Early Life and Education

Born in Oslo, Brundtland graduated as a medical doctor from the University of Oslo in 1963, and completed a Master of Public Health at Harvard University in 1965. At the age of seven, she was enrolled as a member of the Norwegian Labour Movement in its children’s section and has been a member ever since, leading the Labour Party to election victory three times.

Upon graduation, she worked for the Ministry of Health where she worked on children’s health issues including breastfeeding, cancer prevention and other diseases. She also worked in the children’s department of the National Hospital and Oslo City Hospital and became Director of Health Services for Oslo’s schoolchildren.

Political Career

In 1974, Brundtland was appointed Minister of the Environment. Her reputation as an environmentalist grew in national and international circles. Her reputation and popularity led to her election as Prime Minister in 1981. Not only the first woman Prime Minister, Brundtland was also the youngest, aged only 41. She was Prime Minister for two consecutive periods, from 1986-1989 and 1990-1996. Her cabinet was internationally renowned for its large percentage of female ministers. Eight of the eighteen total were female. In 1992 Mrs Brundtland quit as Labour Party leader following the suicide of one of her children. She suffered the biggest defeat of her political career in 1994, when Norwegians voted “No” in a referendum on joining the European Union after a campaign in which she had forcefully argued the case for membership.

She has enjoyed international recognition since 1983 as chairwoman of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. In 1987, the so-called “Brundtland report”, which led to the first Earth Summit in 1992, was produced under her guidance.

Gro Harlem Brundtland is a member of the Council of Women World Leaders , an international network of current and former women presidents and prime ministers whose mission is to mobilize the highest-level women leaders globally for collective action on issues of critical importance to women and equitable development.

World Health Organization (WHO)

Dr Brundtland was nominated as Director-General of the World Category:Health Organisation by the Executive Board of WHO in January 1998. In this capacity, Brundtland adopted a far-reaching approach to public health, establishing a Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, chaired by Jeffrey Sachs, and addressing violence as a major public health issue. Brundtland spearheaded the movement, now worldwide, to achieve the abolition of cigarette smoking by education and persuasion.

Policies on Women

Brundtland has promoted gender equality in all of her public positions. As Prime Minister, Brundland enforced the 40% quota of women as candidates for public office. She sparked controversy over the issue of abortion. In Norway, she pushed through legislation legalizing abortion, arguing that children who are born in poverty or who are unwanted by their parents face serious conditions of negligence and deprivation. In 1994, at the UN conference on population in Cairo, she provoked the anger of Muslims and Catholics by calling for abortion to be decriminalised and accusing religious opponents of hypocrisy. At the conference she argued:

« Women will not become more empowered merely because we want them to be, but through legislative changes, increased information, and redirection of resources. »

References

• Wikipedia page
• http://www.who.int/dg/brundtland/bruntland/en/
• http://www.fsa.ulaval.ca/personnel/VernaG/leadership/disk/noverge_index.html
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/51080.stm

See Also

• Female Heads of State
• Council of Women World Leaders

External Links

• Gro Harlem Brundtland
• Council of Women World Leaders

Early Life and Education

Elion was born in New York City, growing up in the Bronx. Upon finishing high school, she decided to go to All-Women Colleges , an all-women college in New York City. Since her grandfather had died of cancer, she decided to study chemistry to “do something that might evnetually lead to a cure for this terrible disease” according to her autobiography.

The Depression affected her ability to go on to graduate school so Elion decided instead to work for a chemist as a laboratory assistant, making $20 a week. With this salary, she was eventually able to enter graduate school at New York University in 1939, the only female student in her chemistry classes. She received her Masters of Science in 1941.

WWII provided an opportunity to work in laboratories due to the shortage of chemists. She worked as an assistant to George Hitchings, where she ‘transformed’ from an organic chemist to a chemist specialising in microbiology and in the biological activities of the compounds and eventually virology. At the same time, she studied for her doctorate degree, attending at night the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Although she was never able to complete her degree, she later received three honorary doctorate degrees from George Washington University, Brown University and the University of Michigan.

