Ilse (Intrator) Stanley was a German Jew who, working with a handful of people including Nazi Gestapo members of the Gestapo and other Jewish civilians, secured the release of 412 Jewish prisoners from Nazi concentration camps between 1936 and 1938, before the devastating events of Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938).
Olga Tufnell FSA was a British archaeologist who worked on the excavation of the ancient city of Lachish (Tell ed-Duweir) in the 1930s. She had no formal archaeology training, but had worked as a secretary for Flinders Petrie for several years before being given a field assignment. Tufnell joined James Leslie Starkey in the expedition to Lachish in 1929 and remained part of the team for years.
When Starkey was killed in 1938, the team finished the season and then closed the site in 1939. Tufnell volunteered to write up the report of the dig and spent the next 20 years researching and writing up the majority of the excavation report, with the final publication (Lachish IV) in 1957. Her work is considered the “pre-eminent source book for Palestinian archeology”.
After her return to the UK in 1939, her work was almost immediately interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, as Tufnell was recruited to the BBC Arabic radio station due to her association with the Middle East; she was also an air raid warden.
At the end of the war, Tufnell returned to her work on the report, raising controversy when she published findings that the time period between two occupational levels, Level II (before Babylonian conquest by Nebuchadnezzar) and Level III (before Assyrian conquest by Sennacherib) was likely to be in the range of 100 years, rather than a decade, as Starkey had suggested. Although most archaeologists believed Starkey’s interpretation was more likely, subsequent excavations vindicated her opinion in 1973.
In 1951, Tufnell became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, which she called one of her “greatest achievements”. Once the full Lachish report had been published, Tufnell turned her focus to the study of scarabs. Although many scholars dismissed the area of scarabs and seals as “unreliable of chronology”, Olga meticulously recorded their dimensions and styles. She was also an early user of computers for measuring the scarabs, and she was due to present a paper on that use of computers just days after her death in April 1985
Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville was a French writer known for her literary fairy tales and for coining the term when she called her works contes de fées (fairy tales). In 1666, she was married off at age 15 to a man three times her age, the Baron d’Aulnoy. In 1669, the Baron was accused of treason by two men who may have been the 19-year-old baroness’s lovers, and her mother, the Marchioness de Gadagne. The Baron spent three years in the Bastille before he finally convinced the court of his innocence. His two male accusers were executed and the Marchioness de Gadagne fled to England. Though a warrant was served for Madame d’Aulnoy’s arrest, she escaped through a window and hid in a church when officers came to arrest her.
She may have then worked as a spy for France (and possibly spent some time in Holland, Spain, and England) before returning to Paris in 1685 (possibly as repayment for spying). Madame d’Aulnoy hosted salons that were attended by leading aristocrats and princes.
In 1699, her friend Angélique Ticquet was beheaded for having a servant shoot Angélique’s abusive husband. The servant was hanged. Mme d’Aulnoy escaped prosecution despite her alleged involvement and removed herself from the Paris social scene for 20 years.
D’Aulnoy published 12 books, including two collections of fairy tales and three “historical” novels, as well as a series of travel memoirs based on her supposed travels through court life in Madrid and London. Though her stories may have been plagiarized and invented, these stories later became her most popular works. In France and England at the time her works were considered as mere entertainment rather than factual history, a sentiment reflected in the reviews of the period. Her truly accurate attempts at historical accounts – about the Dutch wars of Louis XIV – were less successful. The money she made from her writing helped support her three daughters, not all of whom were produced during her time with the Baron d’Aulnoy .
Her most popular works were the fairy tales and adventure stories she published in Les Contes des Fées (Tales of fairies) and Contes Nouveaux, ou Les Fées à la Mode. Unlike the folk tales of the Grimm Brothers (born some 135 years later than d’Aulnoy), she wrote her stories in a conversational tone, as they might be told in salons. Many of her stories created a world of animal brides and grooms, where love and happiness came to heroines after overcoming great obstacles, though many English adaptations are very different from the original.
