WOMR International Women's Day, Sunday, March 8, 2026

12/06/2025

Meet the modernist the world almost overlooked. ✨ "Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck" is now open at The Met!

Beloved across the Nordic countries, Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) spent decades working in near-isolation—quietly reinventing her style from traditional realism to a stripped-down, bold, modern language.

Featuring nearly 60 works from major Finnish and Swedish collections, this exhibition marks the first U.S. museum show dedicated to her groundbreaking art.

"Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck" is on view through April 5, 2026.
___
🎨 Helene Schjerfbeck, "Self-Portrait," 1912. Oil on canvas. Ateneum Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Yehia Eweis.

12/03/2025

She spent her life chasing shadows and to save millions of people. While the world rushed forward, Dorothy Hodgkin sat in a dim room lit by a single X-ray beam, whispering to crystals as if they were old friends.
“Tell me what you’re hiding,” she would murmur. And, slowly, they did.
Most people have never heard her name. But millions of people are alive because of her.
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin wasn’t born into a life of comfort or privilege. She was born in 1910 in Cairo, the daughter of archaeologists who spent their days unearthing ancient artifacts. Dorothy, however, wanted to discover something no one had ever buried—the architecture of life itself.
As a child she grew crystals on her bedroom windowsill, mesmerized by their orderly beauty. “There must be a map inside them,” she once said. And she was right. That map would one day change medicine.
In the 1930s she discovered X-ray crystallography, a technique so complex that even senior scientists dismissed it as borderline impossible. You couldn’t see molecules directly. You had to interpret the shadows they cast when struck by X-rays—faint dots that looked like stars on a foggy night. To understand molecules, you had to understand their shadows.
Dorothy did.
And she did it while the world told her not to try.
Oxford barred women from certain labs. Cambridge initially rejected her. Male colleagues suggested that women weren’t suited for “heavy mathematics.” When her hands began twisting painfully from rheumatoid arthritis in her twenties, another professor advised her to “step aside and rest.”
Dorothy simply smiled.
“I’m not done yet,” she said.
Her fingers bent. Her joints swelled. The pain never left. But neither did she.
After World War II, penicillin was saving lives but remained difficult to produce. Companies needed to know its structure—but no one could solve it. The molecule was too strange, too complicated.
Dorothy spent years taking thousands of X-ray photographs, doing calculations by hand, studying shadows until her eyes blurred.
In 1945, she cracked it.
She revealed penicillin’s hidden shape—a structure so surprising that chemists initially refused to believe it. They believed her soon enough. With the structure known, mass production became possible. Penicillin went from wartime miracle to everyday lifesaver.
Then came vitamin B12, a molecule so enormous that some scientists joked it would take a lifetime to solve.
Dorothy looked at the mountain of calculations waiting for her and said,
“Then I suppose I’ll need to begin.”
In 1956, she solved it—down to the very last atom. Her work transformed the treatment of pernicious anemia and proved that crystallography could solve almost anything.
But she still wasn’t satisfied.
There was one molecule she wanted more than all the rest: insulin. Diabetes was killing millions. Understanding insulin’s structure would change everything.
So she began.
And she kept going—for 35 years.
Her hands curled inward from arthritis. She held pens between twisted fingers. Students helped her adjust instruments. She worked through pain that would have ended anyone else’s career.
In 1969, she finally solved insulin’s structure.
“After 35 years,” she whispered, “this is what it looks like.”
With that discovery, the pathway to synthetic insulin opened. Modern diabetes treatment became possible.
In 1964, she became the only British woman ever to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry—a fact that remains unchanged to this day.
But the Nobel was never her goal.
Her goal was simple:
“To understand, so that others may live.”
Dorothy Hodgkin spent sixty years teaching shadows to speak. And what they told her saved the world.
Remember her name.

12/03/2025

“Don’t open that door there are men outside looking for you.”

The warning came from a neighbor, breathless, eyes wide with fear.
Night pressed against the windows like a living thing,
and somewhere down the street, a fist slammed against a wooden door.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary set down her pen.
Ink pooled at the tip, trembling from the vibration of footsteps outside.
Her printing press still warm sat in the corner of the room, its metal frame glowing in lamplight.

