The Mirabal sisters, Patria, Minerva, and María Teresa, were born in Salcedo in the Cibao region of the Dominican Republic, three out of four daughters of a family of landowners. In 1930, when the dictator Rafael Trujillo became the country’s leader, their parents opposed the new regime and even refused to hang a picture of the tyrant in their home. After earning their primary education at the village’s school, they attended the country’s best boarding school, El Colegio de la Inmaculada, in La Vega. The oldest sister, Patria, left school at 17, married, and had three children. The third sister, Minerva, continued her education and studied law at the University of Santo Domingo, becoming one of the first women to graduate from law school in the country. However, following an incident that occurred a few years earlier, in which Minerva caught the eye of Trujillo at a party and rejected his sexual attempts, her diploma was revoked from her honors as summa cum laude and got disapproved from practicing law. The youngest sister, María Teresa, attended the Liceo de San Francisco de Macorís and later studied mathematics at the University of Santo Domingo. As a student, Minerva became more aware of Trujillo’s atrocities and became involved in the political movement against the totalitarian regime. Soon, her sisters, husbands, and older children followed. The three couples became the leaders in the underground movement to change the regime. It was named The Fourteenth of June resistance movement after the date the activists tried to overthrow the government and were tortured and killed. They distributed pamphlets, gathered materials for weapons, and made makeshift bombs. The sisters became known within the movement as the Las Mariposas – The Butterflies. However, their activity didn’t last long, as they were discovered only a few weeks after its foundations. On January 22nd, 1960, the secret police raided their meeting place at Patria’s house, burned it to the ground, and arrested Minerva, María Teresa, and the three husbands. The two sisters were released after three weeks but were later sent back to prison for several more months. On November 25th, 1960, the secret police ambushed the three sisters and their driver, Rufino de la Cruz, returning from visiting their incarcerated husbands. The four were strangled and beaten to death with clubs; their bodies were put back into their Jeep, which was pushed off the road to make it look like a car accident. Patria was 36, Minerva 34, and María Teresa 25. The Mirabal sisters’ assassinations significantly impacted public opinion and spurred the events that led to Trujillo’s assassination six months later. Following their death, their surviving sister, Dedé, took in and raised her sisters’ six children. She devoted her life to preserving and promoting their legacy, establishing the Mirabal Sisters Foundation and the Mirabal Sisters Museum. The sister became national heroines and a worldwide symbol of feminist resistance and social justice. Read more...

Wangarĩ Muta Maathai was born in the village of Ihithe, Kenya. At 11, she was sent to a boarding school at the Mathari Catholic Mission in Nyeri, where she learned English and converted to Catholicism. At 16, after graduating top of her class, she was granted admission to Loreto High School, a Catholic high school for girls. In 1960, 20 years old Maathai was one of the 300 Kenyans selected to study in the US as part of the Kennedy Airlift and studied biology, chemistry, and German at Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas. After receiving an MSc in biological sciences from the University of Pittsburgh, she worked as a research assistant in the microanatomy section Department of Veterinary Anatomy in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University College of Nairobi. Later, she moved to Germany to write her doctorate, completing it at the University of Nairobi while serving as an assistant lecturer. In 1971, at 31, Maathai became the first Eastern African woman to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Nairobi. In the early 1970s, Maathai became an active member of various civic organizations. She held positions such as director of the Nairobi branch of the Kenya Red Cross Society and board chair of the Environment Liaison Centre. She also continued her academic career, and in 1976, at 36, she was appointed chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy and associate professor the following year, becoming the first woman to serve in these positions. At the time, she began to work with the National Council of Women of Kenya, formulating a strategy to involve women in rural areas in environmental conservation by planting trees. This initiative aimed to address the challenges of deforestation and desertification while providing a sustainable fuel source for communities. In 1977, she founded The Green Belt Movement, which in 1986 led to the founding of the Pan African Green Belt Network. Since its inception, the organization has planted approximately 40 million trees in Africa. Following their successes, many African countries, such as Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Lesotho, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe, have adopted tree-planting initiatives to act against deforestation and promote environmental sustainability. Besides environmental conservation, Maathai advocated for other social causes, including human rights, AIDS prevention, and women’s issues, representing these concerns in United Nations General Assembly meetings. In 2002, at 62, Maathai was elected as the representative of the Tetu constituency in Kenya’s parliament, and a year later was appointed Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources, serving in both positions until 2007. In 2004, Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her “holistic approach to sustainable development that embraces democracy, human rights, and women’s rights in particular,” becoming the first Black African woman winner. She continued campaigning for environmental causes and human rights, becoming the first president of the African Union’s Economic, Social and Cultural Council and as a Goodwill Ambassador to the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem. In 2006, together with five other sister Nobel Peace winners, she founded the Nobel Women’s Initiative to unite and support global efforts for women’s rights, fostering peace, justice, and equality. Maathai died of ovarian cancer at the age of 71. Read more...