Teresa Villarreal González was a feminist, labor organizer, and political activist who supported the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) and the Mexican Revolution (1910–17). She and her sister Andrea published the feminist newspaper La Mujer Moderna (The Modern Woman) in 1910. That year, Teresa also established El Obrero: Periódico Independiente (The Worker: Liberal Newspaper) in San Antonio, Texas, and published articles that addressed issues of the working class and called for mass involvement in Mexican Revolution’s struggle for a democratic government. Along with economic, educational, and cultural improvements for the masses, she advocated for the emancipation of women.
From 1991 to 1993, Zlata Filipović wrote in her diary, Mimmy, about the horrors of living through the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War as a child. Later published as “Zlata’s Diary,” the book became a bestseller and elicited comparisons to the diary of Anne Frank.
Filipović and her family survived, escaping to Paris in 1993 with the help of the United Nations. She has lived in Dublin, Ireland since October 1995, where she has continued to write and work on films and as an international activist. In 2011, Filipović produced the short film Stand Up! for BeLonG To, an LGBTQ youth service organisation in Ireland. The film, advocating against homophobic bullying in schools, has been viewed more than 1.6 million times on YouTube.
Filipović served on the Executive Committee of Amnesty International Ireland from 2007 to 2013 and is a founding member of NYPAW (Network of Young People Affected by War). She has spoken at schools and universities around the world on the topic of children in conflict.
In 1759, French king Louis XV launched a project to reduce infant mortality in the country and commissioned Parisian midwife Angélique du Coudray to train peasant women as midwifes. From 1760 to 1783, she trained approximately 10,000 women across France, visiting poor women in rural areas and sharing her extensive knowledge with them. Presumably the women she taught also passed those skills on to outhers in following years. Du Coudray also invented the first lifesize obstetrical mannequin, so the women could practice mock births, and published a popular midwifery textbook, Abrégé de l’art des accouchements (The Art of Obstetrics, 1759). Due to the lack of accurate data collection, it is impossible to quote statistics about infant mortality rates (which were frequently underreported in the 1700s and earlier), but it seems inarguable that du Coudray must have directly and indirectly saved countless lives, of both mothers and children.
Feminist activist and journalist Sediqeh Dowlatabadi was a pioneering figures in the Persian women’s movement who believed in the advancement of women through education.
Anna Sewell was an English novelist who wrote the 1877 novel Black Beauty, her only published work, which is now considered one of the top ten best selling novels for children, although it was originally intended for an adult audience. She died just five months after Black Beauty’s publication, having lived long enough to see her only novel become a success.
Sophia Frances Anne Caulfeild was a British writer and needleworker who wrote about religion and needlework, and frequently worked with Blanche Catherine Saward.
In 1882 she and Blanche Saward had their Dictionary of Needlework published. The work was available in six volumes and its full title was The dictionary of needlework : an encyclopaedia of artistic, plain, and fancy needlework dealing fully with the details of all the stitches employed, the method of working, the materials used, the meaning of technical terms, and, where necessary, tracing the origin and history of the various works described. Their encyclopedia attempted to describe all aspects of needlework, with 800 woodcut illustrations and more than 528 pages of alphabetical entries. The section on embroidery alone was 24 pages long. This work was aimed at the fashion for needlework and it competed with Thérèse de Dillmont’s Complete Encyclopedia of Needlework published in 1884 and Weldon’s Practical Needlework which was published in monthly parts from 1886.
Caulfeild also had a book of poetry published in 1870, and in 1887 published The Lives of the Apostles, their contemporaries and successors.
Sheema Kalbasi is an Iranian American poet, writer, filmmaker and activist for women’s rights, minorities’ rights, children’s rights, human rights and refugees’ rights. Her work discusses these topics as well as other women’s issues, war, refugees, Sharia Law and freedom of expression. In additon to her artistic work, Sheema taught refugee children and worked for the UNHCR and the Center for Refugees in Pakistan, and UNA Denmark. Her poems have been anthologized and translated into more than 20 languages.