Another knock.
Closer.
Harder.

She didn’t hide.

She straightened her back,
wiped the ink from her hands,
and prepared to face the danger created by a single, forbidden act:

Telling the truth.

Her story began long before the threats.
Before the editorials.
Before the newspaper that made her both famous and hunted.

She was born in Delaware in 1823,
a free Black girl in a slave state
a place where freedom was fragile,
conditional,
never guaranteed.

Her parents taught her early that knowledge was armor.
They filled the house with books,
with abolitionist newspapers,
with stories of resistance whispered across dinner tables.

She saw freedom seekers passing through her home,
on their way north along the Underground Railroad.
Their fear.
Their hope.
Their determination.

It shaped her life.

When she became a teacher,
she fought for Black children to receive the education white society denied them.
But the backlash hit fast and vicious.

So she did what her parents had taught her to do:
She kept moving forward.

In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act changed everything.
It allowed slave catchers to seize Black people anywhere
even free people.
Even children.

Mary Ann refused to live under terror.

She packed her bags and moved to Canada West (now Ontario),
joining thousands of Black families seeking safety across the border.

But she didn’t want safety only for herself.
She wanted justice for all.

She opened a school for Black refugees.
She taught children to read,
to write,
to question the world around them.

She spoke at public meetings
her voice sharp, fearless, unafraid
challenging even her friends in the abolitionist movement.

“Self-reliance,” she told them.
“Build your own futures.
Do not wait for permission to be free.”

Some found her too direct.
Too bold.
Too willing to confront men who were not used to being challenged by a woman.

She ignored every complaint.

Then, in 1853, she did something no North American Black woman had ever done.

She founded her own newspaper.

The Provincial Freeman.

Printed by hand.
Distributed across Canada and the United States.
Filled with articles that exposed injustice
and celebrated Black achievement.

Mary Ann wrote fearlessly.
About slavery.
About racism.
About economic opportunity.
About women’s rights.

She signed her editorials with a single letter “A”
but everyone soon knew exactly who wrote them.

And the threats began.

White supremacists.
Slave catchers.
Men who believed women should be silent.
They all wanted her gone.

She kept printing.

The smell of ink.
The rumble of the press.
The scrape of metal type.
These became the heartbeat of her rebellion.

During the Civil War, she returned to the United States
to recruit Black soldiers for the Union Army.
She delivered speeches so powerful
that even hardened war officers fell silent.

After the war, she kept pushing
studying law at Howard University,
becoming one of the first Black women in the country to earn a law degree.

She fought for women’s suffrage,
for civil rights,
for better schools,
for equal citizenship.

People tried to outshout her.
Outvote her.
Outmaneuver her.

They never succeeded.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary wasn’t simply ahead of her time.
She was building a time that hadn’t arrived yet
a future where Black women could speak,
lead,
and reshape nations.

She used her voice when it was dangerous.
Her pen when it was forbidden.
Her mind when society told her to sit down.

And every generation that followed
walked a little farther
because she walked first.

12/03/2025

We WOMR women DJs had a good first Zoom meeting last night and will be working on our programs in the next couple of months!

💜
This year’s global theme is ‘Give To Gain’
Whether through donations, knowledge, resources, infrastructure, visibility, advocacy, education, training, mentoring, or time, contributing to women's advancement helps create a more supportive and interconnected world.

What will you Give to Gain gender equality?

Give To Gain is a worldwide call to contribute

You can learn more about IWD here

https://www.internationalwomensday.com/Theme

12/02/2025

Thank you Nancy
Plus more to read here:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1Fcy14GY3k/?mibextid=wwXIfr

Nancy Pelosi with President John F. Kennedy during his 1961 inauguration.

Pelosi was only 20 years old here, watching history unfold long before she became one of the most influential figures in American politics herself. Decades later she would go on to make history in her own right, serving as the first woman Speaker of the House and holding a congressional career that spanned more than three decades.