Research

Elion and Hitchings began working on nucleic acid biosynthesis, a little known field at the time. Elion and Hitchings used the differences in biochemistry between normal human cells and pathogens (disease-causing agents) to design drugs that could kill or inhibit the reproduction of particular pathogens without harming the host cells. Elion produced drugs for herpes, leukemia, malaria, gout and immune disorders. She developed immune suppressants to overcome rejection of donated organs in transplant surgery. Her work with George Hitchings led to the development of the AIDS drug AZT.

Distinctions

In 1967 Elion was appointed Head of the Department of Experimental Therapy, a position which she held until her retirement in 1983. She served on a number of advisory committees and the Board of Scientific Counselors for the Division of Cancer Treatment, and was a member of the National Cancer Advisory Board,  a board member of the American Association for Cancer Research, (President in 1983 – 84).

Other committees include: Advisory Committees for the American Cancer Society, the Leukemia Society of America, the Tropical Disease Research division of the World Health Organization. She was a member of the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Transplantation Society, the American Society of Biological Chemists, the American Society of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, the American Association for Cancer Research, the American Society of Hematology, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists, and a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences.

In 1991, Elion received a National Medal of Science, three years after receiving, with Hitchings, the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology.

References

• Gertrude B. Elion, Biography of Gertrude B. Elion, Jewish Women Encyclopedia

See Also

• Female Nobel Prize Laureates
• Women in Science

External Links

• My Hero Project
• Nobel Prize Winners
• National Academies Press

Education

Raised a Roman Catholic, she was educated at Saint Austin’s Roman Catholic Primary School, St. Joseph’s Convent School (now a nursing home for old people) and Stafford Girls’ High School – where her literary talent was encouraged by English master J. A. Walker. She was also influenced by the poet Adrian Henri. She was a passionate reader from an early age, and she always wanted to be a writer. In 1977 she received an Honours Degree in Philosophy from the University of Liverpool. She also holds honorary doctorates from the University of Dundee, the University of Hull, the University of St Andrews and the University of Warwick.

Poetry and other Works

Her adult poetry collections are Standing Female Nude (1985), winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan (1987), which won a Somerset Maugham Award; The Other Country (1990); Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Poetry Prize (Best Poetry Collection of the Year); The World’s Wife (1999); Feminine Gospels (2002), a celebration of the female condition; and Rapture (2005), winner of the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize. The Hat (2007) is her latest poetry collection for children. Previous collections include Meeting Midnight (1999) and The Good Child’s Guide to Rock N Roll (2003).

She also writes picture books for children, and these include Underwater Farmyard (2002); Doris the Giant (2004); Moon Zoo (2005); and The Tear Thief (2007).

Anthologies edited by Carol Ann Duffy include Out of Fashion (2004), in which she creates a vital dialogue between classic and contemporary poets over the two arts of poetry and fashion; and more recently, Answering Back (2007).

Carol Ann Duffy is also an acclaimed playwright, and has had plays performed at the Liverpool Playhouse and the Almeida Theatre in London. Her plays include Take My Husband (1982), Cavern of Dreams (1984), Little Women, Big Boys (1986) and Loss (1986), a radio play.

Distinctions

She received an Eric Gregory Award in 1984 and a Cholmondeley Award in 1992 from the Society of Authors, the Dylan Thomas Award from the Poetry Society in 1989 and a Lannan Literary Award from the Lannan Foundation (USA) in 1995. She was awarded an OBE in 1995, a CBE in 2001 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. She was awarded an OBE in 1995, and a CBE in 2002.

References

• http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth104
  
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Ann_Duffy
  
• www.carolannduffy.co.uk

Early Life and Education

Artemisia Gentileschi was born in Rome, the first child of the painter Orazio Gentileschi, one of the best representatives of the school of Caravaggio. Artemisia was introduced to painting in her father’s workshop, where she learned drawing, how to mix color and how to paint. She too was heavily influenced and inspired by Caravaggio.

