Celebrating Activists During Women's History Month 2024
Women’s History Month is a celebration of women’s contributions to history, culture, and society held annually in March. This years theme is: “Women Who Advocate for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion”, recognizing women, past and present, who understand that, for a positive future, we need to eliminate bias and discrimination entirely from our lives and institutions.
These are just a few of the influential women who have made history as part of the anti-violence movement. Journey Center is grateful to these, and many other, activists for leading the way.
Ella Baker
Ella Josephine Baker affectionately known as Ms. Baker. A granddaughter of slaves who graduated valedictorian from Raleigh’s Shaw University in 1927, Baker spent nearly half a century raising the political consciousness of Americans, and played a major role in three of the 20th century’s most influential civil rights groups: the National Association or the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”).
While those groups typically had male figureheads, it was Baker who, first as an NAACP field secretary and later as its director of branches, spent the 1940s traveling from small town to small town, convincing ordinary black citizens—who had been enslaved and terrorized for more than 200 years—to join together and peaceably insist that they were deserving of basic human rights.
Confronting the elitist of some civil rights leaders, Ms. Baker’s vision for community- driven change was a “generating force” in the civil rights leader and is known as “The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement”.
Mary Church Terrell
Mary Eliza Church Terrell was a well-known African American activist who championed racial equality and women’s suffrage in the late 19th and early 20th century. An Oberlin College graduate, Terrell was part of the rising black middle and upper class who used their position to fight racial discrimination.
Terrell joined Ida B. Wells-Barnett in anti-lynching campaigns, but Terrell’s life work focused on the notion of racial uplift, the belief that Blacks would help end racial discrimination by advancing themselves and other members of the race through education, work, and community activism.
Crystal Feimster
Feimster is a historian of African American history, women’s history and Southern history- she specializes is the 19th and 20th century.
She is the author of Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching; and is working on a manuscript: “Beauty and Booty: The History of Civil War Rape”.
Bell HOoks
Gloria Jean Watkins better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. hooks is one of America’s most widely published black feminist scholars.
The focus of hooks' writing has been the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. Her book, Feminism is for Everybody, is a wildly popular, man-friendly proposal for common sense feminism that is sensible and wise. Calling for unity to tackle societal ills, hooks is savvy but also outspoken as a cultural critic, education theorist and English professor.
“Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction.”
Joan Little
Joan Little (pronounced "Jo Ann") is an African-American woman whose trial for the 1974 murder of Clarence Alligood, a white prison guard at Beaufort County Jail in Washington, North Carolina, whom attempted to rape Little before she could escape. Her case became a cause célèbre of the civil rights, feminist, and Little was the first woman in United States history to be acquitted using the defense that she used deadly force to resist sexual assault. Joan Little was the first woman to be acquitted of murder committed in self-defense against a sexual assault. African American women were given the right to sexual-assault defense against their Anglo-white male assaulter/rapist. This was all possible with the campaign that stood behind Ms. Little during the full trial.
Joan Little was the first woman to be acquitted of murder committed in self-defense against a sexual assault. Little's murder trial focused national attention on the issues of a woman's right to defend herself from rape, the validity of capital punishment in North Carolina, racial and sexual inequality in the criminal justice system, and the rights of prisoners in general.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor.
Although her novels typically concentrate on black women, Morrison did not identify her works as feminist. When asked in a 1998 interview, "Why distance oneself from feminism?" she replied: "In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book — leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity." She went on to state that she thought it "off-putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract. I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things."
Dr. Diana Russell
Diana E. H. Russell was a feminist writer and activist. Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, she moved to England in 1957, and then to the United States in 1961. For the past 45 years she was engaged in research on sexual violence against women and girls. She wrote numerous books and articles on rape, including marital rape, femicide, incest, misogynist murders of women, and pornography.
Russell lobbied other feminists for two years and eventually was successful in organizing the first International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Brussels, Belgium, in 1976. In 1976 Russell redefined ‘Femicide’, as "the killing of females by males because they are female. Russell's intention was to politicize the term, and bring attention to the misogyny driving these lethal crimes against women, which she said gender-neutral terms like murder don’t do. She explained that in order to deal with these extreme crimes against women, it is necessary to recognize that like race based hate crimes, "Femicides are [also] lethal hate crimes", and that most killings of women by men are "extreme manifestations of male dominance and sexism."
Bernice Sandler
Known as the “Godmother of Title IX,” Bernice Sandler fought for women’s rights in education. Bernice Resnick Sandler was born on March 3, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. As Sandler grew up, she became very aware that she was not allowed to participate in many activities because she was a girl.
Bernice decided to continue her education and received the Doctor of Education degree in Counseling and Personnel Services from the University of Maryland. After graduating, Sandler began teaching at the University of Maryland part-time. She applied for the full-time teaching positions in her department, but she was continually denied. After being rejected from the university, Sandler joined the Women's Equity Action League (WEAL) as the Chair of the Action Committee for Federal Contract Compliance. While researching the strategies of African American civil rights activists that might apply to women’s rights, Sandler found an executive order written by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The order stated that federal companies could not discriminate based on race, color, religion and national origin.
Sandler worked with members of Congress as the Educational Specialist for the House of Representatives Special Subcommittee on Education. She soon wrote the first federal policy report in education about discrimination based on gender. In 1972, her hard work resulted in the Title IX Educational Amendment that states that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
Aishah Shahidah Simmons
Aishah Shahidah Simmons (she/her) is an award-winning cultural worker who, for 30 years, has examined the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and sexual violence. She is also a trauma-informed, Mindfulness Meditation teacher who has been studying and practicing Theravada Buddhism for 20-years. Her lived experiences as a survivor of childhood and adult sexual violence committed to healing, accountability, and compassionate justice inform her teaching, film work, published writings, international lectures, and independent scholarship.
Gloria Steinem
A leader in the second wave of feminist activists and writers, Steinem was a founder and editor of one of the first feminist magazines – Ms – until its closure in 1987. Her collection of essays, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, is a classic of its time.
Vocal about women’s rights, Steinem has espoused feminism on TV, together with lectures and articles. She has also written on topics such as Marilyn Monroe and politics. Steinem says: “Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.”
Malala Yousafzai
Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani female education activist and the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She is known for human rights advocacy, especially the education of women and children in her native homeland, Swat, where the Pakistani Taliban had at times banned girls from attending school. Her advocacy has grown into an international movement, and according to former Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, she has become Pakistan's "most prominent citizen."
On October 9, 2012, while on a bus in Swat District after taking an exam, Yousafzai and two other girls were shot by a Taliban gunman in an assassination attempt to target her for her activism. After her recovery, Yousafzai became a prominent activist for the right to education. Based in Birmingham, she co-founded the Malala Fund, a non-profit organization, with Shiza Shahid.
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