<p align="left">Magdalena Abakanowicz was born in Poland, near Warsaw, to a family that traced its heritage back to Genghis Khan. Her home life was disturbed by the occupation of Poland by Germany and then Russia. She stayed in Poland through the years of Communist rule and then through the changes under the Solidarity movement and afterwards. Her sculpture often reflects the emotional heritage of her political environment.

Magdalena Abakanowicz studied at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, 1950-55. Honorary doctorates from the Royal College of Art in London and the Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz, Poland. Magdalena Abakanowicz began working as a painter, as a weaver and as a sculptor working in the fiber arts, as a weaver, and moved to other media including clay, wood, and sacking. She is noted for groups of large figures which she has called "Abakans." Her work is in many major public museums.

Magdalena Abakanowicz taught at the State College of Arts in Poznan, 1979-1990, and she was appointed a professor in 1979. She has been a visiting professor in the US. In the 1990s Magdalena Abakanowicz designed a model of an ecologically-oriented city, and has also choreographed dance.</p>

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<p align="left">Bella Abzug, a 1947 Columbia Law School graduate admitted to the NY Bar in 1947, was known for her work in the peace movement, for civil liberties, and later in feminism. In 1970, Bella Abzug was elected to the U.S. Congress from New York. In Congress, she was especially noted for her work for the Equal Rights Amendment, national day care centers, ending sex discrimination, and working mothers' priorities. Bella Abzug also worked against American involvement in the Vietnam War and against the Selective Service System. She challenged the seniority system, ending up as chair of the House subcommittee on government information and individual rights.

Bella Abzug ran for the Senate in 1976, losing to Daniel P. Moynihan, and in 1977 was defeated in a primary bid for the office of mayor of New York City. In 1978 she again ran for Congress, in a special election. In 1977-1978 Bella Abzug served as co-chair of the National Advisory Committee on Women. She was fired by President Jimmy Carter, who had originally appointed her, when the committee openly criticized Carter's budget for cutting women's programs. Bella Abzug returned to private practice as a lawyer until 1980, and served for a time as a television news commentator and magazine columnist.</p>
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<p align="left">Wife of the second President of the United States, Abigail Adams is an example of one kind of life lived by women in colonial, Revolutionary and early post-Revolutionary America. While she's perhaps best known simply as an early First Lady (before the term was used) and mother of another President, and perhaps known for the stance she took for women's rights in letters to her husband, Abigail Adams should also be known as a competent farm manager and financial manager. Educated at home, Abigail Adams learned quickly and read widely. Her marriage to John Adams was warm and loving and also intellectually lively, to judge from their letters.

They had four children before John became involved in the Continental Congress. During his long absences, Abigail managed the family and the farm and corresponded not only with her husband but with many family members and friends. During the war, she also served as the primary educator of the children, including the future sixth U.S. president, John Quincy Adams. When John served in Europe as a diplomatic representative of the new nation, Abigail Adams joined him.

John Adams served as Vice President of the United States from 1789-1797 and then as President 1797-1801. Abigail spent some of her time at home, managing the family financial affairs, and part of her time in the federal capital, in Philadelphia most of those years and, very briefly, in the new White House in Washington, D.C. (November 1800 - March 1801).

After John retired from public life at the end of his presidency, the couple lived quietly in Massachusetts. It is mostly through her letters that we know much about the life and personality of this intelligent and perceptive woman of colonial America and the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary period. Abigail Adams died in 1818, seven years before her son, John Quincy Adams, became the sixth president of the U.S.</p>

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<p align="left"> American actress, was born at Sacramento, California, on the 28th of July 1859. Her father, an officer in the Confederate service in the Civil War, died in 1863. She was educated in various Roman Catholic institutions, and at the age of thirteen, with the advice of Charlotte Cushman, began to study for the stage, making her first appearance at Louisville, Kentucky, as Juliet in 1875. Her remarkable beauty created an immediate success, and she played in all the large cities of the United States with increasing popularity.