Her first work, completed at the age of 17, was Susanna e i Vecchioni (Susanna and the Elders). Despite evidence of her early talent, she was rejected from the all-male professional academies for art on account of her gender.

Rape and Trial

Her father hired fellow artist, Agostino Tassi, to tutor his daughter privately. Tassi raped Artemisia, helped by Cosimo Quorlis. After the initial rape , Artemisia continued to have sexual relations with Tassi, since he promised to marry her. However, unbeknownst to Artemisia, he was already married.  Orazio pressed charges against Tassi only after he learned that Artemisia and Tassi were not going to be married. Orazio also claimed that Tassi stole a painting of Judith from the Gentileschi household. The major issue of this trial was the fact that Artemisia had lost her virginity to Tassi.

In the ensuing 7-month trial, Artemisia was given a gynecological examination and was tortured using a device made of thongs wrapped around the fingers and tightened by degrees. Both procedures were used to corroborate the truth of her allegation, the torture device used due to the belief that if a person can tell the same story under torture as without it, the story must be true. At the end of the trial Tassi was imprisoned for one year.

The painting Giuditta che decapita Oloferne (Judith beheading Holofernes) (1612 – 1613), has been interpreted as a wish for psychological revenge for the violence Artemisia had suffered.

Marriage and Florence

In order to restore her honor, Orazio arranged for his daughter to marry Pierantonio Stiattesi, a Florentine artist. After moving to Florence, Artemisia received a commission for a painting at Casa Buonarroti and became a successful court painter, enjoying the patronage of the Medici family and Charles I. While in Florence, Artemisia and Pierantonio had four sons and one daughter, although only the daughter survived to adulthood.

Artemisia was the first woman accepted into the Accademia del Disegno (Academy of Drawing). She frequented an influential circle which included Granduke Cosimo II de’ Medici, Granduchess Cristina, Galileo Galilei and Michelangelo Buonarroti the younger (nephew of the great Michelangelo).

Notable works from this period include La Conversione della Maddalena (The Conversion of the Magdalene), and Giuditta con la sua ancella (Judith and her Maidservant). Artemisia painted a second version of Giuditta che decapita Oloferne (Judith beheading Holofernes). Despite her success, due to an excess of expenses by her husband, the Florentine period was full of problems with creditors and with her husband. These problems led to her return to Rome in 1621.

Rome Period

Despite her artistic reputation, Artemisia did not reach the summits of success in Rome that she had experienced in Florence. The appreciation of her art was narrowed down to portraits and to her ability with biblical heroines: she received none of the lucrative commissions for altarpieces. By 1627, she moved to Venice in search of more favourable working conditions.

The following were probably painted in this period in Rome and Venice: the Ritratto di gonfaloniere (Portrait of Gonfaloniere); the Giuditta con la sua ancella, (Judith and her Maidservant); Venere Dormiente (The Sleeping Venus); Ester ed Assuero (Esther and Ahasuerus).

Naples and England 1630-1653

In 1630 Artemisia moved to Naples, where she remained for the rest of her career with the exception of a brief trip to London and some other journeys. In Naples for the first time Artemisia started working on paintings in a cathedral, dedicated to San Gennaro nell’anfiteatro di Pozzuoli (Saint Januarius in the amphitheater of Pozzuoli) in Pozzuoli. During her first Neapolitan period she painted Nascita di San Giovanni Battista (Birth of Saint John the Baptist) and Corisca e il satiro (Corisca and the satyr).

In 1638 Artemisia joined her father in London at the court of Charles I of England, where Orazio became court painter and received the important job of decorating a ceiling (allegory of Trionfo della pace e delle Arti (Triumph of the peace and the Arts) in the Casa delle Delizie of Queen Henrietta Maria of France in Greenwich. Charles I had convoked her in his court, and it was not possible to refuse.

Orazio suddenly died in 1639. It is known that Artemisia had already left England by 1642, when the civil war was just starting. Her movements are then difficult to trace although it is known from a letter written to her mentor, Don Antonio Ruffo of Sicily, that she was in Naples by 1649. She was still receiving commissions in 1654, although relying on her assistant to help her complete them. It is quite likely that she died during the plague that hit Naples in 1656.