Marjory Stoneman Douglas was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At 6, her parents separated, and she and her mother moved in with her maternal grandparents in Taunton, Massachusetts. While growing up, her mother was committed several times to a mental sanitarium. From a young age, Douglas was an avid reader, and by her teens, she began to write. At 16, she contributed to the children’s publication St. Nicholas Magazine, and in the following year, won a prize for her story “An Early Morning Paddle.” After graduating from Taunton High School, Douglas studied English at Wellesley College, where she edited the college literary magazine and joined the suffrage club. In 1912, the same year she received her degree, her mother died of cancer. After working in various department stores, she met and married Kenneth Douglas, who was 30 years her senior. Soon, she discovered she married a con artist, who committed forgeries and theft crimes and tried to scam her father, whom she hadn’t been in touch with for 19 years. While her husband was in jail, Douglas’s father reconnected with her and persuaded her to file for divorce and reunite with him in Miami, Florida. Douglas began to work at her father’s paper, which later became The Miami Herald, writing the society column, covering tea parties and social events. Not long after, she received the responsibility of the editorial page. When the US entered WW1 in 1917, 27 years old Douglas took a writing assignment and became the first woman in Florida to enlist in the Naval Reserve. The following year, she joined the Red Cross and got stationed in Paris as a nurse. On her return to the US, Douglas was appointed assistant editor at The Miami Herald; she wrote a daily column, The Galley, addressing social issues close to her heart, such as women’s suffrage, civil rights, and urban planning for the growing population. In 1923, at 33, Douglas had a nervous breakdown and left her job in the newspaper. She began to work as a freelance writer, selling articles and short stories to various magazines, which enabled her to purchase a house in Coconut Grove. Douglas wrote about life events such as murders, fires, and hurricanes, and her own experiences, from WW1 to the life of the pioneers in South Florida. Between 1920 to 1990, she published over 100 stories and articles. In addition to writing, Douglas also taught at the University of Miami, served on the editorial board of the University of Miami Press, was the book review editor of The Miami Herald, and wrote plays for the Miami Theater. In 1942, Douglas was asked to write about the Miami River. During her research, she became aware of the threats of the demolition of the Everglades and wrote about it instead. In 1947, after five years of work, she published the book The Everglades: River of Grass, in which she discussed the construction of the Tamiami trail that was built around and through the Everglades and the construction of dams and canals that would drain the wetlands and destroy its wildlife and ecosystem. The book became a best-seller and initiated Douglas’s second career as an activist and spokeswoman for conservation. She played a crucial role in defeating plans to construct an airstrip within the heart of the Everglades, alter the natural water flow within the grasslands, and promote initiatives to restore the natural ecosystem. In 1969, at 79, Douglas founded the Friends of the Everglades, which enabled her to advocate for preserving the Everglades nationally and internationally. Thanks to her efforts, the Everglades was declared a National Park in 1947, an International Biosphere Preserve in 1976, a legislatively designated wilderness area in 1978, a Wetland of International Significance in 1986, and, in 1991, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Everglades Protection Act passed, which fund water treatment facilities in the area. She was awarded by President Clinton the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her tireless work in 1993. All this time, Douglas never stopped writing; in 1951, she published her first novel, Road to the Sun, and in 1987, her autobiography, Voice of the River. Throughout her life, she published ten books and 20 short story collections. She died at the age of 108. Read more...