Between 1883 and 1889 she had several seasons in London, and was the Rosalind in the performance of As You Like It which opened the Shakespeare Memorial theatre at Stratford-on-Avon. Among her chief parts were Galatea (in W. S. Gilbert's Pygmalion and Galatea), Clarice (in his Comedy and Tragedy, written for her), Hermione, Perdita, and Julia (in The Hunchback.) In 1889 she retired from the stage and in 1890 married Antonio de Navarro, and settled in England. See William Winter's Stage Life of Mary Anderson (New York, 1886), and her own A Few Memories (New York, 1896) </p>

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<b>(September 22, 1515 (?) - July 16, 1557) Married Henry VIII of England on January 6, 1540 Divorced July 1540 </b>

Jane Seymour, Henry VIII's beloved third wife, had died. France and the Holy Roman Empire were forging an alliance. Though Jane Seymour had given birth to a son, Henry knew that he needed more sons to ensure the succession. His attention turned towards a small German state, Cleves, which might prove a solid Protestant ally. Henry sent his court painter Hans Holbein to paint the portraits of the princesses Anne and Amelia. Henry selected Anne as his next wife.

Soon after the wedding, if not before, Henry was looking once again for a divorce. He was attracted to Catherine Howard, the political basis for the match was no longer as strong a motivation since France and the Holy Roman Empire were no longer allies, and he found Anne both uncultured and unattractive -- he is said to have called her "Mare of Flanders."

Anne, fully aware of Henry's marital history, cooperated in an annulment, and retired from court with the title "King's Sister." Henry gave her Hever Castle, where he had wooed Anne Boleyn, as her home.

She befriended Henry's children, riding in the coronation of Mary with Elizabeth. Her position and fortune made her a powerful independent woman, though there was little opportunity to exercise such power in any public sphere.

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Actual historical evidence of the man William Shakespeare is meager and seems incongruous with the language and the art of the plays and sonnets attributed to his hand. Delia Bacon was one of the earliest to speculate publicly that the author and William Shakespeare might be two different people. Could the man whose will mentions disposition of his second-best bed be the same man who adapted stories found only in Italian or Latin, who knew details of a 1580 visit of Marguerite de Valois and Catherine de Medici to Henry of Navarre's court?

Delia Salter Bacon was born in Ohio and moved to Connecticut where she studied at Catherine Beecher's girls' school. She taught school for some years, unsuccessfully tried to start her own school, published a book, Tales of the Puritans, and a play, The Bride of Fort Edward, and had some success as a paid lecturer. An affair with a minister caused her to withdraw into private study and reading. She came to the conclusion that Shakespeare's writings were not the product of the "stupid, ignorant, third-rate player," in her words, but of a group of writers including Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, and most prominently, Francis Bacon.
She argued that the political content of the plays and even the sonnets made it safer for these notables to attribute the writing to the actor whose name was Shakspear (he spelled it differently in different records, but never signed his name "Shakespeare.") Encouraged to pursue her theory by Ralph Waldo Emerson but few others, she traveled to England for further research. Nathaniel Hawthorne at one point rescued her from poverty and then helped her to publish her theories in The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857). Almost immediately after the book came out, she, in the words of contemporaries, "went insane," and was returned to the United States. She died in Connecticut in 1859.

While Bacon's book was treated primarily as a crackpot theory and literary novelty, it opened up speculation into the authorship of Shakespeare's writings. That speculation continues today, although Delia Bacon's theory centering on Francis Bacon has met with considerable counter-evidence. The current "leading suspect" is, instead, Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

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<p align="left">Her home was the meeting place of the artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. She was a professional librarian in New York City; her Master of Library Science was from Columbia University. She helped found the Krigwa Players with W. E. B. Du Bois and wrote several plays under her pseudonym Ursula or Ursala Trelling.</p><p><small>Copied from <a href="http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_list.htm">http://womenshistory.about.com</a></small></p>;

Joan Baez was born in Staten Island, New York. Her father was a physicist, born in Mexico, and her mother of Scottish and English descent. She grew up in New York and California, and when her father took a faculty position in Massachusetts, she attended Boston University and began to sing in coffeehouses and small clubs. Bob Gibson invited her to attend the 1959 Newport Folk Festival where she was a hit. Vanguard Records signed Baez and in 1960 her first album, "Joan Baez," came out. Baez was known for her soprano voice, her haunting songs, and, until she cut it in 1968, her long black hair. Early in her career she performed with Bob Dylan, and they toured together in the 1970s.

