Activism Archives - Page 143 of 158

Rangitaamo Tiahuia Taiuru

Rangitaamo Tiahuia Taiuru was born at Waimoho, near Rangiriri in the Waikato district, on 24 July 1901. Her mother, Paretauhanga Rīwhero, was of Ngāti Hine of Waikato; her father, Moroati Taiuru of Rata in the Rangitīkei district, was connected to both Ngāti Tūwharetoa and Ngāti Kahungunu through his hapū Ngāti Hauiti, Ngāti Haukaha, Ngāti Hikairo and Ngāti Whiti-Tama (the inter-married hapū Ngāti Tamakōpiri and Ngāti Whitikaupeka). Her parents had lost all their earlier infants. When Paretauhanga conceived again, they travelled to Waikato to consult Mahuta, the Māori King. He told them that Paretauhanga was the victim of ill will because she had been a puhi (a young woman of rank whose marriage was important to her people), and Moroati had taken her away from her home. He told them to stay in Waikato, and when the child was born, if it was a girl it was to be called Taamorangi Tiahuia Taiuru Te Rango. After her birth, her first name was altered to Rangitaamo. She and her parents stayed in Waikato long enough for Rangitaamo to attend school at Rangiriri, but after a smallpox epidemic the family returned to Rata. Seven other children were born to the family.
Rangitaamo grew up at Rata on her father’s farm. When not at school she worked with him, milking cows and doing farm work in preference to domestic chores with her mother. She also travelled with her paternal grandmother, Te Maari Maatuahu, visiting relatives and attending Native Land Court sittings. She met Tenga-i-te-rangi Takarangi while attending shows in Taihape when she was about 17. He was of the well-known Takarangi Metekīngi family of Te Āti Haunui-a-Pāpārangi of Wanganui, and was also of Ngāti Whiti-Tama of Ngāti Tūwharetoa. Rangitaamo’s father’s people were their close kin and originally came from the same area. Rangitaamo’s and Tenga’s families had arranged a marriage between them; they were to have one son and one daughter, who died aged two. At that time (1932) Rangitaamo adopted another daughter, and she and Tenga formalised their marriage. Their son was killed during the Second World War.
Tenga Takarangi had attended Wanganui Collegiate School, and worked as a farm cadet and farm labourer. He was a leading figure at Pūtiki marae, and Rangitaamo also worked there. At first this was behind the scenes in the kitchen and dining room, but later she learnt marae customs and was invited to welcome visitors formally. One of her first tasks was to welcome soldiers returning from the First World War. She was a foundation member of the Pūtiki Māori Club, and later was to act as tutor in waiata, karanga and whaikōrero (speech-making). She took part in tukutuku projects, making woven panels as wall decorations in meeting houses at Kai Iwi marae, Koriniti marae, the Māori church at Pūtiki, St John’s Cathedral, Napier, and Hato Pāora College, Feilding.
In 1942 Tenga joined the Native Department. Rangitaamo’s own qualities of leadership, her increasingly prominent position at Pūtiki and the range of her husband’s interests and areas of influence made her the logical choice for the Wanganui district when welfare officers were being appointed to the new Māori Welfare Division of the Native Department. She commenced her new responsibilities in May 1947. Her area extended from Pūtiki upriver to Taumarunui, and on almost to Te Kūiti, and included Taupō, part of Taranaki and the Turakina district south of Wanganui. Her main concerns were arranging housing and health care for impoverished Māori, and ensuring the best possible education for their children. Much of her time went to setting up and fostering branches of the Women’s Health League: she had 47 branches in her area, of which five were affiliated to the Rotorua Central Committee. She tried to reduce the number to form larger branches which would function more efficiently, but was thwarted by each small community wanting to work within its own branch.