Isabella Bird was born in Boroughbridge, England. Growing up, the family frequently moved, and her parents home-schooled her. Since she was little, Bird suffered from various illnesses, including a spinal complaint, insomnia, and nervous headaches. To improve her health, she spent most of her time outdoors and learned to ride and row, skills that became helpful later in her life. As an avid reader and writer, she published her first essay at 16, discussing free trade versus protectionism. At 23, following a spine surgery, she was advised to go on a sea voyage to strengthen her health, and she embarked on her first journey to Canada and the US. The letters she wrote on this trip became the basis of her first book, An Englishwoman in America, published in 1856. Following her father’s death in 1858, Bird moved to Edinburgh with her mother and sister. During the next decade, she wrote about her experiences in North America, publishing two more books and several articles. In 1872, at 41, Bird once again left the UK, this time to Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. She compiled her adventures in the book Six Months In The Sandwich Islands, published in 1875. She continued to Colorado, traveling 800 miles of the Rocky Mountains on a horse. Her letters to her sister were published in The Leisure Hour and later in her bestseller book A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains. After a short stay in Edinburgh, she packed her bags and left for Japan, where she lived with the Ainu tribe, and wrote about it in the 1880 book Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. Then, she traveled to Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, the Malay Peninsula, Egypt, and the Sinai Peninsula. There she contracted typhoid fever and returned to Scotland to recover. There she married Dr. John Bishop, ten years her junior, although he died only five years after. Bird decided to devote her life to medical missions. In 1886, after studying medicine at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, she joined the missionary cause, and at 58, she began her journey to India, going through Turkey, Kurdistan, and Persia. That was the first trip in which Bird began to document her experiences not only by pen but also by image, taking photos of the places she visited and the people she met and publishing the pictures together with her writings. In India, Bird worked with the renowned medical missionary Fanny Jane Butler and founded the Henrietta Bird Hospital for Women in Punjab and the John Bishop Memorial Centre in Cashmere. By then, Bird’s recording of her extensive traveling made her a household name. Her writing style was accessible and entertaining, crafting her personal experiences relatable to all and making her readers feel like they were out there with her. In 1890, at 59, Bird became a fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and the following year, she made history as the first woman to be elected as a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Later she was also appointed a member of the Royal Photographic Society. In 1897, at 66, she traveled through China and Korea, publishing her encounters in the 1899 book The Yangtze Valley and Beyond. Bird’s final journey was to Morocco in 1900, where she joined the Berbers for a few months. Not long after her return, Bird fell ill. She died in her home in Edinburgh at the age of 73. Read more...

Winona LaDuke was born in Los Angeles, California, to a Jewish mother and an Ojibwe father from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. From a young age, she was fascinated by her father’s powwows and tribal culture and traditions. At 5, her parents divorced, and LaDuke moved with her mother to Ashland, Oregon. After high school, she attended Harvard University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in economics in 1982. During school, she joined a group of Indigenous activists and assisted the civil rights activist Jimmie Durham in his research on the effects of uranium mining in Navajo reservations. After graduating, LaDuke moved to White Earth to work as the reservation high school’s principal. Soon, she became involved with the Anishinaabeg’s lawsuit to reclaim lands promised to them in a federal treaty in 1867. Initially, the reservation spanned 837,000 acres, but due to government policies allowing lumber companies and non-Native groups to seize the land, more than 90 percent were taken away by 1934. In 1985, at 26, LaDuke founded the Indigenous Women’s Network – a collective of 400 Native women activists and organizations committed to enhancing the representation of Native women, empowering them to participate in tribal politics and cultural endeavors actively. She also worked with Women of All Red Nations to raise awareness of the forced sterilization of Native American women. In 1989, LaDuke received her master’s in community economic development from Antioch University. That same year, LaDuke founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project (WELRP), a non-profit organization that works on buying back reservation lands. By 2000, WELRP bought 1,200 acres, preserving them in a conservation trust for future transfer to the tribe’s possession. Focusing on sustainable development, WELRP has supported many initiatives, including indigenous farming, local food systems, local wild rice crop protection from patenting and genetic engineering, renewable energy, sanitation improvement, and a diaper service that reduces waste from disposable diapers while saving money. In the early 1990s, LaDuke joined forces with the musical due Indigo Girls to arrange a series of concerts to raise awareness of Native issues. In 1993, they founded together Honor the Earth, a non-profit organization promoting financial support for Indigenous environmental justice. In 1996 and 2000, LaDuke delved deeper into politics when serving as Ralph Nader’s running mate on the Green Party presidential ticket. She also was involved with the 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests and led the protests against the Line 3 pipeline of 2020-2021. LaDuke is a strong advocate for the cultivation of marijuana and industrial hemp on Indigenous tribal lands to generate economic benefits and foster local economic self-reliance. Since 2017, she has devoted most of her time to farming and established Winona’s Hemp & Heritage Farm to create an economy led by Indigenous women that focuses on local food, energy, and fiber while prioritizing environmental sustainability. Read more...