Subjected to racial slurs and discrimination in her own childhood because of her Mexican heritage and features, Joan Baez became involved with a variety of social causes early in her career, including civil rights and nonviolence. She was sometimes jailed for her protests. Joan Baez married David Harris, a Vietnam draft protestor, in 1968, and he was in jail for most of the years of their marriage. They divorced in 1973, after having one child, Gabriel Earl. In 1967, the Daughters of the American Revolution denied Joan Baez permission to perform at Constitution Hall, resonating with their famous denial of the same privilege to Marian Anderson.

Early in her career, Joan Baez stressed historical folk songs, adding political songs to her repertoire during the 1960s. Later, she added country songs and more mainstream popular music, though always including many songs with political messages. She supported such organizations as Amnesty International and Humanitas International. Joan Baez continues to speak and sing for peaceful solutions to violence in the Middle East and Latin America.

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<p align="left">Maria Agnesi's father was Pietro Agnesi, a wealthy nobleman and a professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna. It was normal in that time for the daughters of noble families to be taught in convents, and to receive instruction in religion, household management and dressmaking. A few Italian families educated daughters in more academic subjects; a few attended lectures at the university or even lectured there. Pietro Agnesi recognized the talents and intelligence of his daughter Maria. Treated as a child prodigy, she was given tutors to learn five languages (Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French and Spanish) and also philosophy and science.

The father invited groups of his colleagues to gatherings at their home, and had Maria Agnesi present speeches to the assembled men. By age 13, Maria could debate in the language of the French and Spanish guests, or she could debate in Latin, the language of the educated. She didn't like this performing, but she could not persuade her father to let her out of the task until she was twenty years old. In that year, 1738, Maria Agnesi assembled almost 200 of the speeches she had presented to her father's gatherings, and published them in Latin as Propositiones philosphicae -- in English, Philosophical Propositions. But the topics went beyond philosophy as we think of the topic today, and included scientific topics like celstial mechanics, Isaac Newton's gravitation theory, and elasticity.

Pietro Agnesi married twice more after Maria's mother died, so that Maria Agnesi ended up the eldest of 21 children. In addition to her performances and lessons, her responsibility was to teach her siblings. This task kept her from her own goal of entering a convent. Also in 1783, wanting to do the best job of communicating up-to-date mathematics to her younger brothers, Maria Agnesi began to write a mathematics textbook, which absorbed her for ten years. The Instituzioni Analitiche was published in 1748 in two volumes, over one thousand pages. The first volume covered arithmetic, algebra, trigonometry, analytic geometry and calculus. The second volume covered infinite series and differential equations. No one before had published a text on calculus that included the methods of calculus of both Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebnitz.

Maria Agnesi brought together ideas from many contemporary mathematical thinkers -- made easier by her ability to read in many languages -- and integrated many of the ideas in a novel way that impressed the mathematicians and other scholars of her day.
As recognition of her achievement, in 1750 she was appointed to the chair of mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of Bologna by an act of Pope Benedict XIV. She was also recognized by the Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. Did Maria Agnesi ever accept the Pope's appointment? Was it a real appointment or an honorary one? So far, the historical record does not answer those questions.

Maria Agnesi's name lives on in the name that English mathematician John Colson gave to a mathematical problem -- finding the equation for a certain bell-shaped curve. Colson confused the word in Italian for "curve" for a somewhat similar word for "witch," and so today this problem and equation still carries the name "witch of Agnesi." Maria Agnesi's father was seriously ill by 1750 and died in 1752. His death released Maria from her responsibility to educate her siblings, and she used her wealth and her time to help those less fortunate. She established in 1759 a home for the poor. In 1771 she headed up a home for the poor and ill. By 1783 she was made director of a home for the elderly, where she lived among those she served. She had given away everything she owned by the time she died in 1799, and Maria Agnesi was buried in a pauper's grave.</p>

