Women Writers Posters & Prints, pg 9/10
for the language arts, social studies, history, art and science classrooms and home schoolers.

Celia Laighton Thaxter
b. 6-29-1835; Portsmouth, NH
d. 8-25-1894; Appledore Is.

Celia Thaxter, poet and author of short stories, grew up on the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine, where her father was a lighthouse keeper.

• Sandpiper: The Life and Letters of Celia Thaxter

Dorothy Thompson
b. 7-9-1893; Lancaster, NY
d. 1961; Portugal

Dorothy Thompson was a journalist who focused her attention on Central Europe during the time Hitler was rising in power. The report and book resulting from her interview with Hitler was considered offensive by the Germans and she was expelled from Germany.

Thompson was considered on equal influence with Eleanor Roosevelt. She was also married to author Sinclair Lewis fron 1928 to 1940.

Dorothy Thompson quotes ~
• “Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict - alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.”
• “The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness.”
• "As far as I can see, I was really put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy. My offense was to think that Hitler was just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime in the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people— an old Jewish idea. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I was merely sent to Paris. Worse things can happen." (1934)

• World War II posters
• Historic Headlines posters
• American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson

Hester Thrale
b. 1-16-1741; Wales
d. 5-2-1821; Bristol

Hester Thrale (née Sulusbury, second marriage Piozzi), a patroness of the arts with her first husband Henry, were friends and supporters of Dr. Samuel Johnson. Mrs. Thrale was a writer whose diaries and correspondence with Johnson offers a balance to Boswell's Life of Johnson. She was also friends, for a time, with author Frances “Fanny” Burney.

• The Lives of the Muses- Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired

Flora Tristan
b. 4-7-1803; Paris
d. 11-14-1844; France

Flora Tristan, a writer and activist, was one of the founders of modern feminism, and a maternal grandmother to post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin.

Evelyn Underhill
b. 12-6-1875; England
d. 6-15-1941

Evelyn Underhill is considered a Christian mystic who wrote prolifically on mysticism and the practice of religion. In her book Mysticism (1911) she describes the quest as ". . . refuses to be satisfied with that which other men call experience, and is inclined . . . 'to deny the world in order that it may find reality'."

Sigrid Undset
b. 5-20-1882; Denmark
d. 6-10-1949; Norway

• 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature

Marie-Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, comtesse de la Fayette
b. 3-18-1634; Paris
d. 5-25-1693

Madame de La Fayette is the author of La Princesse de Clèves, France's first historical novel and one of the earliest novels in literature.

Alice Walker,
b. 2-9-1944; Georgia

The Color Purple is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by African-American author Alice Walker.

Mercy Otis Warren
b. 9-14-1728; Barnstable, MA
d. 10-19-1814; Plymouth

Mercy Otis Warren, the sister of patriot lawyer James Otis (1725-1783), and wife of James Warren, is known as the “Conscience of the American Revolution.”

Mercy Warren was a close friend of Abigail Adams and hosted political meetings in her home. In 1772 her play, The Adulateur, was published. After the war, in 1790, Mrs. Warren published a volume of poetry in her name and in 1805, she published History of the American Revolution.

• American Revolutionary War Era posters

Eudora Welty
b. 4-13-1909; Jackson, MS
d. 7-23-2001; Jackson (pheumonia)

Eudora Welty's stories and novels about small town life in the Mississippi Delta were often inspired by photographs she took while working for the WPA during the Great Depression.

Mathilde Wesendonck
b. 1828
d. 1902

Poet Mathilde Wesendonck infatuated composer Richard Wagner.

Rebecca West
nèe Cicely Isabel Fairfield
b. 12-21-1892; London
d. 3-15-1983

Rebecca West, author, journalist, critic and travel writer, was committed to feminist and liberal principles. She had a ten year affair with H. G. Wells.

• Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:
A Journey Through Yugoslavia; Rebecca West

Edith Wharton, National Archives
b. 1-24-1862; New York
d. 8-11-1937

• Edith Wharton : Novels : The House of Mirth / The Reef / The Custom of the Country / The Age of Innocence

Phillis Wheatley
b. c. 1753; Senegal
d. 12-5-1784; Boston(?)

The woman known as Phillis Wheatley was born in Senegal, kidnapped in 1761 and shipped to America on a slave ship named “Phillis”. She was purchased John and Susanna Wheatley, a wealthy Boston merchant, who tutored her with their son Nathaniel. Wheatley's published poetry helped her gain her freedom but she died in poverty, from complications of childbirth. One of her poems was in praise of George Washington; she was a supporter of the colonists seeking independence.

• The Poems of Phillis Wheatley
• Black History posters

Laura Ingalls Wilder
b. 2-7-1867; Pepin, WI
d. 2-10-1957; Mansfield, MO

Laura Ingalls Wilder said the reason she wrote the books known as the “Little House” series was “to preserve the stories of her childhood for today's children, to help them to understand how much America had changed during her lifetime.”

Author and editor Rose Wilder Lane, Laura's daughter, was a collaborator for the books.

Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
b. 5-8-1859; Columbus, Georgia
d. 5-9-1906; Mobile, AL

Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, one of nineteenth-century America's most popular novelists, was an outspoken supporters of the Confederacy.

Her nine novels include Beulah, Macaria, and St. Elmo, which had sales rivaling those of Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur.

Mary Wollstonecraft Writer's Who Changed the World Poster Series

Mary Wollstonecraft
b. 4-27-1759; London
d. 9-10-1797

Poster Text: “Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.”

The book Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in England in 1792. The author, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote that men were given more respect and power in society than women were, and that women were taught only to be concerned with their looks and with getting married. Wollstonecraft believed mothing would change until men and women received the same education. Vindication of the Rights of Woman caused a huge controversy in England – but this was nothing new for Mary Wollstonecraft.

Wollstonecraft was born in London, and her family moved all over England and Wales because of her father's financial troubles. She left home at 19 and became a governess, watching over and teaching young children. She also helped her sister found a school. Eventually, she met Richard Price, a radical preacher who helped her form her thoughts about how unfairly women were treated in English society. With his encouragement, she began to write pamplets and books.

Wollstonecraft became famous (and infamous) when Vindication of the Rights of Woman came out. the book was very important in England and around the world. Her ideas, including the view that women should be seen as equal to men, were revolutionary at he time. Because of Vindication, Wollstonecraft has been called the mother of the feminist movement. Not everyone was happy about her work, however; the writer Horace Walpole called her "a hyena in petticoats." Mary Wollstonecraft wrote many other works, including two novels. She died after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who grew up to write Frankenstein.

• more Writers Who Changed the World posters
• more Mary Wollstonecraft posters

Virginia Woolf, neé Stephen
b. 1-25-1882; London
d. 3-28-1941; suicide, bipolar disorder

Virgina Woolf is considered one of the foremost authors on the 20th century. Her family was well connected in the literary culture; among visitors to her home when she was a child included Henry James and George Eliot. A founder of the Bloomsbury Group, her great aunt was photographer Julia Cameron, her sister Vanessa Bell became a notable painter and designed her book covers; her godfather was American poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell.

• The Virginia Woolf Reader
• Mrs. Dalloway cover