Now, with news that she plans to step back from politics, this photo hits differently. It shows the very beginning of a journey that shaped modern American government. From witnessing JFK’s inauguration to becoming one of the most powerful lawmakers in the country, Pelosi’s long stretch in public service marks the end of an era.

11/17/2025

11/16/2025

11/07/2025

When her husband died suddenly in 1889, she faced a choice no woman had ever dared to make—and changed American business forever.
Melville Bissell collapsed from pneumonia in March 1889, leaving behind his 42-year-old wife Anna, five children, and a struggling carpet sweeper company teetering on the edge of collapse.
Most widows of that era would have sold the business and retreated into quiet domesticity. That's what society expected. That's what was "proper."
But Anna Bissell wasn't interested in what was proper.
At a time when women couldn't vote in most states, when they were locked out of boardrooms and often couldn't even control their own money, Anna did something revolutionary.
She took the helm.
Not just to survive. Not just to keep the lights on.
She was going to build an empire.
Anna Sutherland was born in 1846 in Nova Scotia, Canada. By age 16, she was already a teacher—sharp, capable, and hungry for more than the limited options society offered women.
At 19, she married Melville Bissell, and together they opened a crockery shop in Grand Rapids, Michigan. But there was a problem: the sawdust from shipping crates kept getting ground into their carpets, making cleaning a nightmare.
So Melville invented something brilliant—a mechanical carpet sweeper.
And Anna? She saw the future.
While Melville tinkered with designs, Anna hit the road. She went door-to-door, town-to-town, selling these revolutionary sweepers with a passion that convinced even skeptical store owners.
She didn't just sell products. She sold a vision of cleaner homes and easier lives.
Anna became the company's top salesperson. She convinced John Wanamaker—pioneer of the modern department store—to stock Bissell sweepers on his shelves. It was a game-changer.
Then in 1884, disaster struck. Fire gutted their entire factory.
Most businesses would have collapsed. But Anna walked into local banks, leveraged her reputation and relationships, and secured the loans they needed. Within three weeks, they were back in business.
She had already saved the company once. She would soon have to save it again.
When Melville died in 1889, Anna faced a crossroads. She had five children to raise (having tragically lost one daughter, Lillie May, at age seven). She had no formal business training. The industrial world was a man's domain, hostile to female leadership.
Everyone expected her to sell.
Instead, Anna Bissell became America's first female CEO.
And she didn't just maintain what Melville built—she transformed it.
Anna understood something most business leaders of her time didn't: a great product needs great branding. She aggressively protected patents and trademarks. She created a recognizable brand identity. She expanded internationally, taking Bissell sweepers to Europe and Latin America.
Queen Victoria herself demanded that Buckingham Palace be "Bisselled" every week.
By 1899—just ten years after taking over—Anna had built Bissell into the largest carpet sweeper company in the world.
But Anna's brilliance extended far beyond profit margins.
In an era when workers were treated as disposable, when 12-hour days and dangerous conditions were the norm, Anna created something different.
She introduced one of America's first pension plans. She provided workers' compensation for injuries—decades before it became law. She offered paid vacation time. She knew every employee by name and asked about their families.
During the 1893 economic depression, when most companies laid off workers, Anna refused. Instead, she reduced hours and found other roles for employees to keep everyone working.
Her workers loved her. In fact, the Bissell company has never experienced a strike in its entire history—a testament to the loyalty Anna inspired.
But Anna didn't stop at the factory gates.
She founded the Bissell House, a center offering recreation and training programs for immigrant women and children in Grand Rapids. She served on boards for children's homes and hospitals. She was the first female trustee of the Methodist Episcopal Church and the only woman member of the National Hardware Men's Association for years.
One of her children later wrote: "Her chief joy was to find homes for destitute children. She has placed four hundred at least."
Anna Bissell led the company as CEO from 1889 to 1919, then as board chairman until her death in 1934 at age 87.
She raised five children as a single mother.
She built a struggling family business into an international brand.
She pioneered labor practices that are now standard across industries.
She proved that compassion and profitability aren't opposites—they're partners.
Today, Bissell remains a family company, still headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It holds about 20% of the North American floor care market and is worth approximately $1 billion.
In 2016, a seven-foot bronze statue of Anna Bissell was unveiled in Grand Rapids, just miles from where she changed history.
But her real legacy isn't made of bronze.
It's in every pension plan, every workers' compensation policy, every female CEO who followed in her footsteps.
Anna Bissell didn't just clean carpets. She swept away the barriers that said women couldn't lead, couldn't innovate, couldn't build empires.
She did it with quiet determination, sharp intelligence, and a heart that never forgot the people who made success possible.
In 1889, society told her to step aside.
Instead, she stepped up—and changed the world, one sweep at a time.