In 1948 Rangitaamo was sent to the Women’s Health League conference to promote the idea among Te Arawa and Ngāti Tūwharetoa of a Māori welfare league, able to deal directly with the different government departments responsible for housing, health, education and employment. Rangitaamo presented these ideas to her Ngāti Tūwharetoa kin in Māori, hoping to break their allegiance to the Rotorua Committee. In 1951 she travelled her district, discreetly persuading the Women’s Health League branches to convert to branches of the newly formed Māori Women’s Welfare League. Just before the MWWL’s first dominion conference, Rangitaamo hosted a crucial meeting at Pūtiki in 1951 which helped to turn the tide towards it. After the league was established, Rangitaamo was ultimately responsible for its administration in her zone. Throughout the early 1950s she forwarded to the Department of Māori Affairs applications to form new branches. This meant attending and assisting at most of their meetings. She also attended all dominion conferences; with Ruth Wright and Ema Ōtene her special responsibility was to take care of official visitors.
Rangitaamo continued in her work as a welfare officer, attending meetings of the MWWL and Pūtiki’s many other community organisations for 14 years, dealing with the sick, promoting healthy child-rearing practices among mothers, caring for the homeless and disadvantaged, finding work for the unemployed, and promoting spiritual welfare through her teaching of all aspects of Māori culture. She retired officially in 1962; Tenga-i-te-rangi died the same year. Rangitaamo coped with the massive tangihanga, and later with a ceremony at Pūtiki to mark the unveiling of his memorial stone.
Neither her husband’s death nor her own retirement lessened Rangitaamo’s activity. In August 1964 she was one of a group of four Māori women who flew to Tonga to attend the 10th annual conference of the Pan-Pacific and South-East Asia Women’s Association, which was built around the theme of the role of women in preserving cultural heritage. With Te Arahori Pōtaka, also of Wanganui, Rangitaamo helped to lead the New Zealand delegation in waiata, poi dances and haka during the associated concert. For Rangitaamo, the highlight of the conference was meeting Queen Salote; they became firm friends.
Rangitaamo continued her tutoring of Māori language, arts and crafts and her role as elder at Pūtiki. In 1982 she was asked to instruct Prince Edward, then a house tutor at Wanganui Collegiate School, in Māori custom. She received the Wanganui Community Award in 1984. That year Sir Kīngi Īhaka of the Council for Māori and South Pacific Arts presented her with an award of $700 for her work in promoting Māori arts and culture, and for her compositions of waiata. She was awarded the Queen’s Service Medal in 1986 for community service. Rangitaamo Takarangi died at Wanganui Hospital, aged 90, on 5 June 1992. She was survived by a daughter and numerous descendants. After a tangihanga on Pūtiki marae, she was buried at Pūtiki cemetery.

