Naomi Rebekah Wolf was born and raised in San Francisco, California. She studied English literature at Yale University and then at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. During her college years, Wolf encountered class hierarchy for the first time, as well as sexism and antisemitism. These experiences influenced her views and writing in her future career. When she presented a feminist theory as her doctoral thesis, her tutor rejected her proposal and told her that her subject does not exist. Wolf did not complete her Ph.D. at the time but formed her writing into her first book, The Beauty Myth. Published in 1991, Wolf’s book challenged beauty norms, the unrealistic standards of beauty, and the cosmetics industry for its women’s exploitation. This ground-breaking book became an international bestseller and was nominated by The New York Times as one of the 70 Most Significant Books of the Century. At 29, Wolf became a leading spokeswoman for what was later referred to as The Third Wave of the Feminist Movement. Two years later, Wolf published her second book, Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How to Use It, in which she wrote on women’s empowerment and sexual liberation. Following its release, she began writing for various publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, exploring in her essays a wide range of topics, from abortions and suppressed sexuality to ISIS and Edward Snowden. In 1996, at the age of 34, Wolf was asked to advise on women issues in President Clinton’s re-election campaign and to give her input on reaching female voters. She was not paid for her contribution but was called on again as a formal consultant in Al Gore’s bid in the 2000 presidential election. In 1997, Wolf published her third book Promiscuities: A Secret History of Female Desire, in which she argued that schools need to teach about sex rather than encouraging abstinence. In the same year, she co-founded the Board of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership – a non-profit organization dedicated to developing young women’s professional skills and training them in ethical leadership. In the next two decades, Wolf published ten more books. Read more...

Helen Newington Wills was born and raised in California. Her interest in tennis sparked after watching tennis matches, and at the age of 8, Wills received her first tennis racket and began playing on the local dirt courts. In 1919, Wills was spotted by a member of the Berkeley Tennis Club and was invited to join in. There, at 14, she sharpened her techniques, and two years later, she won both singles and doubles titles at the California State Championships. In that same year, Wills won the US girls’ championship, repeating her achievement in the following year. At 17, Wills not only graduated high school top of her class but also won her first women’s national title – the youngest tennis player at that time to win the US National Championship. At the 1924 Paris Olympics games, 18 years old Wills won two gold medals – for singles and doubles. She dominated the field, not losing a set for six consecutive years – from 1926 to 1933, winning one title after another, including Grand Slam titles, keeping her ranking in the world top ten. In 1933, Wills suffered from a dislocated vertebra and had to take almost two years off to recover. In 1935, A month after she returned to court, she won her seventh Wimbledon title. At 33, soon after winning her eighth Wimbledon title, Wills’ index finger was injured after been beaten by a dog. The damaged finger had affected her game, and she decided to retire from the tennis world. She decided to follow her other passion, art. She opened a studio and exhibited her painting in various venues. She died at the age of 92 of natural causes. Throughout her 17 years of professional career, Wills has won 180 straight matches, reached the final of every Grand Slam singles event she played except one, and won more than 50 international titles. Read more...

