunteer at Hull House in Chicago, and a lecturer at Cornell.

Frances Perkins quotes ~
• “Being a woman has only bothered me in climbing trees.”
• “To one who believes that really good industrial conditions are the hope for a machine civilization, nothing is more heartening than to watch conference methods and education replacing police methods.”
• “In America, public opinion is the leader.”

• The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience

Christine de Pizan
b. c.1362; Venice, Italy
d. c.1431

Christine de Pizan was a feminist philosopher and first professional women writer in the medieval era. Her first works as a writer was to provide for her family after the death of her husband. She then became a critic of Jean de Meun who slandered women in his Romance of the Rose.

The illustration for the presentation frontispiece of Christine de Pizan presenting her Collected Works to Queen Isabeau of France consists solely of females.

Christine de Pizan quotes ~
• “Just as women’s bodies are softer than men’s, so their understanding is sharper.”
• “This woman in love with scholarship intends, to be sure, that woman should acquire learning: but it must be for the purpose of developing her intelligence, or raising her heart to serious things, not of widening her field of ambitions, dethroning man.”
• “I say it to thee again, and doubt never the contrary, that if it were the custom to put the little maidens to the school, and they were made to learn the sciences as they do to the men-children, that they should learn as perfectly, and they should be.”

Sylvia Plath
b. 10-27-1932; Boston
d. 2-11-1963; London

A Troubled Genius - Few poets in the 20th century literature could match the lyricism and emotional intensity of Sylvia Plath's work. Afflicted with bipolar disorder, Plath transformed her inner turmoil into poems full of sadness, anger, and beauty – combining a sense of profound loss with surprising personal strength. Though she lived only a short time, Plath not only inspired admiration and imitation – she also helped launch an emerging feminist movement.

Sylvia Plath quotes ~
• “Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.”
• “If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
• “And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

• Bell Jar movie poster
• Sylvia Plath in Famous Author Educational Mini poster set