Jeanne Baret was born in La Comelle, France. Little is known about her early life, though she claimed that her mother had died soon after she was born and her father when she was 15. In her early 20s, Baret worked as a housekeeper to the naturalist Philibert Commerson, and the two developed an intimate relationship. In 1764, the two moved to Paris, where she gave birth and placed her child with a foster mother. In 1765, Commerson got invited to join as a botanist to the first French circumnavigation of the globe, led by the admiral and explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville. Wanting her by his side, Commerson enlisted Baret to the voyage as his valet and assistant. However, women were prohibited on French navy ships, so she disguised herself as a man. In December 1766, the ship Étoile left the port of Rochefort toward South America with Baret on board. Since Commerson had a lot of equipment to collect specimens, the ship’s captain gave up his big cabin to Commerson and his assistant, allowing Baret more privacy. Early in the voyage, Commerson suffered from seasickness, and an ulcer on his leg, so Baret spent much of the time attending him. While on shore, she did the heavy labor of carrying the equipment and collecting specimens. Along the journey, the ship stopped in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where Baret collected plants, shells, and stones; while sailing, she helped Commerson to catalog their findings. For two years, Baret managed to keep her true identity a secret, though there were rumors that she was, in fact, a woman. There are different versions of how her gender got revealed. One story claims that when reaching Tahiti in April 1768, the islanders immediately recognized that she was a woman, and they surrounded and threatened her until she had to be rescued back to the ship. Another record claims that in July 1768, while stopping in New Ireland (today part of Papua New Guinea), Baret was discovered by crew members who confronted and sexually assaulted her. Either way, when anchoring in Mauritius for supplies, Baret and Commerson decided to leave the ship and stay on the island as the governor’s guests. There, she continued to assist Commerson and went with him on collecting expeditions to Madagascar and Bourbon Island. By 1770, Baret gained independence and was granted property in Port Louis, where she ran a tavern. Commerson died in 1773, and in the following year, at 33, Baret married Jean Dubernat, a non-commissioned officer in the French Army. Soon after, they returned to France and settled in Saint-Aulaye. In 1785, the Ministry of Marine granted Baret a pension of 200 livres a year. The pension document acknowledges her achievement of circumnavigating the globe and her devotion and assistance to Commerson while recognizing she was a woman disguised as a man. She died at the age of 67. Read more...

According to the Roman author Gaius Julius Hyginus in his mythology story collection, Fabulae, Agnodice (or Agnodike) was born into a wealthy Athenian family during the 4th Century BCE. Growing up, she was aware of the high mortality rate of infants and mothers during childbirth and decided to become a physician. During that time, women were not allowed to practice medicine, so Agnodice disguised herself as a man, cut off her hair, wore men’s clothes, and traveled to Alexandria to study medicine under Herophilus. On her return to Athens, Agnodice began to practice medicine, focusing on women in labor, especially those who were embarrassed or refused to be treated by a man. In one case, in which a patient did not trust Agnodice as a male physician, Agnodice revealed her true gender. Afterward, the word spread amongst the women of Athens, and her reputation and popularity grew. Envying her success, the (male) doctors accused Agnodice of seducing her patients. She was sent to trial by Areopagus, the Athenian governing council, and had to expose herself as a woman to prove her innocence. She was accused of violating the law prohibiting women from practicing medicine. As a result of her patients’ campaign for her defense, a new law allowed freeborn women in Athens to study and practice medicine, making Agnodice officially the first female physician. For over 2000 years, Agnodice has symbolized determination and female equality. Her story has been often cited, in particular, in the context of the role of women in the medical profession. Read more...