Some works in this period are Susanna e i vecchioni (Susanna and the elders) and Madonna e Bambino con rosario (Virgin and Child with a Rosary).

Artemisia Gentileschi and 20th Century Feminism

During the 70s, Artemisia Gentileschi’s attracted the attention of Feminism , who retraced her authorship of paintings which had lost its original attribution over the centuries. The rape and trial have also attracted cosiderable attention, resulting in a controversial French film in 1999, Artemisia, which depicted the rape as consensual.

Sources

• http://www.artemisia-gentileschi.com/index.shtml
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_Gentileschi
• http://sisyphe.org/article.php3?id_article=995

Early Life and Education

Mistral was born in Vicuña, Chile, but was raised in the small Andean village of Montegrande, where she attended the primary school in which her older sister, Emelina Molina, was a teacher. Of a poor socio-economic background, she was supporting by age fifteen both herself and her mother through her work as a teacher’s aide in the seaside town of Compania Baja, Chile.

Poetry Career

She began to write poetry as a village schoolteacher after a passionate romance with a railway employee who committed suicide. In 1904 Mistral published some early poems, such as Ensoñaciones, Carta Íntima (“Intimate Letter”) and Junto al Mar, in the local newspaper El Coquimbo, Diario Radical, and La Voz de Elqui using a range of pseudonyms and variations on her civil name. She taught elementary and secondary school for many years until her poetry made her famous. In 1914, Mistral was awarded the first prize in a national literary contest in Santiago, with the work Sonetos de la Muerte (Sonnets of Death). She had been using the pen name Gabriela Mistral since June 1908 for much of her writing.

She started to get published in New York in the early 1920s and her international reputation as a poet grew. She travelled to Mexico, Texas, Washington and Europe lecturing and giving readings. The love poems in memory of the dead, Sonetos de la muerte (1914), made her famous throughout Latin America. Her first great collection of poems, Desolación [Despair], was not published until 1922. In 1924  Ternura [Tenderness] appeared, a volume of poetry dominated by the theme of childhood. This same theme, linked with maternity, also plays a significant role in Tala, a poetry collection published in 1938. Her complete poetry was published in 1958.

Teaching Career and Political Activism

Mistral was able to make a career in the education sector because of a lack of trained teachers, and willing to work in rural areas. Between 1906 and 1912 she taught in three schools. By 1912 she had moved to work in a Liceo, or high school, where she stayed for six years and often visited Santiago. In 1918, the then Minister of Education, and future President of Chile, appointed her to direct a Liceo.  In 1921, she defeated a candidate connected with the Radical Party, Josefina Dey del Castillo, to be named director of Santiago’s Liceo, the newest and most prestigious girls’ school in Chile. The President had her join in the nation’s plan to reform libraries and schools within the project of starting a national education system.

She played an important role in the educational systems of Mexico and Chile and was active in cultural committees of the League of Nations. She also was a Chilean consul in Naples, Madrid, and Lisbon. She held honorary degrees from the Universities of Florence and Guatemala and was an honorary member of various cultural societies in Chile as well as in the United States, Spain, and Cuba. She taught Spanish Literature in the United States at Columbia University, Middlebury College, Vassar College, and at the University of Puerto Rico. As consul in Madrid, she had occasional professional interactions with another Chilean consul and Nobel Prize winner, Pablo Neruda, and she was among the earliest writers to recognize the importance and originality of his work. Along with Neruda, Gabriela Mistral became a supporter of the Popular Front which led to the election of her long-time friend and patron, the Radical Pedro Aguirre Cerda in 1938.

She died in New York of pancreatic cancer on January 10, 1947.

References

• Euskonews.com, written by Palmira Oyanguren
• “School Histories: the Stories Behind the Names.” Houston Independent School District. Retrieved on September 24, 2008.

External Links

• Hiru
• Nobelprize

Early Life

The Mexican Revolution began in 1910 when Kahlo was three years old. Later, however, Kahlo claimed that she was born in 1910 so people would directly associate her with the revolution.

