Reader's Nominations

PLATINUMGRL

Simone DeBeauvoir (okay, so she is famous, but is still worth mentioning!)

Kate Chopin (gaining some fame)-- Victorian writer, wrote 'The Awakening' about a woman's well, awakening; realizing she was a sentient being, had strengths, was sexual. I highly recommend.

Aphra Behn (I believe 18th century, but could be late 17th) wrote Oroonoko. Amazing book about a white woman's attraction to/fascination with a black slave. She was a pretty interesting person herself, can't remember all the details off the top of my head but I do remember that she was a high level spy (for England?) and obtained many useful secrets.

GLASSWOMAN

Please don't forget Marian Anderson, the great singer banned from many opera halls because she was black. Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for her to sing at the Washington Monument to an integrated audience.

Mary McCloud Bethune of South Carolina was part of FDR's "kitchen cabinet." She was also an advisor to 4 other presidents and founded Bethune-Cookman College in Florida for black students. She is also the founder of the National Council of Negro Women.

Anna Hyatt Huntington was a great sculpturist and left behind her legacy of sculpture at Brookgreen Gardens, close to Myrtle Beach.

Elisa Lucas Pinckney raised the first successful crop of indigo in the US, used as a dye. When she died in 1793 George Washington was one of the pallbearers.

Wilma Mankiller (born 1945) became principal chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1985.

CELEBRANT

Another name that might be mentioned is Enheduanna (flourished 2330 BC), daughter of the Akkadian King Sargon and author of "The Exaltation of Inanna," a hymn to the goddess Innana, preserved in a tablet discovered in the 1920s but not translated into English until the late 1960s. Inanna is usually described as a goddess of love, but in Enheduanna's poem, she is fearsome warrior. The Women Writer's site here at About has lots of material on her.

It is also of interest to me that three "new religions" that emerged in the nineteenth century were founded by women: Mary Baker Eddy (Christian Science), Ellen White (Seventh-Day Adventism), and Helena Blavatsky (Theosophy, an ancestor of current "New Age" movements).

MOIREACH

My personal female hero and favourite cool woman is astronaut Shannon Lucid. A member of the first group of female astronauts, selected in 1979, she holds the records for the most flight hours in orbit for any woman or American and second place for any human in space, after spending 223 days on Mir. She holds a doctorate degree in biochemistry, and on top of all her professional achievements raised three children. I think she's a great testimony to the abilities of women to succeed in both professional and personal areas, and balance the two.

And to add to everything else, Shannon exercised enough on the space station that after six months there, she was able to walk off the space shuttle, while most astronauts, male and female, who spent far less time on the station had to be taken out on stretchers, after being in microgravity for so long. :)

I'd also like to mention some great female poets, such as Edna St. Vincent-Millay and Emily Dickinson. :)

Charli Nixon

I'd like to nominate Mary Dyer, first woman ever hanged in Boston Common. She was executed for preaching the Quaker religion. A feminist before her time, they had to kill her to shut her up.

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