11/07/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/1DA3LUcgGm/?mibextid=wwXIfr

In celebration of Native American Heritage Month, we're honoring Maria Tallchief, the first Native American to become a prima ballerina! One of the most acclaimed ballerinas of the 20th century, Tallchief grew up on the Osage Reservation in Oklahoma. As noted in a NY Times tribute to her, "at a time when many American dancers adopted Russian stage names, Ms. Tallchief, proud of her Indian heritage, refused to do so, even though friends told her that it would be easy to transform Tallchief into Tallchieva."

Tallchief kept her name and made her mark throughout the dance world, dancing with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo from 1942 to 1947 and the New York City Ballet from its founding in 1947 through 1965. She is pictured here in the title role of George Balanchine's ballet "Firebird." This dance legend passed away in 2013 at the age of 88.

To introduce this pioneering dancer to children, we highly recommend the picture book "Tallchief: American's Prima Ballerina" for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/tallchief-america-s-prima-ballerina), the chapter book "She Persisted: Maria Tallchief" for ages 6 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/she-persisted-tallchief), and the illustrated biography "Who Is Maria Tallchief" for ages 8 to 12 (https://www.amightygirl.com/who-is-maria-tallchief)

She is also among the women featured in "This Little Trailblazer" for ages 1 to 4 (https://www.amightygirl.com/this-little-trailblazer) and "She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World," for ages 5 to 9 (https://www.amightygirl.com/she-persisted)

For a lovely picture book about a Native American girl who loves to dance at powwows, we recommend "Jingle Dancer" for ages 4 to 8 at https://www.amightygirl.com/jingle-dancer

To discover our favorite fictional picture books about Mighty Girl dancers, visit our blog post, "Dancing Her Heart Out: 20 Picture Books About Mighty Girls Who Love to Dance," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12378

For more books about Native American and Indigenous girls and women to share during November's Native American Heritage Month, check out our blog post, 50 Children's Books Celebrating Native American and Indigenous Mighty Girls" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=10365

10/27/2025

Gina Lollobrigida once walked off a Hollywood set and never came back. The director had called her “just a pretty face.” She smiled, thanked him — and flew back to Rome the next morning.

What few knew then was that she had just turned down a million-dollar contract from Howard Hughes, the most powerful producer in the world. Hughes sent roses, letters, even a private jet. Lollobrigida ignored them all. “He offered me everything,” she said later, “except respect.”

In postwar Italy, when cinema was ruled by men and glamour meant obedience, Gina was something else entirely. She spoke six languages, designed her own costumes, and argued with directors until they rewrote scripts. When she starred in Bread, Love and Dreams in 1953, she didn’t play a starlet — she played a woman with fire in her eyes, the kind men underestimated until it was too late. Audiences saw themselves in her, and Italy fell in love.

What happened next turned her into a legend. Hollywood kept calling, but she built her career in Europe on her own terms. She became an international symbol of independence long before feminism had a name in film. Later, she reinvented herself again — as a photojournalist. She interviewed Fidel Castro and photographed Salvador Dalí, trading red carpets for real revolutions.

“Beauty fades,” she once said, “but courage, that stays in the face.”

Even now, decades later, Gina Lollobrigida’s story feels like a rebellion wrapped in elegance — a reminder that power sometimes looks like walking away.