Kahlo contracted polio at age six, which left her right leg thinner than the left, which Kahlo disguised by wearing long skirts. In 1922, Kahlo was enrolled in the Preparatoria, one of Mexico’s premier schools. An important turning point in her life occurred on September 17, 1925, at age 18, when she was involved in a serious bus accident.  She suffered serious injuries in the accident, including a broken spinal column, a broken collarbone, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, eleven fractures in her right leg, a crushed and dislocated right foot, and a dislocated shoulder. An iron handrail pierced her abdomen and her uterus, which seriously damaged her reproductive ability. Although she recovered from her injuries and eventually regained her ability to walk, she was plagued by relapses of extreme pain for the remainder of her life. The pain was intense and often left her confined to a hospital or bedridden for months at a time. She underwent as many as thirty-five operations as a result of the accident, mainly on her back, her right leg and her right foot.

Career as an Artist and Diego Rivera

The accident catalysed an important change in Kahlo’s life. Turning away from her studies, she began painting whilst convalescing. Kahlo approached the famous Mexican painter, Diego Rivera, to ask for guidance. They developed a strong bond, and eventually married in 1929.

Both Kahlo and Rivera had numerous extramarital affairs. The openly bisexual Kahlo had affairs with both men (including Leon Trotsky) and women; Rivera knew of and tolerated her relationships with women, but her relationships with men made him jealous. Rivera had an affair with her younger sister, Cristina, which led to the couple’s divorce. They remarried in 1940.

Communism and Death

Kaho and Rivera were both active communists, inviting Leon Trosky to stay with them whilst he sought political sanctuary.

Kahlo died in 1954 of a pulmonary embolism, She had been very ill throughout the previous year and her right leg had been amputated at the knee, owing to gangrene. Later, in his autobiography, Diego Rivera wrote that the day Kahlo died was the most tragic day of his life, adding that, too late, he had realized that the most wonderful part of his life had been his love for her. He ordered for their home, La Casa Azul, in Coyoacán, Mexico, to be converted into a museum after his death.

Style

Although she had one exhibition in New York in the 1930s, Kahlo was not recognised until the early 1980s with the onset of the artistic movement known as Neomexicanismo.

Kahlo painted in a deeply intimate and personal way, drawing on the personal tragedies she experienced, including miscarriages, physical pain and her marriage. Strongly influenced by Mexican culture, she used bright colors and dramatic symbolism. She frequently included the symbolic monkey. In Mexican mythology, monkeys are symbols of lust, but Kahlo portrayed them as tender and protective symbols. Christian and Jewish themes are often depicted in her work.

She also combined elements of the classic religious Mexican tradition with surrealist renderings. Kahlo created a few drawings of “portraits,” but unlike her paintings, they were more abstract. At the invitation of André Breton, she went to France in 1939 and was featured at an exhibition of her paintings in Paris. The Louvre bought one of her paintings, The Frame, which was displayed at the exhibit. This was the first work by a 20th century Mexican artist ever purchased by the internationally renowned museum.

In 2006, Kahlo’s 1943 painting Roots set a US$5.6 million auction record for a Latin American work.

References

• Herrera, Hayden (1983). A Biography of Frida Kahlo. New York: HarperCollins. p. 5. ISBN 978-0060085896.

See Also

• Mexico
• Mexico
• National Association of Women Artists

External Links

• http://www.mexique-fr.com/frida.php
• Ronnen, Meir (2006-04-20). “Frida Kahlo’s father wasn’t Jewish after all”. The Jerusalem Post. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1143498883340&pagename=JPArticle%2FShowFull. Retrieved 2009-09-02.

