Posts Tagged ‘Women’s History’

Coleen Atwood, not a common name to most of us, unless you are a slave to movie fashion. This talented woman was born September 25, 1948 in Yakima, Washington. Graduating from Cornish College of the Arts in the early 1970’s, she began dabbling in fashion. By 1980, Ms. Atwood moved to New York to study…

Tess Gallagher born in Port Angeles Washington in 1943 found her voice through poems, essays, and short stories. She studied creative writing at the University of Washington. Gallagher wrote extensively throughout her life, encouraged by her husband Raymond Carver. Her honors include a fellowship at the Guggenheim Foundation, two National Endowment for the Arts awards,…

Alice Lord arrived in Seattle in 1892, quickly taking a “pink collar” job, working 12-hour days for a weekly wage of between $5 and $6. In 1900, Alice became an instrumental figure in founding the Waitresses’ Union, Local 240, one of the few women’s unions with a national charter in the American Federation of Labor.…

Dorothy Hollingsworth played a critical role in Seattle’s education system.  She was born in South Carolina in 1920, and moved to Seattle in 1946. Hollingworth worked in Seattle’s Central District as a social worker in the 1950s and 1960s. Dorothy became the first director of Seattle’s Public Schools’ Head Start program in 1965 and served…

Bonnie Jeanne Dunbar was born the small eastern Washington city of in Sunnyside, but decided that the stars were the limit. Dunbar became a NASA astronaut in 1981. She spent 50 days in space. She flew on five space flights—on three of which she served as mission specialist and as Payload Commander on the other…

Ann Reinking, born in Bellevue in 1949, performed with the English Royal Ballet at the age of twelve. Moving to New York at 17, she worked extensively as an actress, dancer, and choreographer. Ann starred on Broadway for most of her career including Chicago, Sweet Charity, All that Jazz, and Annie. In 1994, Reinking founded…

All of us are born with a gift, sometimes life challenges make sharing those gifts difficult. Octavia E. Butler began writing at the age of 10, a shy, awkward, slightly dyslexic, African-American diving into the world of science fiction. Octavia’s style of writing focused on marginalized characters and communities often exposing the underside of humanity…

Sometimes your calling in life takes you into the realm of math and physics. In 1938, Mary Layne Boas earned her bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree two years later in the field of mathematics from the University of Washington. In 1948, Boas earned a Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Boas taught…

When most people hear the name “Bertha” and Seattle, they probably think of the giant drilling machine moving under the city’s underground. But there’s another Bertha that pre-dates the one tunneling beneath the city. Bertha Ethel Knight Landes sat on the Seattle City Council in 1922 and became council president in 1924. In 1926, she…

Linda Brown Buck, a Washington born American Biologist received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her work on olfactory receptors. In 1980, she set out to map the olfactory process at the molecular level asking how the nose and brain detect and interpret pheromones and odors. Her landmark work, with Richard Axel,…