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

Pandita Ramabai
Jeannette Rankin

Evelyn Reed
Adrienne Rich

Panita Ramabai Dongre Medhavi
b. 4-23-1858; Maharashtra, India
d. 4-5-1922

Pandita Ramabai, renowned for her learning in an age when most Indian women did not even learn to read, was a Indian Christian social reformer and activist. In 1889 she founded the Mukti (Hindi: liberatation) Mission as a refuge for young widows; today the mission is still active providing education, vocational training, housing, and medical services for the needy.

Pandita Ramabai quote ~
• “I realized after reading the fourth chapter of St. John's Gospel, that Christ was truly the Divine Saviour he claimed to be, and no one but He could transform and uplift the downtrodden women of India. … Thus my heart was drawn to the religion of Christ.”

• Pandita Ramabai's America: Conditions of Life in the United States

Jeannette Pickering Rankin
b. 6-11-1880; Missoula, MT
d. 5-18-1973; Carmel, CA

Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the US Congress, (1916 House of Representative as a Republican from Montana), voted against declaring WWI. Rankin then voted for the draft, sold Liberty Bonds and introduced legislation to provide state and federal funds for health clinics, midwife education, and visiting nurse programs in an effort to reduce the nation's infant mortality. She was the only woman to vote for the 19th Amendment.

After failing to gain nomination for the 1918 Montana nomination for the Senate she worked as a Washington lobbyist until she was again elected to Congress in 1940. Rankin voted against declaring war against Japan, and simply declared her presence in the vote to declare war against Germany and Italy in the WWII conflict.

Rankin was a supporter of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and at age eighty-seven she led five thousand women in a peace march on Washington to protest the Vietnam War.

Jeannette Rankin quotes:
• “As a woman I can't go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.”
• “You can no more win a war that you can win an earthquake.”
• “What one decides to do in crisis depends on one's philosophy of life, and that philosophy cannot be changed by an incident. If one hasn't any philosophy in crises, others make the decision.”

• Jeannette Rankin: First Lady of Congress

Evelyn Reed, née Horwit
b. 10-31-1905; Haledon, NJ
d. 3-22-1979; NYC

Evelyn Reed was the pen name of Evelyn Horwit Andreas Novack, an artist, philosopher, anthropologist and socialist who “sought to educate and inspire women with the facts about the creative and productive role females have played in history.”

Evelyn Reed's book Woman's Evolution, establishes through research that women/mothers were the creators of the social skills necessary to evolve primates to hominids, and that women, as the first artists, linguists, architects, writers and farmers, were the sex to tame fire.

Adrienne Rich
b. 6-16-1929; Baltimore, MD

Feminist Adrienne Cecile Rich has been called “one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century.”

Eleanor Roosevelt
b. 10-11-1884; NYC
d. 11-7-1962; NYC

Poster Text: Born in 1884, Eleanor Roosevelt was to become the most active First Lady in the nation's history. Even as a teenager, she felt a deep concern for the less forunate. “I am always questioning, questioning,” she wrote in her diary. “I can feel it in me ... that I can do much more than I am doing.” Life was soon to give her the chance to do “much more.” In 1905, Eleanor married Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When he was stricken with polio in 1921, she began to help him with his work. And after he became President in 1933, she became hes “eyes and ears,” traveling everywhere he could not go.

The 1930s were the years of the Great Depression, a time when millions were out of work. When Mrs. Roosevelt was not visiting coal mines or city slums, she was working hard to get help for poor farmers or speaking boldly against racial prejudice. In the early 1940s, during World War Two, she worked tirelessly for world peace. And for the six years after her husband's death in 1945, whe served as a delegate to the United Nations. President Truman once called her “The First lady of the World.” She herself summed up her views this way: “You have to do the best you can in this world, and when you have done that, that is all you can do.” She remained active in public life until her death in 1962.

• more Eleanor Roosevelt posters
• more Great American Women posters