History is filled with women doing all kinds of kickass stuff.
Watch these girls... they're going places!
Need a dose of inspiration? Here you go.
Some of my entertainment recommendations with awesome female characters and stars.
Some of the awesome items made by kickass women!
Chainmail Bikini is an anthology of comics by and about female gamers! 40 cartoonists have contributed 200+ pages of all new stories about the games they're passionate about—from video games to table-top role-playing to collectible card games. Help us pay for the printing costs and reward the artists by pre-ordering the book!
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| Potential $100 reward: character image by Kori Michele Handwerker |
The comics in Chainmail Bikini explore the real-life impact of entering a fantasy world, how games can connect us with each other and teach us about ourselves. Alliances are forged, dice get rolled, and dragons get slain! We believe that gaming should be open to all, regardless of gender. Chainmail Bikini shows that while women are not always the target market for gaming, they are a vital and thoroughly engaged part of it, and are eager to express their personal take as players, makers, and critics of games.
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| Potential $100 reward: character image by Molly Ostertag |
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| Norman Garstin, In A Cottage By The Sea, 1887 |
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| Photo: Kate Warren |
That’s exactly what today’s women fighters are doing: staying light on their feet, waiting for the perfect opening. They’re struggling to maintain their balance and their sanity. Nelson has found hers in God, and she keeps training, keeps delivering pancakes, with the faith that her dedication will give way to an answer. If she could eat title belts, Nelson wouldn’t have a care in the world. But undefeated or not, there’s no clear strategy for turning her athletic success into financial success just yet.
Meanwhile, Douglas struggles to keep her anger from controlling her. She once thought boxing could help her overcome a past filled with abuse and foster homes, but after she debuted as a pro, a bad experience with a promoter left her jaded. “They told me, ‘You need to change the way you dress, you need to put on makeup, do this, do that,’” she says. “They were trying to change everything about me, and I wasn’t having it.” The promoter also dragged her out to nightclubs, where they’d hang around with wealthy men who frequently propositioned Douglas, implying that they’d take sex in exchange for financial support. “It really used to bother me. I used to cry. Now I’m like, ‘How ’bout I break your jaw?’”
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| Courtney Force greeting her fans. Photo: NHRA |
Anecdotally, though, anyone can clearly see a difference in the NHRA pits and grandstands.
"The women are out there," [Gary] Darcy said. "The young girls are out there. And when you see somebody like a Courtney Force, a Leah Pritchett, both boys and girls are paying attention, but certainly you see the young girls and the moms that are there trying to get a glimpse. Because it does become very inspirational, and they see somebody doing what they could maybe do one day.
"That's the great thing about our sport. Those barriers don't exist."
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| Jane Goodall on Lake Tanganyika. Photo: Michael Christopher Brown/Magnum |
But if her interactions with government officials from the United States, France, Tanzania and Burundi, as well as executives from Silicon Valley, are any indication, the skill sets are not so different: patience, purpose, perception. It took her only a few months of observing chimps before Goodall noticed that some of their behaviors were remarkably similar to those of humans. Now, perhaps, it has come full circle: Her understanding of people has been informed by her time spent with chimps, giving her an intuitive power of persuasion that even she does not seem to consciously grasp.
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| Photo: Disney |
The actual Cinderella tale, while a nebulous thing that can be hard to pin down with precision, is more than that. There's very little that's common to every variant of the story, but in general, you have a mistreated young woman, forced to do menial work, either cast out or unloved by her family. She has an opportunity to marry well and escape her situation, but she gets that chance only after being mistaken for a higher-status person, so she has to get the man who may marry her to recognize her in her low-status form, which often happens either via a shoe that fits or some kind of food that she prepares.
For me is was very valuable. It gave me a broader view about professional compromises and personal choices. Moreover, a novel-length format provides something unique: it gives the readers (and the writer) an opportunity to experience the situations emotionally. One can then get a richer impression of what is going on and what kinds of pressures a woman-scientist feels, and what drives those around her. It is such understanding, rather than any practical advice, that may help women in science.Oh yes! You absolutely have to watch this conversation between Tavi Gevinson, founder and editor in chief of Rookie Magazine, and Anna Holmes, founder of Jezebel.
We believe that instead of asking kids what they want to be when they grow up, we should be asking them, "What kind of change do you want to create in the world, and how can you start achieving that dream today?"
Science communication is a big part of my life as in my opinion, there's absolutely no point doing science if no-one hears about it and can use it.So true!
I loved being a Girl Scout and was disappointed when the troop was disbanded the next year when my friend's mom couldn't do it anymore, and no one else's parent could take it over. I still go out of my way to support local girl scouts by buying cookies (duh!) and also taking part in other events during the year. (The local troop has a post-Christmas tree pick-up service that's pretty handy!)
One such devoted Girl Scout leader was Josephine Groves Holloway. In 1923, Josephine, the daughter of a Methodist minister and a recent graduate from Fisk University with a degree in sociology, was working as a social worker for the Bethlehem Center in Nashville, Tennessee, a Methodist-run family resource center serving the black community.