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<p align="left">American figure skater who contracted polio at age 11, but won the U.S. figure skating championship in 1952 and the silver medal in the 1952 Olympics. In 1956, she became the first American woman to win the Olympic gold medal in figure skating. In 1976, Albright was appointed to a seat on the U.S. Olympic Committee, the first woman to hold that position.</p>
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<p align="left">Alexander, born in Boston, moved with her family to Europe when she was sixteen. She lived most of her life in Florence, where she worked with her mother. Her philanthropy in Tuscany opened the door for her to collect folk songs, folk customs and other folklore, which she published through her connection with John Ruskin.</p>
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<p align="left">After a career in music was cut short by an injury, Allen studied politics and then law. She established a law practice in Ohio, working for Legal Aid and for woman suffrage. She served as an assistant prosecutor in Cuyahoga Country before her election as a judge, serving as the first female elected as a judge of the court of common pleas (1920) and the first female elected to the Ohio Supreme Court (1922). In that position, she was the first woman in the world to sit on a court of last resort.

In 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed her to the US Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit, the first appointment of a woman to any federal bench of general jurisdiction. She served on that court until she retired in October 1959, and was chief judge of that court in the later years of her service. Among other cases she heard was the testing of the constitutionality of the Tennessee Valley Authority. She was active in human rights work through the International Bar Association. She received many awards and honorary degrees and published two books on law and another on her life, To Do Justly.</p>
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<p align="left">Born in Lima, Peru, her Chilean diplomat father and her mother divorced and she lived with her mother and grandparents. She worked first as a secretary and then as a journalist in print, on television and in movie documentaries. After the overthrow and assassination in 1973 of her uncle, Salvador Allende, president of Chile, Isabel Allende and her husband and children left for safety in Venezuela.

It was in her exile that she began to write The House of the Spirits, her first novel, which was based on her own family and the politics of Chile. She continued to produce novels based in part on her own experience, often focusing on the experience of women, weaving myth and realism together. She has lectured and done extensive book tours, and has taught literature at colleges in Virginia, New Jersey and California. Her 1995 work, Paula, is based on the extended coma and death of her daughter in 1992. She was divorced from her first husband, Miguel Frías, an engineer. In 1988, she married William Gordon, a lawyer.</p>
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<p align="left">English medical practitioner, daughter of Newson Garrett, of Aldeburgh, Suffolk, was born in 1836, and educated at home and at a private school. In 1860 she resolved to study medicine, an unheard-of thing for a woman in those days, and one which was regarded by old-fashioned people as almost indecent. Miss Garrett managed to obtain some more or less irregular instruction at the Middlesex hospital, London, but was refused admission as a full student both there and at many other schools to which she applied. Finally she studied anatomy privately at the London hospital, and with some of the professors at St Andrews University, and at the Edinburgh Extra-Mural school.

She had no less difficulty in gaining a qualifying diploma to practise medicine. London University, the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons, and many other examining bodies refused to admit her to their examinations; but in the end the Society of Apothecaries, London, allowed her to enter for the License of Apothecaries' Hall, which she obtained in 1865. In 1866 she was appointed general medical attendant to St Mary's dispensary, a London institution started to enable poor women to obtain medical help from qualified practitioners of their own sex. The dispensary soon developed into the New hospital for women, and there she worked for over twenty years.

In 1870 she obtained the Paris degree of M.D. The same year she was elected to the first London School Board, at the head of the poll for Marylebone, and was also made one of the visiting physicians of the East London hospital for children; but the duties of these two positions she found to be incompatible with her principal work, and she soon resigned them. In 1871 she married Mr J. G. S. Anderson (d. 1907), a London shipowner, but did not give up practice. She worked steadily at the development of the New hospital, and (from 1874) at the creation of a complete school of medicine in London for women. Both institutions have since been handsomely and suitably housed and equipped, the New hospital (in the Euston Road) being worked entirely by medical women, and the schools (in Hunter Street, W.C.) having over 200 students, most of them preparing for the medical degree of London University, which was opened to women in 1877.

In 1897 Mrs Garrett Anderson was elected president of the East Anglian branch of the British Medical Association. In 1908 she was elected (the first lady) mayor of Aldeburgh. The movement for the admission of women to the medical profession, of which she was the indefatigable pioneer in England, has extended to every civilized country except Spain and Turkey.</p>

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