Angela Davis

Early Life, Education, and Teaching

Birmingham and “Dynamite Hill”

Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama to Frank and Sallye Davis. Davis had early experiences with racial predjudice and discrimination living in the “Dynamite Hill” neighborhood – a region characterized by significant racial violence.http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAdavisAN.htm She attended elementary and middle school in Birmingham, before studying at an integrated high school in New York City, through a grant from the American Friends Service Committee. She was greatly influenced by her mother’s active leadership role in the Southern Negro Cross and in high school, she studied socialist and communist thought through the school’s young communist group. Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Bhavnani; Davis,Angela (Spring 1989). “Complexity, Activism, Optimism: An Interview with Angela Y. Davis”. Feminist Review (31): 66–81. JSTOR

Educational and Philosophical Influences

After high school in New York, Davis was awarded a scholarship to Brandeis University, and became one of the three black students in her freshman class. She spent her third year in Paris with the Hamilton College Junior in Paris Program.Alice Kaplan, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, Chicago : University of Chicago Press (2013) It was there that she learned of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing – a racist attack committed by the Ku Klux Klan. She knew a number of the young women killed in the bombings. After France, she decided to pursue studies in philosophy, graduating in 1965 from Brandeis, and then beginning studies in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt. She returned to the USA two years later to study at the University of California, San Diego.

Time as a teacher at the University of California, Los Angeles

Soon after completing her graduate work, Davis was hired to teach for the University of California, Los Angeles. An outspoken activist, radical feminist, member of the Communist Party, and associate of the Black Panther Party, Davis soon had difficulties with the Board of Regents of the University of California. Urged by California governer Ronald Reagan, the Board fired her less than a year after her hiring, on the grounds of her Communist Party membership.http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/ssmith/davisbio.html Although Judge Jerry Pracht later ruled this reasoning unsound, the Board continued its attempts to be rid of Davis. She was again fired in 1970, on the basis of her “inflamatory language.”http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/la-rebellion/timeline/angela-davis-dismissed-uc-regents

Activism and Imprisonment

The Soledad Brothers and the Marin County Courthouse incident

During her PhD work, Davis became a strong advocate for the three recently accused inmates of the Soledad Prison. Referred to as the “Soledad Brothers,” John W. Cluchette, Fleeta Drumgo and George Lester Jackson, were accused of killing white prison guard John Vincent Mills, following the deaths of three black prisoners.http://www.biography.com/people/angela-davis-9267589 The white corrections officer responsable for their deaths – Opie G. Miller – had recently been acquitted by the all white Monterey County grand jury. A number of activists argued that the Soledad Brothers were merely being used as scapegoats for the corrupt, racist prison system. During Jackson’s trial on August 7, 1970, an escape and hostage attempt was made, with the goal of using “the hostages to take over a radio station and broadcast the racist, murderous prison conditions and demand the immediate release of the Soledad Brothers.”Stephen Millies, “Long live the spirit of Jonathan Jackson”, 8 August 2010

“Free Angela Davis”

Two of the four weapons used in the Soledad incident were registered in Angela Davis’ name, and with this evidence, she was soon placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List – wanted for murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy. http://www.afterellen.com/2013/04/review-free-angela-davis-and-all-political-prisoners Columbia University’s program for Social Justice Movements describes the time of the search for Angela Davis:

“The witch-hunt for a woman, who fought for the liberation of all people, easily became a means to attack a community of people, not just Angela Davis. Black women across the nation were being pulled over in cars, stopped on the street, and accosted for being black while wearing a ‘natural.’ It was not just Angela Davis who was a fugitive, but also any black woman whose hair was coiffed into a black corona.”http://socialjustice.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/index.php/Angela_Davis

Two months after going underground, Davis was taken into custody in New York. Her 16-month imprisonment led to a highly publicized trial, and a huge international “Free Angela Davis” campaign. More than 200 defense committees were formed through the campaign, leading to her final acquittal in 1972.http://www.workers.org/2010/us/jonathan_jackson_0812/ Later in her 1974 autobiography, Davis makes it clear that her assumed guilt and imprisonment were not directed at her specifically, but rather were the product of systematic racist, sexist oppression within the USA. She explains that “the one extraordinary event of my life had nothing to do with me as an individual—with a little twist of history, another sister or brother could have easily become the political prisoner whom millions of people from throughout the world rescued from persecution and death.”http://www.afterellen.com/2013/04/review-free-angela-davis-and-all-political-prisoners

