French writer, philosopher, cultural critic, and public intellectual Simone de Beauvoir (January 9, 1908–April 14, 1986) is celebrated as the mother of contemporary feminism. Her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a seminal account of woman’s role as an “other” in a world dominated and defined by male power, framed much of the dialogue on women’s rights and gender equality in the decades that followed, shaping the subsequent work of iconic reconstructionists like Betty Friedan and Gloria...| The Reconstructionists
Celebrated as “the first lady of Civil Rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement,” Rosa Parks (February 4, 1913–October 24, 2005) helped usher in a new era of equality with her iconic act of defiance against injustice: Her refusal to give up her bus seat to a white passenger on December 1, 1955, became one of the symbolic pillars of the modern Civil Rights movement. Though Parks, raised by a strong mother and nursed on pride in her heritage, was not the first African American ...| The Reconstructionists
When she penned her 1962 book Silent Spring, marine biologist, conservationist and writer Rachel Carson (May 27, 1907–April 14, 1964) loudly, if perhaps unwittingly at the time, announced what’s been termed “ The Age of Ecology” and became a key figure in pioneering the modern environmental movement. Today, when sustainability is on every corporate and cultural agenda and the deluge of news of environmental collapse is never-ending, it’s hard to appreciate just how radical Carson’...| The Reconstructionists
When she was nine years old, Hetty Bower (September 28, 1905–November 12, 2013) saw the wounded veterans returning from the battlefields of WWI and became an unflinching opponent of war. She spent the century that followed fighting for social justice as one of Britain’s most unrelenting political activists. Among her last words when she died at the age of 108 was the song she sang with her daughters during those final days, and the refrain to her entire life: “Ban the bomb, for ever mor...| The Reconstructionists
By the time she was forty, British social reformer, mathematician, and statistician Florence Nightingale (May 12, 1820 – August 13, 1910) was the second most influential woman in England, after only Queen Victoria. Nightingale pioneered modern nursing during her time serving as a volunteer nurse in the Crimean War, where she became known as “The Lady with the Lamp” for her nightly visits with the wounded in the wards. In 1854, John MacDonald, commissioner of the Times Crimea Fund, desc...| The Reconstructionists
During the Civil War, women weren’t allowed to vote or have bank accounts, were still subject to Victorian ideals of homemaking and motherhood as the sole purpose of female existence, and had little personal or political agency. And yet hundreds of them served in the war undocumented, dressed as men. Singular among them was the surgeon, feminist, and abolitionist Mary Edwards Walker (November 26, 1832 – February 21, 1919), who is to this day the only woman awarded the Medal of Honor, the ...| The Reconstructionists
It was under the male pseudonym George Eliot that Mary Anne Evans (November 22, 1819 – December 22, 1880) became one of the most revered voices in literary history – a choice dictated as much by the biases of the Victorian era, in which women writers tended not to be taken seriously for anything beyond romance novels, as it was by Evans’s desire to keep the turbulence of her private life out of the public eye. Evans received little formal education after the age of sixteen, but thanks t...| The Reconstructionists
The first daughter in a Wisconsin family of dairy famers with seven children, Georgia O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) had decided she wanted to be an artist by the age of ten. What she did become – what she made herself with the sheer power of passion and grit – was not merely an artist, but an art pioneer celebrated as the Mother of American Modernism. O'Keeffe pursued her childhood vision with unrelenting focus and dedication, from her early instruction by a local waterco...| The Reconstructionists
When pioneering chef Julia Child (August 15, 1912–August 13, 2004) was finally able to publish her landmark labor-of-love magnum opus Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 1961, it wasn’t just a seminal introduction of French cuisine to America – it was a pioneering feat of entrepreneurship for Child, who had faced rejection after rejection, struggling for nearly a decade to surmount the oppressive greed of the publishing industry and bring her vision to life in its original creative i...| The Reconstructionists
Few artists have captivated audiences with equal enchantment in coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, have sung for prisoners and for presidents, have come to be known by first name only and to speak for millions at the same time, becoming the voice of a movement that shaped the course of history. But singer, songwriter, and activist Odetta Holmes (December 31, 1930–December 2, 2008), better-known simply as Odetta and widely celebrated as the “voice of the civil rights movement,” did just ...| The Reconstructionists
Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901–November 15, 1978) intended to make a life out of painting. Instead, she became the world’s best-known cultural anthropologist, becoming the discipline’s most revered patron saint. A 1959 audio interview captured Mead’s deceptively ordinary extraordinariness: Doctor Mead is of small build, she has blue eyes, she’s plain folks – there are no wares about her. You get the impression that she’d be at home anywhere – in an igloo, a native hut, or a ...| The Reconstructionists
A generation before reconstructionist Berenice Abbott took her camera to the streets, pioneering female photographer and photojournalist Frances “Fannie” Benjamin Johnston (January 15, 1864–May 16, 1952) revolutionized the cultural impact of the photographic image. The only surviving child in a well-to-do family, Johnston was raised by intelligent, connected, and progressive parents – her mother was a female congressional journalist and drama critic, an occupation as uncommon for a wo...| The Reconstructionists
Janette Sadik-Khan (b. 1960) has done for the practical advancement of urbanism what Jane Jacobs has done for the theoretical. Since her appointment as commissioner of New York City’s Department of Transportation in 2007, she has championed a number of initiatives that, beyond transforming Gotham into a more livable and sustainable metropolis, have inspired cities around the world to undertake their own projects cultivating robust urban life. From converting car-space into people-space and ...| The Reconstructionists
The longest-serving American First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt (October 11, 1884–November 7, 1962) endures as one of the most remarkable luminaries in modern history – a relentless champion of human rights, an advocate for working women, and a tireless supporter of underprivileged youth. At the age of seventy-six, Roosevelt collected her life’s wisdom in You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life – an elegant and timeless manual of personal exploration emanating universa...| The Reconstructionists
When Amelia Earhart (b. July 24, 1897) disappeared over the Pacific on July 2, 1937, she left behind a legacy shrouded in legend, glory, and modern-day mythmaking. Celebrated as a pioneering aviator and the first woman to cross the Atlantic on a solo flight, she was also a smart businesswoman, a generous caretaker, and a relentless champion of education. She applied her remarkable tenacity to everything she took on, demanding a great deal of herself and never failing to live up to it, in publ...| The Reconstructionists
Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) has been called an “addict of experience,” a tragic literary blonde, a victim of her generation and her medication. Beneath these partly true yet invariably reductionist labels, however, lies the immutable fact that she was, above all, one of the most celebrated and influential poets of the twentieth century, with a remarkable gift for moving the hearts of millions while struggling to still her own. From an early age, Plath embodied a ...| The Reconstructionists
“The Cuba swim is the greatest endurance feat in human history, but if anyone can do it, I can,” Diana Nyad (b. August 22, 1949) told a New York Times reporter in 1978, shortly after she captured the world’s attention by swimming around the island of Manhattan. She was 28. This declaration of courageous bravado is something one would expect from Thomas Edison or Muhammad Ali, but 35 years later, after four failed attempts and a lifetime of resilience in the face of great emotional and p...| The Reconstructionists
Journalist, critic, and women’s rights pioneer Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810–July 19, 1850) is celebrated not only as the first full-time female book reviewer in America, but also as the author of the very first work of feminist literature in the United States – her 1845 book Woman in the Nineteenth Century came more than five decades before women’s right to vote and predated reconstructionist Betty Friedan’s seminal treatise The Feminine Mystique by more than a century. By the tim...| The Reconstructionists
Not only did Scottish mathematician, science writer, and polymath Mary Fairfax Somerville (December 26, 1780–November 28, 1872) defy the era’s deep-seated bias against women in science, she was the very reason the word “scientist” was coined: When reviewing her seminal second book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, which Somerville wrote at the age of 54, English polymath and Trinity College master William Whewell was so impressed that he thought it rendered the term “men o...| The Reconstructionists
As if to be a successful woman before the the feminist revolution and a person of color before the civil rights movement weren’t hard enough in and of themselves, Margaret Bonds (March 3, 1913–April 26, 1972) was both. But despite the era’s cultural odds stacked against her success, she went on to become an exceptional pianist and composer and endures as a beacon in a creative field to this day dominated by white men. Born to a church-organist mother, Bonds began learning to play the pi...| The Reconstructionists