Te Pikinga

Ngāti Apa woman of mana

Te Rohu

Ngāti Tūwharetoa woman of mana

Whina Cooper

Te Rarawa woman of mana, teacher, storekeeper, community leader

Dolores Huerta

Co-founder of the United Farm Workers Association, Dolores Clara Fernandez Huerta is one of the most influential labor activists of the 20th century and a leader of the Chicano civil rights movement.
Born on April 10, 1930 in Dawson, New Mexico, Huerta was the second of three children of Alicia and Juan Fernandez, a farm worker and miner who became a state legislator in 1938. Her parents divorced when Huerta was three years old, and her mother moved to Stockton, California with her children. Huerta’s grandfather helped raise Huerta and her two brothers while her mother juggled jobs as a waitress and cannery worker until she could buy a small hotel and restaurant. Alicia’s community activism and compassionate treatment of workers greatly influenced her daughter.
Discrimination also helped shape Huerta. A schoolteacher, prejudiced against Hispanics, accused Huerta of cheating because her papers were too well-written. In 1945 at the end of World War II, white men brutally beat her brother for wearing a Zoot-Suit, a popular Latino fashion.
Huerta received an associate teaching degree from the University of the Pacific’s Delta College. She married Ralph Head while a student and had two daughters, though the couple soon divorced. She subsequently married fellow activist Ventura Huerta with whom she had five children, though that marriage also did not last. Huerta briefly taught school in the 1950s, but seeing so many hungry farm children coming to school, she thought she could do more to help them by organizing farmers and farm workers.
In 1955 Huerta began her career as an activist when she co-founded the Stockton chapter of the Community Service Organization (CSO), which led voter registration drives and fought for economic improvements for Hispanics. She also founded the Agricultural Workers Association. Through a CSO associate, Huerta met activist César Chávez, with whom she shared an interest in organizing farm workers. In 1962, Huerta and Chávez founded the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), the predecessor of the United Farm Workers’ Union (UFW), which formed three year later. Huerta served as UFW vice president until 1999.
Despite ethnic and gender bias, Huerta helped organize the 1965 Delano strike of 5,000 grape workers and was the lead negotiator in the workers’ contract that followed. Throughout her work with the UFW, Huerta organized workers, negotiated contracts, advocated for safer working conditions including the elimination of harmful pesticides. She also fought for unemployment and healthcare benefits for agricultural workers. Huerta was the driving force behind the nationwide table grape boycotts in the late 1960s that led to a successful union contract by 1970.
In 1973, Huerta led another consumer boycott of grapes that resulted in the ground-breaking California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which allowed farm workers to form unions and bargain for better wages and conditions. Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, Huerta worked as a lobbyist to improve workers’ legislative representation. During the 1990s and 2000s, she worked to elect more Latinos and women to political office and has championed women’s issues.
The recipient of many honors, Huerta received the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. As of 2015, she was a board member of the Feminist Majority Foundation, the Secretary-Treasurer Emeritus of the United Farm Workers of America, and the President of the Dolores Huerta Foundation.

Mercedes Laura Aguiar

Mercedes Laura Aguiar was a writer, teacher and feminist from the Dominican Republic. As a journalist and poet, she wrote works that promoted gender equality and Dominican sovereignty, in opposition to the US occupation. She fought for women’s right to vote, women’s right to education, and employment protections for women and children.