Born as Harriet Wood in New Orleans, Louisiana, but grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where her father, a Spanish merchant, has established a Trading Post with Native Americans. Growing up, she used to ride horses and shoot shotguns while fantasying about becoming an actress. At 18, she moved to NYC to pursue her dream and took the stage name Pauline Cushman. She met Charles Dickinson, and in 1853 they got married and relocated to Cleveland, Ohio. At the onset of the Civil War, her husband enlisted in the Union Army as a musician but soon fell ill with dysentery and passed away a few months later. Cushman, now a widow with two children, wanted to return to the stage. She left her children with her in-laws and moved to Louisville, Kentucky, which at the time was a Union state, full of Confederate sympathizers. In April 1863, while preparing to perform in the play The Seven Sisters, she was approached by two Confederate officers who offered her $350 for toasting the Confederate President during the play, instead of President Lincoln. Hesitated, Cushman turned to the Union authorities, who told her to accept the proposition, and so she did. She was immediately fired from the show but was offered a new job – a spy for the Union Army. As a spy, Cushman utilized her acting skills and posed as a Confederate sympathizer. Sometimes dresses as a man and sometimes as a woman, she was able to befriend military commanders and gather information. Pretending to be a Southern woman in a boarding house, she managed to stop the boarding house’s mistress from poisoning Union soldiers, and while dressed as a man, she joined a Southern woman who brought confident documents to the south and had the Union to confiscate her papers. Cushman’s biggest mission was in 1864 when she entered a Confederate camp in Tennessee under the appearance that she is searching for her missing brother. She managed to steal drawings of fortification plans but was caught by Confederate soldiers. Though Cushman escaped captivity, she was captured and brought to trial before a military court. She was sentenced to hang, but her execution was delayed after becoming sick or pretending to be one. Eventually, by the time she got better, the Union had invaded the area, and she was spared. After that incident, Cushman received public attention as well as recognition from General Garfield and President Lincoln. She was awarded the rank of brevet major and was honored as “Major of Calvary.” She received a military uniform, which she used in her lectures and performing tours after the war. Over time, the public became exhausted hearing about war stories, and Cushman’s popularity had declined. She moved to San Francisco, and in 1872 she got married, but her husband passed away in the following year. A widow for the second time, Cushman moved to Arizona, where she met her third husband, Jeremiah Fryer. They ran together a hotel for ten years, but their marriage did not survive the death of their daughter, and they separated in 1890. Cushman, then living in poverty, returned to San Francisco and spent her last years working as a charwoman and seamstress. At the time, she suffered from rheumatism and arthritis and became addicted to pain medications. At the age of 60, Cushman had died from a morphine overdose. With her death, her Civil War honors and fame were recalled, and she was buried with full military honors. Read more...

Clara Shortridge was born in Milton, Indiana, but was raised in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, attending a co-educational school. At 14, she accepted a teaching job, but in the following year, she eloped with Jeremiah D. Foltz – a Civil War veteran and a farmer who was ten years older than her. The couple moved from one place to another until they settled in San Jose, California. She raised their children and wrote articles for several local newspapers. When she was 27 years old, her husband left her with their five children. Already involved in the suffrage movement, she supported herself by giving public lectures on the subject, and simultaneity began to study law independently. When she wanted to take the bar examination, her admission declined because of her gender. Her response was to write the Woman Lawyer Bill, in which she changed “white male” into “person.” The Bill passed, and within a few months, she became the first woman to be admitted to the California bar and the first female lawyer on the west coast. Foltz wished to deepen her education, so she tried to enroll into Hastings College of the Law, but once again was denied for being a woman. So, together with Laura de Force Gordon, she argued before the state Supreme Court that if women could serve as lawyers, they should be allowed to attend law school. They also wrote an amendment to the California state constitution to change the law accordingly. By the time she won the case, she had no money to pay for her education, and she had to give up her dream to attend law school and return to serve as an attorney. As such, she had a successful career, practicing family, criminal and corporate law, first in San Francisco, then in Los Angeles and NYC. In 1893, during the Chicago World Fair, Foltz presented the pioneering idea of providing legal assistance to criminal defendants with low means, as well as segregating juvenile offenders from adult prisoners. Although it took 20 years, her revolutionary initiative came to practice first in California and then throughout the US. As a suffragist, Foltz always pushed for progressive legislation for women’s rights and encouraged women to participate in the legal field. In 1911, she led a campaign to secure the vote for women in state elections in California, and afterward, she became the first woman to serve as LA’s deputy district attorney. It is only one of her “firsts list,” that include- first female clerk for the State Assembly’s Judiciary Committee, the first female licensed Notary Public, the first woman appointed to the State Board of Corrections, the first woman director of a major bank, the first woman member of the State Board of Charities and Corrections, and at 81, she became the first woman to run for Governor of California. She passed away at 85 of heart failure. Read more...