Sadly for her scouts, she was forced to retire from her work with the Bethlehem Center the next year, when she married Guerney Holloway, the "boys' worker" and her former classmate. After she left, the troop was neglected and eventually folded.
Josephine's efforts, always a benefit to her community, were starting to pay off on a larger scale. The local council began to truly appreciate her work, and make changes to how they conducted their business. By 1946, when the Nashville council hosted the regional gathering of Girl Scouts, the event was fully integrated, even though the larger, non-scouting community was not. Black scouts and their leaders were invited to join, but had to seek accommodations in the homes of local citizens. Fortunately, Josephine's outreach in her community had created significant goodwill, and they had no problem finding rooms for everyone. The hotels involved would not serve black guests, so all future events were held in the local YWCA or other halls that were open to everyone.
I mean, I've been a JoCo fan for what feels like forever. I was trying to remember whether I went to my first JoCo concert before or after my first PAX. I dunno. The two are twisted up together in my memory.
Senda was born in 1868, in Vilna, Lithuania. Her parents moved to the United States when she was seven. She was a frail child, often sick, and she spent much of her childhood at home. She did not encounter many opportunities for physical activity until she was already an adult. Those she did, she probably lacked the requisite muscle tone and ability to pursue. It wasn't until she was forced to leave off her studies at the Boston Conservatory for Music for the second time due to her health that she sought help.
It was difficult, to say the least. Senda hated it. Five minutes of light exercise left her sore and worn out. She wanted to quit. But she stuck with it, and within three months, she started to see improvements. By the end of the year, she could complete the recommended two hours of exercise every day, and her health had improved dramatically. She enrolled for a second year, where she learned anatomy, physiology, and hygiene, with the intention of becoming a gymnastics teacher. Her improvement was so striking, and her conversion to the benefits of regular exercise so remarkable, she was sent to Andover, Massachusetts, to teach the Swedish system at the elementary school twice a week. This was a quite fortuitous event. While there, she learned of an opening at Smith College for a temporary gymnastic instructor, with the assumption that it would just last one year.
At the end of her first year at Smith, she was asked to return for a second year, and her position had been made permanent. After only one year, in what was supposed to have been a temporary gig, she had managed to introduce team sports to young women, and spark a nation-wide trend. By 1899, she'd codified her rules for women's basket ball, and in 1901, her rules were published by the Spalding Athletic Library's Basket Ball for Women. She remained the editor for each subsequent edition until the 1916/17 issue. Her rules for women's basketball remained practically unchanged until the mid-1960s.
Emboldened by the success of basket ball, she began to introduce other sports to the students of Smith College. After a trip to Sweden in 1893, she began a folk dancing program. And in 1901, she worked with Lady Constance Applebee (another amazing woman to research!) of England to establish a field hockey program. She also introduced fencing and another new team sport, volleyball, to her students.
History is full of strong women and now you can show them off. These little peg women can be used as decoration to grace your desk or living space as a great conversation set or they can be used as a toy to teach your child or children about powerful and strong women in history. This is the American history edition of these peg people and includes Rosie the Riveter, Rosa Parks, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Amelia Earhart on the larger 3.5 inch peg dolls.She also has a set of Little Women peg people, and will happily make any other amazing women you might wish to have.
If you love Nina Simone then you will truly appreciate these fan earrings. Nina was beautiful, strong, and bold in character and so are these earrings. They glisten and shine and catch light with your movement. People will ask you if that is Nina Simone on your ears.
"Come, come my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles and see the world is moving." Elizabeth Cady StantonNeed a post card to cheer up your feminist BFFs? How about this elegant oversized card featuring a quote by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the artwork of Chandler O’Leary and Jessica Spring of DeadFeminists!
Or, if you are the type of feminist to wear her heroines on her sleeve (or backpack or bookbag), how about a great hand-painted patch featuring the indomitable Ida B. Wells? Artist Deirdre McCorkindale paints and sews and sells her patches in her shop SpidersParlour.
“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” Ida B. WellsIf you'd like, you can make a whole set of patches featuring awesome women from history: Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, or Angela Davis. She can also do custom patches of your favorites, if you don't see them in her shop.
Who was Janet Vaughan, and what did she do? It turns out, she did quite a bit to improve our medical care, in that she almost single-handedly transformed how we do blood transfusions. Rose George has written a wonderfully detailed account of the amazing life of this remarkable woman.Polly Toynbee asked her in 1984 how she would like to be remembered. And this woman who was instrumental in setting up mass blood donation and transfusion; who dared to stick a large needle into the breastbone of a small burned girl; who did science in hell; who never stopped encouraging science in all ways, and women to do more of it, said, “As a scientist. That I have been able to solve, to throw light onto fascinating problems. But as a scientist who had a family. I don’t want to be thought of as a scientist who just sat thinking. It’s important you have a human life.”
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| (photo source: jhencolors2) |
Now, looking up from my clumsy feet, shuffling around the porch in clunky white boots, what painted itself around me was not a scene from a postcard, but a scene from a life, shifting with every breath.
"We can be interested in women and science, and their participation, and how many are here and there," [Stanford science historian Londa Schiebinger] says. "But the big difference is, what knowledge and technologies do you have? What's the outcome? Who are things designed for?"Indeed.
