No matter who we are and what we think, the beautiful truth is that we are all children of Africa. It was in no small part the painstaking work of Mary Leakey that revealed this. For more than 50 years … Continue reading →

There are many reasons why a pregnancy may be unwanted. A woman may have no access to contraception or already have too many mouths to feed. It may endanger her health, even her life. She may have been raped. The … Continue reading →

“I have some things to say about sex, which, so far as I am aware, have not yet been said … things which seem to me to be of profound importance to men and women who hope to make their … Continue reading →

A tribute to the extraordinary self-determining inner- and outer-world explorer Alexandra David-Néel will appear here soon.

On This Deity today proudly presents a love story of lust and adventure; the story of Jane Elizabeth Digby, who died 130 years ago today, a woman who did her own thing, when doing one’s own thing was very much … Continue reading →

She was born a low-caste “untouchable”. By the time she was twenty, she’d been raped so many times she’d lost count. But she would rise from poverty, rape, abuse and degradation to avenge her honour and become a champion of … Continue reading →

One hundred and sixty-one years ago today, the pioneering feminist, Transcendentalist leader, freethinker and intellectual giant Margaret Fuller drowned tragically when the cargo ship carrying her and her family from Italy struck a sandbar just fifty yards off the coast … Continue reading →

“I’m flying to Ibiza. It’s my favourite place, and I think I’ll die there.” And twenty-three years ago today, Nico fulfilled her own prophecy after a fatal bicycle fall on the Spanish island she’d loved so much. She was 49. … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to the extraordinary Chinese poetess, radical women’s rights leader and revolutionary, Qiu Jin – executed one hundred and seven years ago on this day at the age of 31. At the turn of the twentieth century, while Qiu’s … Continue reading →

“They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn’t. I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality.” …and Frida’s reality was a lifetime of extreme physical pain and tortuous suffering, punctuated with a tempestuous emotional turbulence. Artist Frida Kahlo … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to Alice Paul, the pioneering American feminist and most overlooked women’s right leader of the 20th century. Nearly a half-century before Martin Luther King Jr., Alice Paul employed militant non-violent protest tactics to win full voting … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to Lakshmi Bai – the Rani (queen) of Jhansi – killed in battle one hundred and fifty-three years ago by British Imperialists during India’s First War of Independence. She was twenty-two years old. The story of this freedom-fighting … Continue reading →

Today, we remember one of the most important British women of the 20th century who died 83 years ago today, aged 69. Sisters! If you have ever voted in an election, thank Emmeline Pankhurst. And if you have ever decided not … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to one of the twentieth century’s most potent symbols of courage and fortitude, the legendary Helen Keller. Rendered deaf and blind at nineteen months as a result of what was probably scarlet fever, the extraordinary story … Continue reading →

“Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it.” – Mark Twain Five-hundred and eighty years ago today the English tied a 19-year-old French peasant girl to a pillar in the square in … Continue reading →

In that grim 100-year period between the end of the Civil War and the onset of the Civil Rights movement, the only thing more challenging than being an African American was the double whammy of being both black and female. … Continue reading →

Today we commemorate one of the twentieth century’s greatest revolutionary heroines – the mother of the environmental movement, Rachel Carson. Passionate naturalist, brilliant biologist, fearless crusader and gifted writer of extraordinary command, this outwardly demure and unassuming woman took on … Continue reading →

Ninety-four years ago today, the first woman elected to any national legislature in a Western democracy took her seat for the first time in the U.S. House of Representatives. And Sisters, our first-ever political representative didn’t let us down. Three … Continue reading →

  On 28th March 1941, 59-year-old visionary feminist writer Virginia Woolf walked into the river Ouse with stones in her pockets and drowned herself. A note to her husband Leonard said: “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad … Continue reading →

  Today we pay tribute to a woman whose very name is synonymous with American women’s suffrage – the legendary Susan B. Anthony. Although there are several other luminaries whose pioneering efforts heralded that extraordinary first wave of female emancipation,  it … Continue reading →

12th March is the date often erroneously attributed to the death of Anne Frank. But the exact date is of course unknown, for the 15-year-old Jewish diarist was just one of some 18,000 to die from the typhus epidemic that … Continue reading →

  “Excepting John Brown – of sacred memory – I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people,” wrote Frederick Douglass of the abolitionist and freedom fighter, Harriet Tubman. Notwithstanding the numerous … Continue reading →

  When Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton first drafted the 19th Amendment in 1878, never could they have imagined it would be another forty-two protracted years before American women would win the right to vote. Why even black … Continue reading →

In 1989, as a 26-year-old, I first truly understood what it was like to be disrespected because I am a woman. Although I was modestly dressed, I had dared to walk down the street on my own in a village … Continue reading →

