How Well Do You Know These Famous Feminists?

The term “intersectional feminism” was coined by American law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. This form of feminism takes into account the many different types of women, and seeks to understand the ways that oppression by gender, race, class, sexuality, and immigration can overlap in individuals who identify with two or more minority groups.

In 1864, Lucretia Mott founded Swarthmore College as a co-educational institute of higher learning. Mott was a lifelong Quaker who fought for the abolition of slavery and for women’s equal rights. Swarthmore College, an institution that offered equal education to both women and men, was an extension of her women’s rights activism.

Ida B. Wells helped found the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in 1909. Born into slavery, Wells became a journalist who led anti-lynching campaigns and started her own newspapers to report on racial violence. She was also a women's rights advocate who worked with Susan B. Anthony in the women’s suffrage movement in the mid-19th century.

bell hooks (styled in lowercase) was the pen name of poet, author, and activist Gloria Jean Watkins, who authored more than 30 books and was a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize recipient. Throughout her body of work, hooks explored how feminism has the potential to improve all lives, not just those of women, and looked at the overlapping oppressions of gender, race, and class.

Marsha P. Johnson was launched into the public eye after her involvement in the Stonewall Riots in New York City on June 28, 1969. She dedicated the rest of her life to helping unhoused transgender people and advocating for equal rights for gay and trans women. A waterfront park in Brooklyn was named after her in 2020, and a monument honoring her will be installed in Greenwich Village.

The Bechdel Test was created by queer feminist cartoonist Alison Bechdel, and has become a measure of how fairly women are represented in film. To pass the test, a film must include at least two female characters, they must have names, and they must talk to each other about something other than men. The main goal of the test is to raise awareness, by highlighting how the world of cinema is dominated by the male point of view.

In 2010, Maya Angelou was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. The award honored her lifetime of work as a poet, writer, performer, and activist. Her work explored racial and gender oppression with a prevailing undercurrent of hope.She received more than 30 honorary degrees and dozens of awards and accolades, including a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

In 1963, Gloria Steinem went undercover as a Playboy Bunny in Manhattan’s Playboy Club to expose the exploitation in Hugh Hefner’s circle. The published account, “A Bunny’s Tale,” appeared in “SHOW” magazine and chronicled the grueling working conditions and harassment that the Playboy Bunnies endured. The assignment launched Steinem’s career as a journalist and feminist activist.

When Billie Jean King won the U.S. Open in 1972, she received $15,000 less than the men’s champion. This blatant inequality led her to lobby for equal prize money for male and female athletes, and as a result, the U.S. Open became the first major tournament to offer equal prize money. In 2009, King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her activism.

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo expressed her feminist worldview through painting. In her work, she explored women’s experiences that were often considered taboo, such as miscarriage, menstruation, sexuality, and infertility. In both her art and her life, she defied feminine beauty standards by painting herself wearing masculine clothes and embracing facial hair. She created around 200 paintings during her career.