Lillie Hitchcock was born in West Point, New York, and at the age of 7, the family moved to San Francisco, California. Not long after, she was rescued from a burning hotel by the Knickerbockers Number 5. Fascinated by the firefighters and their missions, she started watching them and cheering them on their job. One day, on her way home, she witnessed firefighters responding to a call on Telegraph Hill. Short of staff, they struggled to pull the engine up the hill, 15 years old Coit, rushed to help them, taking the empty spot on the line. From that day on, she became the mascot of the company, rushing out for every alarm, and earning the nickname “Firebelle Lil.” Growing older, she was known for her eccentric behavior – smoking cigars, wearing trousers, and gambling. She even used to dress like a man to enter the male-only gamblers’ clubs. When her father died, she inherited his fortune, which allowed her to travel to Europe back and forth. She stopped following the firefighters regularly but always visited them on her visits in the US, giving them souvenirs from her travel, joining their parades, and attending their banquets. When she was 20 years old, she became an honorary member of the Knickerbocker Engine Company No. 5, the first woman in the US to be a firefighter squad member. At age 26, she married Howard Coit, a caller at the San Francisco Stock Exchange, and together they continued to travel around the world. Coit died in San Francisco at the age of 86. Her ashes were placed at a mausoleum, next to various firefighting memorials. She left one-third of her wealth to the city of San Francisco. It was spent building the Coit Tower, a beautiful tower on Telegraph Hill, as well as for sponsoring a statue of three firefighters at the corner of Washington Square Park, one of them depicted carrying a young girl to safety. Read more...

Born in 1930 to a Mexican immigrant family in a small mining town in New Mexico. When she was 3 years old, her parent got divorced. She moved with her mother and two brothers to Stockton, California, to a diverse farm worker’s community. Growing up, she faced racism and discrimination several times. This and her parent’s activism and kindness inspired and shaped her. She finished high school, got married, had two children, and shortly after, got divorced. She finished studying at the local college and became a teacher. Still, after witnessing the poverty conditions of the farmworkers’ families and their brutal working conditions, she decided to change this injustice and started her activism journey. At 25 years old, Huerta became one of the leaders of the Stockton Chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO). During this time, she got married, had five children, but later on, she got a divorce. In the CSO, she met her colleague, Cesar Chavez. Both had shared interest in organizing farmworkers, and in 1962, they co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, which later became United Farm Workers’ Union (UFW). Huerta served as its vice president till 1999. As a UFA leader, Huerta organized, negotiated, and lobbied for the farmworkers. She organized nonviolent rallies, demonstrations, strikes, and boycotts. She stood in the front picket lines facing sexism and sometimes violence. Due to her driving force, the first-ever union contract was signed in 1970. In addition to the fieldwork, she was active at the legislative level, lobbying and promoting California laws to improve immigrants’ and farmworkers’ work conditions. One of her achievements is the 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act. During her 70s, she decided to dedicate her activism to women’s rights and campaign to increase the number of women and Latinas running for office. In 2002, she founded the Dolores Huerta Foundation, and even in her 80s and 90s, she is still traveling across the country, promoting social justice. Read more...

Born Dianne Emiel Goldman in San Francisco’s exclusive Pacific Heights neighborhood, she was redirected from a Jewish religious school to a private Catholic high school to learn discipline. She initially wanted to study medicine but ended up graduating Stanford University with a degree in History and Political Science. Feinstein’s political career had many firsts, starting with being the first woman to head the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco. She also had her share of disappointments, as when she lost twice the elections for the position of mayor of San Francisco. Several years after, following the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, whom she found shot to death, she replaced Moscone in the office, and later elected to stay in the position. In 1992, together with Barbara Boxer, she became one of California’s first female senators and continued in conceiving achievements when she became the first woman to assume the role of the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017, as well as the first woman to chair the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Today she is the oldest member of the Senate. Her most significant contribution was leading six years review of the CIA’s use of torture. Feinstein is one of the wealthiest senators of the US, with an estimated net worth of $58 million. The reports attribute a large portion of her wealth to her third husband, investment banker Richard C. Blum. Her only daughter, Katherine Feinstein, is a former Superior Court judge. She died on September 29th, 2023, at the age of 90. Read more...

Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn was born in 1895 to a middle-class family in New Jersey. At the age of 12, her father abandoned the family, and she dropped her middle name, assuming her mother’s maiden name, Lange. After graduating from high school, she decided to become a photographer and went to study photography at Columbia University as well as working as an apprentice in several New York photography studios. In 1918 she left NYC to travel and eventually settled in San Francisco, establishing her own studio of portrait photographs of the social elite. In 1920 she got married and later had two sons. Her career took a turn when the Great Depression began, as she had the urge to turn the lens of her camera from the studio to document the changing world of the crisis. Her initial photos of the unemployed and homeless people led to her employment as a photographer at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), which aimed to document the crisis to increase public awareness and make a change. Lange traveled to rural areas and camps, documenting the life of the unemployed, migrants, poor, and desperate people. This documentation resulted in an aid sent to the camps. Her images become the icons of the era; on many of them, she wrote quotes and information about the person she photographed. She later continued as a full-time documentary photographer, traveling to far counties across the US, sometimes taking government projects documenting the lives of people in crisis and rural areas. One of these projects was in 1942 when she was documenting the transfer of Japanese-Americans from “assembly centers” to internment camps, Manzanar. These important images were published only after World War 2 was over. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, she traveled to photograph in Asia, South America, and Egypt. Lange died of cancer in 1965, three months before the opening of an exhibition about her life work in the MoMa, the first one-person retrospective by a female photographer held there. Read more...

Grace Louise McCann Morley was born in Berkeley and grew up in St. Helena. She received her MA in French from the University of California, Berkeley. Thanks to a scholarship, she lived three years in Paris – working on her PhD from the Sorbonne. It is in France where she earned a deeper understanding of the arts. When she returned, she found a job teaching French at Goucher College in Baltimore. Her career took a shift thanks to a summer course at Harvard, which was intended to introduce museum studies to teachers. Her first curatorial position was at the Cincinnati Museum of Art. From there she moved back to California and took on the role of director of the San Francisco Museum of Art (which is currently called San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). In her role she was considered very progressive in engaging her community: she offered educational activities, kept the museum open until ten in the evening, presented up to 100 exhibitions a year, supporting local artists and artists of color. Morley gave unprecedented attention to women in the program, with dozens of solo shows to female artists such as Ruth Armer, Julia Codesido, Aline Liebman, Henrietta Shore, and Susi Singer. She then continued to serve as the first head of the Museum Division of UNESCO, helped to organize the International Council of Museums and founded the publication “Museum.” When she was sixty years old, she was offered to become the director of the National Museum of New Delhi. After six years in her role, she stayed in India until her death in 1985. Read more...

Charlotte Amanda Blake, nicknamed Lotte, was born in Philadelphia. In her childhood the family moved often following missionary work, living in Maine, California, and Chile. At age 20, she graduated from Elmira College in New York. The following year she married and worked as a nurse. After giving birth to her third child, she left to attend the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. When she graduated, Blake Brown returned to her family in the Bay Area. In 1875, at the age of 30, she co-founded together with Dr. Sara E. Brown and Dr. Martha E. Bucknell, the Pacific Dispensary for Women and Children in San Francisco. It was a unique institution – employing strictly all-female staff and serving only women and children patients. Five years after its incorporation, the dispensary opened West Coast’s first Training School for Nurses. It later became San Francisco’s Children’s Hospital. In addition to serving as a physician and surgeon, she wrote eighteen articles for scientific journals. Her famous paper “The Health of Our Girls” (1896) proved the link between lifestyle and poor health with teenage girls. Blake Brown was also an innovator – inventing a milk sterilizing device and establishing a registry bank of data on cancer patients. Read more...