She was born of impeccable parentage – the daughter of two of the 18th century’s most notable and infamous freethinkers: Mary Wollstonecraft, the pioneering feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; and William Godwin, the radical philosopher, proto-anarchist … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to one of the most important female writers of the twentieth century – Anaïs Nin – who died thirty-four years ago on this day. Brilliant, beautiful, seductive, promiscuous, flamboyant, provocative, fearless… Anaïs remains a source of inspiration … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to the extraordinary Comandante Ramona – the diminutive, barely literate peasant-turned-revolutionary leader and heroine – who died six years ago on this day at the age of 47 following a decade-long battle with cancer. A high-ranking … Continue reading →

  Sigmund Freud called her “the great understander”. Friedrich Nietzsche said of her: “I found no more gifted or reflective spirit … Lou is by far the smartest person I ever knew.” Rainer Maria Rilke sang of her: “…all that … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to Elizabeth Peabody – author, publisher and education reformer – whose progressive and intellectual contributions played a pivotal role in igniting and facilitating the American Transcendentalist movement. Born into a poor but intellectually rich family, Elizabeth was … Continue reading →

On 27th December 2007, Benazir Bhutto – twice Prime Minister of Pakistan and the first democratically-elected female leader of any Muslim country – was assassinated as she left an election rally in Rawalpindi; mysteriously done to death by either the assassin’s … Continue reading →

Twenty-six years ago this night, Dian Fossey – legendary zoologist and champion of Africa’s mountain gorillas – was brutally murdered in the bedroom of her isolated cabin, high in Rwanda’s Virunga Mountains. Her lifeless body with its skull split open … Continue reading →

The history of nineteenth-century female revolutionaries unsurprisingly mirrors women’s subjugated status of that century… if their stories are not consigned to mere footnotes or entirely suppressed, they are usually documented as embarrassing radical lunatics – the glory of the heroic freedom … Continue reading →

Today we recall the “Spanish Joan of Arc”, Dolores Ibárruri – better known the world over by her revolutionary name, La Pasionaria (the Passion Flower) – who died twenty-two years ago at the age of 93. Dolores Ibárruri achieved meteoric … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to Olympe de Gouges – the extraordinary French writer and reformer, whose trailblazing convictions led her to the scaffold two hundred and eighteen years ago on this day where she was executed by guillotine at the height … Continue reading →

Today we recall an extraordinary episode in the long struggle for women’s suffrage in America, when Susan B. Anthony – one of the movement’s leading lights – launched a bid for the right to vote so clever and audacious it … Continue reading →

  Today we pay tribute to Elizabeth Cady Stanton – the brilliant, feisty, fearless pioneer of the American women’s rights movement and the first American feminist to synthesise the arguments for women’s equality in employment, income, property, custody and divorce. … Continue reading →

Today we pay tribute to the brilliant French sculptor, Camille Claudel – who died sixty-eight years ago on this day. Widely considered to be the most gifted female sculptor the world has ever known, her achievements have nevertheless been eclipsed … Continue reading →

  Not with any single, amazing knock-out blow did today’s subject achieve greatness, but instead through umpteen rounds of parries, punches and counter-punches. For Sylvia Pankhurst – who died fifty-one years ago today – earned her historical place as a … Continue reading →

Parents with daughters: in such times when our reprehensible media will regularly scrutinise a 5-pound weight loss or gain of any (so-called) ‘celebrity’, is it any wonder there is such a paucity of female role models? We must fight back … Continue reading →

“When the history of our civilization is written,” wrote H. G. Wells, “it will be a biological history – and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.” Hearing her tale for themselves, most modern women would find it difficult to disagree … Continue reading →

Ninety-three years ago today, as Vladimir Lenin left a factory where he’d just delivered a speech to workers, a female revolutionary by the name of Fanya Kaplan – disillusioned at the manner in which Lenin had assumed dictatorial powers and … Continue reading →

Forty-two years ago today, and just twelve months after Women’s Libbers first burned a bra at an Atlantic City protest against inequality, a new kind of World Revolutionary Heroine was born when twenty-five-year-old Leila Khaled of the PFLP (Popular Front … Continue reading →

Sisters, ninety-one years ago, the world was still so male dominated that we women were not even allowed to vote. While our most adventurous brothers were becoming heroes of the so-called Free World by flying planes from the USA to … Continue reading →

Sixty-three years ago on this day, Mileva Maric died alone and unknown in Zurich at the age of seventy-two. “Few stories in the history of science are as heartbreaking [as hers],” claimed the New Scientist. A brilliant woman born in … Continue reading →