Manuela Sáenz

Doña Manuela Sáenz de Vergara y Aizpuru was an Ecuadorian revolutionary who supported the cause by collecting information, distributing leaflets, and protesting for women’s rights, and received the Order of the Sun (“Caballeresa del Sol” or ‘Dame of the Sun’) for her work.
Manuela was born in Quito, the illegitimate child of Ecuadorian Maria Joaquina Aizpuru fand the married Spanish nobleman Simón Sáenz de Vergara y Yedra (or Sáenz y Verega). Maria’s family abandoned the mother and child and young Manuelita was sent to school at the Convent of Santa Catalina where she learned to read and write. She had to leave the convent at age 17, when she was discovered to have been seduced by Army Officer Fausto D’Elhuyar.
Sáenz lived with her father for several years, until 1817 when he arranged for her marriage to a wealthy English merchant twice her age, James Thorne. The couple moved to Lima, Peru, in 1819. There, she lived as an aristocrat and hosted social gatherings in her home where guests included political leaders and military officers. These guests shared military secrets about the ongoing revolution, and when Simón Bolívar took part in the successful liberation of New Granada in 1819, Sáenz was radicalized and played an active role in the conspiracy against the viceroy of Perú in 1820.
In 1822, Sáenz left her husband and traveled to Quito, where she met Simón Bolívar and eventually became romantically involved with him, exchanging love letters, and visiting him while he moved from one country to another. Bolivar referred to her as la amable loca, the dear madwoman.
Sáenz supported the revolutionary cause by collecting information, distributing leaflets, and protesting for women’s rights. As one of the most prominent female figures of the wars for independence, Manuela received the Order of the Sun (“Caballeresa del Sol” or ‘Dame of the Sun’). In public she often wore a colonel’s uniform. In 1825 and 1826, she lived with Bolívar near Lima, but as the war continued, Bolívar was forced to leave, and Sáenz later followed him to Bogotá.
On 25 September 1828, mutinous officers tried to assassinate Bolívar. Woken by the sound of fighting, Bolivar wanted to investigate but Sáenz persuaded him to leave through a window, while she confronted the intruders. She convinced them that Bolivar was somewhere in the building and proceeded to lead them to different rooms, pretending to lose her way and even stopping to attend one of the wounded. Eventually the would-be assassins lost patience and beat her before departing. Bolivar to later called her “Libertadora del Libertador” (liberator of the liberator).
Bolívar left Bogotá in 1830 and died in Santa Marta from tuberculosis. He had made no provision for Sáenz. Francisco de Paula Santander, who returned to power after Bolívar’s death, exiled Sáenz. She went to Jamaica and remained politically active until the mid-1840s before becoming disillusioned.
When she tried to return to Ecuador in 1835, President Vicente Rocafuerte revoked her passport. She went to live in the small coastal town of Paita in northern Peru. She became a destitute outcast, and for the next 25 years, Sáenz sold tobacco and translated letters for North American whale hunters who wrote to their lovers in Latin America.
In 1847, her estranged husband was murdered and she was denied her 8,000 pesos inheritance. Disabled after the stairs in her home collapsed, Sáenz died in Paita, on 23 November 1856, during a diphtheria epidemic. Her body was buried in a communal, mass grave and her belongings were burned.
On his deathbed, Bolívar had asked his aide-de-camp, General Daniel F. O’Leary to burn the remaining, extensive archive of his writings, letters, and speeches. O’Leary disobeyed the order and his writings survived, providing historians with a vast wealth of information about Bolívar’s liberal philosophy and thought, as well as details of his personal life, including his relationship with Sáenz. Shortly before her own death, Sáenz added to this collection by giving O’Leary her own letters from Bolívar.
On 5 July 2010, Sáenz was given a full state burial in Venezuela. Because she had been buried in a mass grave, no official remains existed; instead, “symbolic remains”, composed of some soil from the mass grave into which she was buried during the epidemic, were transported through Peru, Ecuador and Colombia to Venezuela. This was laid in the National Pantheon of Venezuela where the remains of Bolívar are also memorialized.
After the revolution, Sáenz effectively faded from literature. Between 1860 and 1940 only three Ecuadorian writers mentioned her and her participation within the revolution, and largely portrayed her as either exclusively the lover of Simón Bolívar or as incapable and wrongfully participating within the political sphere. These portrayals also assured her femininity as a mainstay of her characterization. However, there was significant shift in how she was viewed and characterized in the 1940s. Literature like Papeles De Manuela Saenz (1945), a compilation of documents around the life of Bolívar, effectively disproved popular stereotypes about Sáenz. Ideas about her being sexually deviant, hyper feminine and incapable were replaced by more favorable portrayals as the 20th century progressed. Shifts in her portrayals were consistent with ideological changes within Latin America, like the increase of feminism of the 1980s and nationalism of the 1960s – 1970s. Portrayals within the novel The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez and Alfonso Rumazo’s nonfictional Manuela Saenz La Libertadora del Libertador added to her humanization within popular culture and helped politicize her image. Sáenz became increasingly popular with radical Latin American feminist groups and her image was commonly used as a rallying point for Indo-Latina causes of the 1980s. The image of Sáenz riding horseback in men’s clothing, popularized by her portrayal in The General in His Labyrinth, was re-enacted by female demonstrators in Ecuador in 1998.
On 25 May 2007 the Ecuadorian government symbolically granted Sáenz the rank of General.
The Museo Manuela Sáenz is a museum in Old Town, Quito, that contains personal effects from both Sáenz and Bolívar to “[safeguard] the memories of Manuela Saenz, Quito’s illustrious daughter”.

Autherine Juanita Lucy Foster

As she walked to school each day, Autherine Lucy was always in danger. She was the first African American student to attend the University of Alabama, and many white people did not want her to attend. On her third day of school, she had to lock herself in a classroom after an angry group of white students chased her and threw rotten eggs. However, thirty-two years later, Lucy was honored by the same college that tried to keep her from attending.

Eleanor Roosevelt

A shy, insecure child, Eleanor Roosevelt would grow up to become one of the most important and beloved First Ladies, authors, reformers, and female leaders of the 20th century.

Lucretia Coffin Mott

Lucretia Coffin Mott was an early feminist activist and strong advocate for ending slavery. A powerful orator, she dedicated her life to speaking out against racial and gender injustice.