Current Activism

Contributions to Feminism

Published Workshttp://guides.library.cornell.edu/content.php?pid=374295&sid=3066481

• If They Come in the Morning (1971)
• Lectures on Liberation (1971?)
• The Black Family: The Ties That Bind
• Women, Race, and Class (1983)
• Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism (1987)
• Blues Legacies and Black feminism : Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998)
• Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1988)
• Women, Culture and Politics (1990)
• Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)
• Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (2005)
• Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representations (2005)
• The Meaning of Freedom (2012)

References

See also

• Intersectionality
• Feminism
• Lesbian
• LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender)

External links

• Publications by Angela Davis (Cornell University Library Guides)
• UCSC Feminist Studies: Angela Y Davis
• AngelaDavis.biography
• Wikipedia: Angela Davis
• CNMTL Social Justice Movements: Angela Davis Biography
• Angela Davis
• Alice Kaplan, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis, Chicago : University of Chicago Press (2013)

Education

Born in Conneticut, she attended the San Francisco Art Institute but enrolled to study painting. It was only until she visited Japan during her sophomore year that she realised that she was more interested in photography.

Rolling Stone

In 1970 Leibovitz approached Jann Wenner, founding editor of Rolling Stone, which he’d recently launched and was operating out of San Francisco. Impressed with her portfolio,  Leibovitz her first assignment was to photograph John Lennon. Leibovitz’s black-and-white portrait of the shaggy-looking Beatle was the cover of the January 21, 1971 issue. Two years later she was named Rolling Stone chief photographer.

When the magazine began printing in color in 1974, Leibovitz had to teach herself about lighting and colour. During this period, she photographed Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, and Patti Smith. Leibovitz also served as the official photographer for the Rolling Stones’ 1975 world tour. While on the road with the band she produced her iconic black-and-white portraits of Keith Richards and Mick Jagger.

In 1980 Rolling Stone sent Leibovitz to photograph John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who had recently released their album “Double Fantasy.” A few hours later, Lennon was assassinated. Her photograph ran on the cover of the Rolling Stone Lennon commemorative issue. In 2005 the American Society of Magazine Editors named it the best magazine cover from the past 40 years.

Vanity Fair

In 1983, Leibovitz  joined Vanity Fair and was made the magazine’s first contributing photographer. At Vanity Fair she became known for her provocative portraits of celebrities. Most famous among them are Demi Moore naked and holding her pregnant belly. She has photographed Whoopi Goldberg, Brad Pitt, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ellen DeGeneres, the George W. Bush cabinet, Michael Moore, Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, Scarlett Johannson and Keira Knightley (the last two nude), Tom Ford in a suit; Nicole Kidman in ball gown and spotlights.

Her portraits have appeared in Vogue, The New York Times Magazine, and The New Yorker, and in ad campaigns for American Express, the Gap, and the Milk Board.

Private Life

Leibovitz met Susan Sontag in 1989 while photographing the writer for her book AIDS and its Metaphors. They remained together until the latter’s death in 2004. Sontag profoundly influenced Leibovitz, visible in the greater interest in political themes. In 1993 Leibovitz traveled to Sarajevo during the war in the Balkans. Among her work from that trip is Sarajevo, Fallen Bicycle of Teenage Boy Just Killed by a Sniper, a black-and-white photo of a bicycle collapsed on blood-smeared pavement. Sontag, who wrote the accompanying essay, also first conceived of Leibovitz’s book Women (1999). The book includes images of famous people along with those not well known. Celebrities like Susan Sarandon and Diane Sawyer share space with miners, soldiers in basic training, and Las Vegas showgirls in and out of costume.