Bertha Sophie Felicitas Freifrau von Suttner was born in Prague, then in the kingdom of Bohemia, part of the Austrian Empire. Her father was from an aristocratic family, and her mother was of an untitled nobility, so Bertha was not considered part of the Austrian high nobility because of her “mixed” descent. Soon after she was born, her father died, and she and her mother moved to Brno to live with her maternal family. There, Bertha was introduced to literature and philosophy by her cousin Elvira. She also studied French, Italian, and English and became an accomplished pianist and singer. In 1856, after her mother gambled all their money, they moved to Vienna for a few years before relocating to Klosterneuburg, where Bertha published her first work, the novella Erdenträume im Monde. Due to their financial situation, Bertha tried to become an opera singer and took intensive vocal lessons. However, her stage fright impacted her performance, and she couldn’t secure a job. In 1873, at 30, Bertha began to work as the governess of the four girls of the von Suttner family. She and the girls had a close connection, and later she used the nickname they gave her, “Boulotte” (fatty), as her pseudonym B. Oulot. During that time, she developed a romantic relationship with the girl’s elder brother, Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner. In 1876, encouraged by her employers, who opposed her relationship with their son, Bertha applied and accepted a position as Alfred Nobel’s secretary-housekeeper at his Paris residence. After only one week, she returned to Vienna to secretly marry von Suttner. They eloped to Georgia and settled in Kutaisi, where they lived in poverty and worked as music and language teachers to the children of the local aristocracy. To supplement their income, both worked as writers, he covered the Russo-Turkish War, and Bertha contributed to the Austrian press and began working on her first novel, Es Löwos, published in 1906. In 1882, the couple moved to Tbilisi, where Bertha focused on her writing. The following year, she published her first significant political work, Inventarium einer Seele (Inventory of the Soul), claiming that world peace is inevitable because of technological advancement. In 1885, at 42, the Suttners returned to Austria, living in Harmannsdorf Castle in Burgschleinitz-Kühnring. For the next few years, she continued to work mainly as a journalist, writing primarily about peace and war issues. In 1889, Bertha published the pacifist novel Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!). The book was translated into 12 languages and published in 37 editions, making her a leading figure in the peace movement. She used her rising status to promote pacifist ideas by any means possible. Among her many actions, she founded and chaired the German Peace Society, established the international pacifist journal Die Waffen nieder!, helped to fund the establishment of the Bern Peace Bureau, presented Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria a petition to establish an International Court of Justice, and participated in the First Hague Convention in 1899. To support herself financially, she continued to write novels in which she incorporated her pacifistic ideas. In 1904, 61 years Bertha embarked on a seven months tour across the US to promote universal peace and to attend the International Peace Congress in Boston. Her main argument was that the right to peace needs to be enshrined in international law, as it is an evolutionary necessity. In 1905, Bertha and her comrade Tobias Asser were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their contribution to developing an international order based on peace rather than war. She became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the second female Nobel laureate (after Marie Curie), and the first Austrian laureate. She continued to campaign for international peace and against armament, and in 1911, at 68, Bertha was appointed a member of the advisory council of the Carnegie Peace Foundation. During the last months of her life, she worked on organizing the next Peace Conference, intended to take place in September 1914. She died of cancer in June of that year at 71. The conference was canceled; ironically, a week after it was supposed to take place, the heir to the Austria-Hungary throne, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated, an event that triggered WWI. Read more...

