Lillemor Rachlew was one of four Norwegians who were the first women to set foot on the Antarctic mainland in 1937, for whom the Four Ladies Bank in Prydz Bay was named. On an earlier voyage to Antarctica Rachlew took photographs, whichwere published in 1934. Sections from her diary were preserved, the earliest examples of a woman’s writing about her travels in Antarctica.
Mina Shum is the writer and director of award-winning feature films and several short films. In addition to using a comedic approach to depict the Chinese-Canadian family in multicultural Canada, she often features ironic, discontented young women who want to leave home for something better. She had also created site-specific installations and theatre experiences. Her first feature-length film, Double Happiness, was released in 1994 and won several awards including the Wolfgang Staudte Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Audience Award at the Torino International Festival of Young Cinema, and Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Shum’s second feature film, Drive, She Said, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1997 and was in official competition at the Turin Delle Donne Film Festival. Her third feature film, Long Life, Happiness & Prosperity was screened as part of the Canadian Perspective Program at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival and at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival.
Her feature documentary Ninth Floor was about the Sir George Williams Affair student protest (the largest student occupation in Canadian history, which resulted in $2 million of property damage). Ninth Floor premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, and earned Shum the Women in Film+Television Artistic Merit Award at the 2015 Vancouver International Film Festival.
Julia Peterkin was an American author who won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Novel/Literature for her novel Scarlet Sister Mary. She wrote several novels about the plantation South, especially the African-American Gullah people of the Lowcountry. She was one of the few white authors of her time to write about the African-American experience.
Katharine Susannah Prichard was an Australian author and co-founding member of the Communist Party of Australia. Over her more than 50-year career, she published novels, volumes of poetry and short story collections.
Kathleen Mansfield Murry was a major modernist writer who wrote as Katherine Mansfield.
Mercedes de Acosta was an American poet, playwright, and novelist who wrote almost a dozen plays, only four of which were produced, and she published a novel and three volumes of poetry. She was professionally unsuccessful but is known for her social connections, including her many lesbian relationships with famous Broadway and Hollywood personalities and many friendships with prominent artists of the period.
Ina Donna Coolbrith was an American poet, writer and librarian, prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area literary community. Called the “Sweet Singer of California”, she was the first California Poet Laureate, as well as the first poet laureate of any U.S. state.
Urani Rumbo was an Albanian feminist, playwright and teacher who founded several associations promoting Albanian women’s rights, including the Lidhja e Gruas (English: Woman’s Union), one of the country’s first major feminist organizations. In 1919, while teaching at the De Rada school of Gjirokastër, she started an initiative against female illiteracy and the tradition of restricting women to certain parts of the household. In 1920 she opened the Koto Hoxhi school, a five-year primary school for girls from all parts of Gjirokastër and of all religions. There is an elementary school in Gjirokastër named after her. On March 1, 1961, she posthumously recieved the Mësuese e Popullit (Teacher of the People) medal.
Ann Katharine Mitchell was a British cryptanalyst and psychologist who worked on decrypting messages encoded in the Germans’ Enigma cypher at Bletchley Park during World War II. She later became a marriage guidance counsellor, then worked for the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Social Administration and wrote several academic books about the psychological effects of divorce on children, including Someone to Turn to: Experiences of Help Before Divorce (1981) and Children in the Middle: Living Through Divorce (1985).
Susan Joy Fowler is a writer and software engineer known for influencing institutional changes in how Uber and Silicon Valley companies respond to sexual harassment. Fowler worked at two technology startup companies before joining Uber in late 2015. In early 2017, her blog post on sexual harassment at the company went viral and ultimately led to the removal of Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick. She runs a science book club and has written a book on microservices, a style of constructing applications as a collection of loosley coupled services. Fowler served as editor-in-chief of a quarterly publication by the payment processing company Stripe, and as a technology opinion editor at The New York Times.