References

• Wikipedia page
  
• PBS biography

Early Life

Coco was born in a poorhouse in Saumur, France. The hospice employees were illiterate, so when the mayor François Poitu wrote down the birth, no one knew how to spell Chanel so the mayor improvised and recorded it with an “s”, making it Chasnel. She had five siblings: two sisters and three brothers. In 1895, when she was 12 years old, Chanel’s mother died of tuberculosis and her father left the family a short time later because he needed to work to raise his children. Because of his work, the young Chanel spent seven years in the orphanage of the Roman Catholic monastery of Aubazine, where she learned the trade of a seamstress. School vacations were spent with relatives in the provincial capital, where female relatives taught Coco to sew with more flourish than the nuns at the monastery were able to demonstrate. When Coco turned eighteen, she left the orphanage, and took up work for a local tailor. When Coco was older she searched for her two sisters Lauren and Natalie. They soon met at Paris under the Eiffel Tower.

Fashion Career and Success

She adopted the name Coco during a brief career as a cafe and concert singers 1905-1908. First a mistress of a wealthy military officer then of an English industrialist, she drew on the resources of these patrons in setting up a millinery shop in Paris in 1910, expanding to Deauville and Biarritz. The two men also helped her find customers among women of society, and her simple hats became popular. Soon she was expanding to couture, working in jersey, a material usually associated with men’s underclothes.

By the 1920s, her fashion house had expanded considerably, and her chemise set a fashion trend with its “little boy” look. Her relaxed fashions, short skirts, and casual look were in sharp contrast to the corset fashions popular in the previous decades. Chanel herself dressed in mannish clothes, and adapted these more comfortable fashions which other women also found liberating. She appropriated styles, fabrics and articles of clothing that were worn by men and also appropriated sports clothes as part of the language of fashion

In 1922 Chanel introduced a perfume, Chanel No. 5, which became and remained popular, and remains a profitable product of Chanel’s company. It was the first perfume to be named after a designer.

Fall from Grace

A significant turning point in her life occurred in World War II, when she embarked on a romantic liaison with a German officer, Hans Gunther von Dincklage, whose favours included permission to reside in the Ritz hotel. She had private apartments there for thirty years. She stopped designing, saying that war was not a time for fashion. Her reputation was tarnished by this liaison and she left France for Switzerland in 1945. In 1954,  she decided to make a comeback to the world of haute couture. The Chanel suit became instantly popular again and in addition, she introduced bell pottom trousers and pea jackets for women. 

She died in 1971 aged 87, in her private suite at the Hôtel Ritz, and she was buried in Lausanne, Switzerland .

See Also

• Fashion
• France
• France France
• France

External Links

• Women’s History at Answers.com
• “Madamoiselle Chanel: The Perennially Fashionable”. Chanel. http://um.chanel.com/. Retrieved 2006-10-13.
  
• Ingrid Sischy (1998-06-08). “Coco Chanel”. TIME 100 – The Most Important People of the Century. http://www.time.com/
  

Early Life and Education

Christiane Nüsslein was born on October 20, 1942, in Magdeburg, Germany. She studied biochemistry at the University of Tübingen, graduating in 1969. For her diploma thesis, she along with fellow student Bertold Heyden, developed a new method for large scale purification of very clean RNA polymerase. She turned her attention to fruit flies, drosofila melanogaster, for her post-doctoral research, partly conducted at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Her post-doctoral research, the basis for her later work, focused on the gene mutations in the fruit fly.

Nobel Prize Work on fruit flies

The experiment that earned Nüsslein-Volhard and her collaborators the Nobel prize aimed to identify genes involved in the development of fruit fly embryos. The genes involved in embryonic development were identified by generating random mutations in fruit flies and breeding them. Whenever the development was impaired, changed or absent, the experimenters identified exactly which gene(s) had been affected by the mutation, thereby building up a set of genes crucial for Drosophila development. The subsequent study of these mutants and their interactions led to important new insights into early Drosophila development, especially the mechanisms that underlie the step-wise development of body segments.

These experiments have a significance for organisms other than fruit flies.These findings have also led to important realizations about evolution.Additionally, they greatly increased our understanding of the regulation of transcription, as well as cell fate during development.

Nüsslein-Volhard is associated with the discovery of the toll gene, which led to the identification of toll-like receptors.

Since 1985 Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard has been Director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen and also leads its Genetics Department.

Resources

• Wikipedia article