Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander

Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander was the first African-American to receive a doctorate in economics in the United States (1921), and the first woman to receive a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

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Thérèse de Dillmont

In 1884 needleworker Thérèse de Dillmont left the embroidery school that she had started with her sister Franziska and moved to France, where she wrote her Encyclopedia of Needlework (1886) The book, which has since been translated into 17 languages, pulled together thousands of textile designs from many countries including Egypt, Bulgaria, Turkey and China. She later owned several shops in European capitals and was considered “one of the most important pioneers in the international and multicultural enterprise of hobby needlework in the late nineteenth century”.

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Teréz Karacs

Teréz Karacs was a writer, educator, memoirist and women’s rights activist. She was a leader of Hungary’s early feminist movement, as well as the general social reform movement, and a famous literary writer of contemporary Hungary. A pioneer of women’s education, she founded the Zrínyi Ilona Grammar School in the northeastern Hungary.

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Zelia N. Breaux

Zelia N. Breaux was an American music teacher and musician who played the trumpet, violin and piano. She organized the first music department at Oklahoma’s Langston University, as well as the school’s first orchestra. As the Supervisor of Music for segregated African-American schools in Oklahoma City, Breaux organized bands, choral groups and orchestras, establishing a music teacher in each of the district’s schools. She had a significant influence on many musicians including Charlie Christian and Jimmy Rushing, as well as novelist Ralph Ellison. Breaux was the first woman president of the Oklahoma Association of Negro Teachers and was posthumously inducted into the Oklahoma YWCA Hall of Fame, Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma Bandmasters Association Hall of Fame.

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Kartini

Kartini was an Indonesian national hero, a pioneer in the area of education for girls and women’s rights for Indonesians. Her birthday is celebrated as Kartini Day in Indonesia.
Born into an aristocratic Javanese family in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), she attended a Dutch-language primary school. She aspired to further education but there was no opportunity available to girls in Javanese society.
Kartini wrote letters about her ideas and feelings, and they were published in a Dutch magazine and later as Out of Darkness to Light, Women’s Life in the Village, and Letters of a Javanese Princess. Although she died at only 25, her advocacy for the education of girls was continued by her sisters. Kartini Schools in Bogor, Jakarta, and Malang were named for her and a fund established in her name to support the education of girls.

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Astrid Gøssel

Astrid Gøssel was a music educator who worked for many years as a movement educator. Based on her work with children’s sensory-motor and rhythmic-musical development, she developed a pedagogical method she called “the guided and motivated movement game”.
Her practice was based on a holistic view of a “unity between learning, understanding and creative activity”, and between a child’s motor, rhythmic and other musical development. Studying young children’s spontaneous play, Gøssel focused on the importance of play for the young child’s physical and mental development and emphasized that limiting opportunities for play also limits development. She was also inspired by jazz music, its rhythmic expression and improvisation, and studied different forms of movement across various cultures.

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Minnie Fisher Cunningham

Born: March 19 1882, United States Died: 9 December 1964 Country most active: United States Also known as: NA Minnie Fisher Cunningham was an American suffrage activist, who was the […]

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Amabel Anderson Arnold

Amabel Anderson Arnold LL.M. was an American lawyer and law professor who received degrees from both Benton College of Law and City College of Law and Finance within a five-day period. On July 15, 1912, Anderson and her fellow St. Louis women attorneys organized the Woman’s State Bar Association of Missouri, the first association of women lawyers in the world. Caroline G. Thummel was the President. Prior to her law career, in 1907 she opened and managed for 6 years the Arnold Preparatory School for men and women whose early education had been neglected. Anderson and her assistants tutored them privately and placed them in nearly every department of every college and university in St. Louis and in other cities. Anderson built for herself a lasting name as a competent and modern teacher. While operating the school, Anderson also accepted a position as instructor of Latin in the Dental Department of the Saint Louis University in 1908, the only woman in the faculty. She was also a professor of medical botany at the American Medical College – again, the only woman instructor. Law and teaching came together in September 1913, when Anderson was elected director of the Woman’s Department at the University of Chicago Law School, the first woman to hold such an office in the United States. In 1914 Anderson was appointed to the regular faculty of the City College of Law and Finance as lecturer and instructor in the chair of International Law – once again, the only woman to hold such a position in St. Louis.
Anderson was also an advocate of the Equal Rights Amendment and women’s suffrage; she was a charter member of the Equal Suffrage League (St. Louis), and sent out the first invitations to business women, asking them to meet to consider the organization of a league to further suffrage.

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Themistoclea

Themistoclea was a priestess at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi; the priestesses were mentors and tutors to many ancient Greek philosophers.
Themistoclea was Pythagoras’ teacher, teaching him moral doctrines, according to Diogenes Laërtius’s 3rd-century biography of Pythagoras in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers.
Porphyry (233–305 CE) calls her Aristoclea (Aristokleia), although he is presumed to be talking about the same person. He states “(Pythagoras) taught much else, which he claimed to have learned from Aristoclea at Delphi.”

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