This is an ongoing digital collage project focusing on Women in history. I started this project during Women's History Month 2021 to highlight and help educate myself and others on significant female figures that have had a great impact on our world. 

Irena Sendlerowa

The start to this series is Irena Sendlerowa from my parents native land of Poland. She was a humanitarian, social worker, and nurse who served in the Polish Underground Resistance during World War Two in German occupied Warsaw. Over the course of the war she saved over 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto. She wrote the name of every child she and her network saved on paper and hid these names in glass jars that would be buried in her backyard. This was done in the hope that someday she would be able to reunite these children with their families. She was imprisoned by the Gestapo and had both her legs broken by her interrogators and was almost forgotten about. However, this inspiring woman has received many accolades over the years and was up for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Noor inayat khan

The Indian Princess who spied for the British during WWII.
Khan was a wartime British secret agent of Indian descent who was the first female radio operator sent into Nazi-occupied France by the Special Operations Executive (SOE). For a time she was the only link between England and the French resistance. She was arrested and eventually executed by the Gestapo but we must not forget the bravery of this incredible woman.

Octavia butler

Science Fiction Author, Observer and Ponderer
"Octavia Butler walked a singular path. A writer from her poverty-stricken childhood to her death in 2006 at the age of 58, she committed her life to turning speculative fiction into a home for Black expression. In her hands, the genre felt capacious and infinite. “I wrote myself in,” she told The New York Times in 2000.

Her ink was permanent. Weathering rejections, dead-end jobs and her own persistent doubts, Butler rose to international prominence. She became the first science fiction author to be granted a MacArthur fellowship, and the first Black woman to win Hugo and Nebula awards. Today her influence spans literature, genres and media.

...Her recurring character archetype is the survivor, a figure of endurance, resourcefulness and compromise." –Stephen Kearse, New York Times

Octavia's novel Kindred has been adapted as a graphic novel and is fantastic! Please look her and her work up. 

Rigoberta menchu

"We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism."
–Rigoberta Menchú​
Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a K'iche' Guatemalan human rights activist, feminist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the rights of Guatemala's Indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War, and to promoting Indigenous rights internationally.

She joined the radical 31st of January Popular Front, in which her contribution chiefly consisted of educating the Indian peasant population in resistance to massive military oppression. In 1981, Rigoberta Menchú had to go into hiding in Guatemala, and then flee to Mexico. 

Grace lee boggs

Asian American Labor Organizer, writer, social activist, philosopher and feminist​
"Grace Lee Boggs — an Asian American intersectional feminist — died at the age of 100 on October 5, 2015, in Detroit, where she spent much of her life working as an activist. Boggs’s identity as a first-generation Asian American woman made her uniquely aware of the different yet connected struggles her community faced. Her early exposure to class inequalities inspired her fight for workers’ rights, specifically in relation to capitalism and racism. Her legacy as a community organizer is still apparent in various labor efforts today."
–Sara Li, Teen Vouge

Maria tallchief

The Osage Nation woman who took Ballet by Storm​.
As the country’s first prima ballerina, Maria Tallchief put American ballet on the map. She became the first American to dance with the Paris Opera Ballet, played an integral role in making the New York City Ballet world-renowned, and broke barriers for Native American women.

Joshephine baker

World renowned dancer, singer,
​French resistance spy, and civil rights activist​.
Josephine Baker was an American-born French dancer and singer who became a major icon of the roaring twenties. Baker became famous for her theatrical performances, but she devoted her life to the idea that people of all nationalities can live peacefully together. She fought against fascism in Europe during World War II by using her celebrity status to capture information for the French Resistance. Oh, did I mention she also opened for Martin Luther King right before he gave his "I have a dream" speech?
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Krystyna skarbek

AKA Christine Granville, Polish-British intelligence agent, Churchill's favorite spy, flaming Polish patriot, expert skier
With a price on her head in Europe she joined the SOE in Cairo becoming an expert in the dark arts of the SOE agent. In July 1944, she parachuted into France to join the resistance in the Vercors region as lieutenant to Francis Cammaerts – one of Britain’s top agents. Amongst her many adventures she took the surrender of a German garrison persuading the polish conscripts there to join her; she tamed a man-hunting German soldier’s Alsatian dog which also switched sides under her spell and wouldn’t leave her side; perhaps most famously she marched into the Gestapo headquarters alone, despite the enormous bounty on her head and demanded the release of Francis Cammaerts and Xan Fielding who had been captured and were due to be executed that afternoon. With a mix of charm, money, threats she successfully persuaded the Gestapo chief to release them – whatever the odds she got the job done.

Also it is rumored that she inspired Ian Fleming's Vesper Lynd Bond Girl but lets face it....she's more of a real life James Bond. 
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ada blackjack

The Queen of Arctic Expeditions
Ada Blackjack was an Iñupiat woman who lived for two years as a castaway on the uninhabited Wrangel Island, north of Siberia. "When Ada Blackjack set sail in 1921 for a remote speck of land north of Siberia, the petite Inupiat woman was an unlikely Arctic heroine. In her role as the seamstress for an expedition comprised of four men and a female cat named Vic, Blackjack was assured that during her one-year contract sewing survival gear on Wrangel Island, she would be well fed and cared for without needing to participate in the grueling day-to-day work of Arctic survival.

But by the time a rescue ship crested the horizon nearly two years later, Blackjack, who would come to be known as “The Female Robinson Crusoe,” was the only member of the party still alive—that is, apart from Vic. The shy tailor with the crippling fear of polar bears had taught herself to shoot and trap to stave off the constant threat of starvation, and when she strode out to meet her rescuers in a resplendent reindeer parka she had stitched herself, her gaunt face held a triumphant smile." –Tessa Hulls (Atlas Obscura)

Ada's story has been captured in the movie Ada Blackjack Rising and can be found here . 
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Princess Ka’iulani

Born Victoria Ka’iulani on October 16, 1875, the Crown Princess and heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Hawaii was known throughout the world for her intelligence and determination to preserve the Hawaiian monarchy. Princess Ka’iulani’s life, spirit, and legacy are a testament to her love of the Hawaiian people in their hour of need.

With her kingdom on the line, Princess Ka‘iulani, entered the White House in Washington, D.C., on a delicate diplomatic mission. She had just sailed from Great Britain, where she had been riding her surfboard in the waves at Brighton Beach, on England’s southern coast.

Unfortunately, Ka’iulani never got to see herself become Queen as Hawaii's monarchy was overthrown in 1893 by the United States. It was an irony compounded by the fact that America had only a century before thrown off the bonds of a foreign power and demanded self-rule.

On the flip side there is a strong case to be made that surfing was saved from extinction by this brave, bold woman. The Hawaiian monarchy had surfed with passion until the late 1800s, when wave riding became almost extinct as a sport. The evangelical missionaries’ religious dogma had become the preeminent cultural power in the land—and for the most part they had succeeded in removing surfing from the everyday lives of the Hawaiian people. But Princess Ka‘iulani— second in the line of succession for the Hawaiian Crown—was a notable exception. Disregarding the missionaries’ efforts to eradicate all wave-riding activities, she continued to surf daily in full defiance of the western restrictions imposed on the Hawaiian culture. “She was an expert surfrider,” recalled early 20th-century surfrider Knute Cottrell, one of the founders of the Hui Nalu surf club at Waikiki in 1908. Riding a “long olo board made of ‘wili wili’ hardwood, Ka‘iulani was the last of the traditional native surfers at Waikiki.”
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–Women on Waves: A Cultural History of Surfing From Ancient Goddesses and Hawaiian Queens to Malibu Movie Stars and Millennial Champions by Jim Kempton