10/27/2025

May 15, 1857. Dundee, Scotland.
Williamina Paton Stevens was born into a world that had very specific ideas about what a working-class Scottish girl could become. She became a teacher at 14—a respectable profession for a woman. At 20, she married James Orr Fleming and emigrated to America with dreams of a better life.
Within a year, those dreams shattered. James abandoned her while she was pregnant, leaving Williamina alone in Boston with no money, no family, and soon, a newborn son named Edward.
To survive, she did what desperate women had to do: she took whatever work she could find. In 1879, she became a maid in the home of Professor Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard College Observatory.
She dusted his furniture, cleaned his floors, and had no reason to believe her life would be anything more than survival.
But Edward Pickering had a problem.
His all-male team of assistants at the observatory were making mistakes in their astronomical calculations. They were careless with data. They missed details. And one day, in a moment of frustration that would change history, Pickering allegedly said:
"My Scottish maid could do better!"
Whether he meant it as a joke or a challenge, we'll never know. But Williamina Fleming took him seriously.
In 1881, Pickering hired her to work at the Harvard College Observatory. And she didn't just do better than his previous assistants. She revolutionized the field.
Williamina became one of the first "Harvard Computers"—a team of women hired to analyze thousands of glass photographic plates of the night sky. While male astronomers got credit and professorships, these women did the actual work of mapping the universe. They were paid 25 cents an hour—half what men earned for the same work.
But Williamina didn't let that stop her.
Night after night, she examined glass plates covered with tiny specks of light—each one a star whose secrets were locked in patterns of light and darkness. She developed a system for classifying stars based on their spectra, creating what became known as the Pickering-Fleming system. This work laid the foundation for the Harvard Classification System, which is still used in astronomy today.
Over her career, Williamina personally classified more than 10,000 stars. But she didn't just catalog them—she discovered them.
She found 59 gaseous nebulae that no one knew existed. She identified over 310 variable stars—stars that change in brightness, revealing cosmic processes we're still studying today. She discovered 10 novae—stellar explosions millions of miles away.
A woman who started as a maid was now seeing things in the universe that the most educated astronomers had missed.
In 1899, Pickering promoted her to Curator of Astronomical Photographs—making her responsible for managing hundreds of thousands of plates and supervising a team of women computers. She became one of the most important astronomers in America, even though she was never allowed to call herself that officially.
In 1906, the Royal Astronomical Society in London did something unprecedented: they elected Williamina Fleming as an honorary member. She was the first American woman ever given that honor.
Think about that. A Scottish maid who'd been abandoned by her husband and forced to scrub floors to survive became the first American woman recognized by one of the world's most prestigious scientific institutions.
But here's what makes her story even more remarkable: Williamina knew she was underpaid, undervalued, and given none of the recognition her male colleagues received. She wrote in her diary:
"I am here on a salary of $1,500 per year in charge of the work... I feel this is a very small compensation for what I have done."
She was right. It was shamefully inadequate. But she kept working anyway—not for money or status, but because the stars called to her.
Williamina Fleming died on May 21, 1911, at just 54 years old. By then, she had transformed from an abandoned, penniless immigrant into one of the most accomplished astronomers of her generation.
The woman who cleaned Edward Pickering's house ended up discovering more of the universe than most professional astronomers ever will. The woman who had been told her only value was domestic labor proved that brilliance has nothing to do with where you start—only with how far you're willing to reach.
Every time an astronomer uses stellar classification today, they're using a system Williamina Fleming helped create. Every nova, every nebula she discovered is still up there, bearing witness to what a Scottish maid accomplished when someone finally gave her a chance.
She didn't just count the stars. She taught us how to understand them. And she did it while being paid half what a man would earn, while raising a son alone, while being denied the title of "astronomer" despite doing the work of ten.
Williamina Fleming's story isn't just about astronomy. It's about what happens when we stop deciding who gets to contribute based on their circumstances and start judging them by what they can actually do.
Somewhere above us, the stars she discovered are still shining. And every one of them is proof that genius can emerge from the most unexpected places—even from a maid's quarters in a professor's house.

09/03/2025

Greetings to all the WOMR Community Radio women DJs, it’s time to start thinking of your program for 2026. We all know the routine, so it would be nice to start gathering your thoughts now for March 8!