Luce Irigaray was born in Blaton, Belgium. Not much is known about her upbringing and personal life because she believes that revealing details in the male-dominated academic establishment was usually used to challenge and criticize the works of women. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Catholic University of Leuven and later worked as a high school teacher in Brussels. In 1960, at 30, she moved to Paris to further her education, receiving a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Paris VIII in 1968. Her dissertation, an attempt to establish the grammar of dementia patients, was the basis of her first book Le Langage des déments, published in 1973. During the 1960s, she studied to become a psychoanalyst at Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic seminars at the École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris). She then held a research position at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Centre for Scientific Research). Combining her knowledge in both psychology and linguistics, she researched gender differences in language and concluded that speech is never neutral but always marked by sexual differences. In 1974, Irigaray published her second doctoral thesis, Speculum of the Other Woman, criticizing the roots of Western psychoanalysis. In this pioneering text, she argued that because Freud always used a boy as his paradigm of psychosexual development, the masculine was the norm, and girls and women got reduced to being inferior to males and functioned as commodities. She also claimed that in a culture where the line of descent goes from father to son, whose symbolism takes no account of the mother-daughter line, women do not exist as women but only as mothers subordinate to a patriarchal order, preferably as the mothers of sons. Her work received much criticism from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and she got dismissed from her teaching positions at the University of Vincennes. In 1977, she published the book This Sex Which is Not One, arguing that in a phallic-centered economy, women were a commodity because all forms of transactions were done and managed only between men. She played on the two meanings of “One” in the book title. The female was not sex because women got demoted to being nothing more than inferior men and did not exist in their own right, and the sex of women was not one because it was not reducible to one organ as men. In 1982, at 52, Irigaray began to serve as head of the Philosophy department at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. There, she worked on research that resulted in her 1984 book, An Ethics of Sexual. The book, in which she stated that Western culture is unethical because of gender discrimination, established her as an influential continental philosopher. She is also considered to be one of “The French Feminism,” together with the philosopher Helen Helene Cixous and others. Over the following decades, in addition to giving seminars and lectures throughout Europe, Irigaray continued to explore the differences between men’s and women’s languages. Through this research, she discovered a correlation between the language of men and women and the suppression of female thought and that gendered language patterns indicate subjectivity in women and male dominance. Her later work delved into the possibility of creating a female imagination that would allow women to speak as women and not as “lesser to men” and incorporate utopian speculation about possible ethics of sexual differences, in which she implied a recognition of a distinct male and female psychosexual economics that can coexist without one being reduced to the other. Read more...

Jovita Idar was born in Laredo, Texas. Her parents advocated for Mexican Americans’ civil rights, and she and her seven siblings grew up in a socially and politically active household. Idar attended the Methodist Holding Institute in Laredo, earning her teaching certificate in 1903. Afterward, she moved to Los Ojuelos, where she taught Chicano children (Mexican-Americans with no Anglo heritage). There, she experienced the segregation and poor conditions of this community. Upon the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, Idar resigned from her teaching position and returned to Laredo to work in her father’s newspaper, La Crónica (The Chronicle), which advocated for Mexican-American rights. Using a pseudonym, she focused on the loss of Mexican culture and the use of the Spanish language, Mexican-Americans’ poor living and working conditions, and lynching. She also used this platform to promote women’s suffrage and wrote articles encouraging women to vote. In 1911, the Idar family organized the First Mexican Congress to unite Mexicans to fight injustice. That same year, she founded and served as the first president of the feminist organization La Liga Feminil Mexicaista (the League of Mexican Women), which encouraged women to break out of the domestic sphere, offered study sessions for women, and established bilingual schools for children. Over time, the organization provided food and clothes to those in need. She also founded the El Etudiante, a bilingual education newspaper for teachers which offered practical methods for bilingual education. During the Mexican Revolution in 1913, 28 years old Idar crossed the border to help people injured in the attack on the city of Nuevo Laredo. She joined the La Cruz Blanca (the White Cross) and volunteered as a nurse. In 1914, on her return to the US, she began to write for the El Progreso newspaper. Following a criticizing article she published about US President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to send US troops to the border, the Texas Rangers came to newspaper offices to shut it down. However, Idar argued that per the First Amendment, the newspaper could publish opinion articles and physically block the entrance to the office. The Texas Rangers left but returned the next day while Idar was away and destroyed the newspaper’s presses. The incident did not hold her back, and she continued to publish her articles in other papers. Several months afterward, her father died, and she became the editor of La Crónica. Two years later, she founded another paper called Evolución. In 1917, at 32, she married Bartolo Juárez, and soon after, they moved to San Antonio, Texas. There, she became active in the Democratic Party, co-founded with her husband the Democratic Club, and served as editor of the Methodist Church publication El Heraldo Cristiano. She continued to promote equal rights for women and established a free kindergarten. She also volunteered as a translator at the county hospital and taught hygiene and childcare classes to women. She died at 61 from a pulmonary hemorrhage caused by advanced tuberculosis. Read more...