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Random Musings: A Blog Curated by beYOUteous — women empowerment RSS



Joan of Arc: “A Useless, Infamous, Dishonored Woman”

One of history’s great mysteries is how a teenage girl hearing voices and claiming to be on a mission from God persuaded the Dauphin Charles de Valois to give her soldiers and send her to help with the siege of Orléans. Joan of Arc was tried by the Inquisition. The case boiled down to two charges; that she dressed in men's clothes, which was considered an "abomination to God," and that she claimed God guided her personally, through voices and visitations.

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Emily Greene Balch: Peace As A Women's Issue

Emily Greene Balch was a social worker, reformer, peace activist and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize of 1946. She founded the Women’s International Committee for Permanent Peace, later known as the Women’s International League for Peace of Freedom (WILPF), and was better known for her involvement in activist movements for racial justice, women’s suffrage, child labor, working conditions, fair wages, and, in particular, the pursuance of peace.

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Autherine Lucy: Separate Educational Facilities are Inherently Unequal

On September 4, 1952, before Brown v. Board of Education case was issued, Autherine Lucy and friend, Mollie Ann Meyers, sent their applications to the University of Alabama. Realizing that Lucy and Myers were African American, the university rescinded, stating that they were no longer welcomed. Civil rights lawyers, Arthur Shores and Thurgood Marshall brought the case to court. The first case to test the Supreme Court’s decree giving Federal District Court judges the authority to implement the Brown decision, which concludes that separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

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Pearl S. Buck: Nobel Prize Novelist & Cookbook Author

Pearl S. Buck authored over 80 books, including The Good Earth, part of a trilogy about what started off as peasant life of the Wang family in old agrarian China. She was the first woman to be awarded both the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize in literature and was active in American civil rights and women's rights activities and published essays in both Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, and Opportunity, the magazine of the Urban League.

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Helena Rubinstein: The Polish Eagle of the Beauty Industry

In the early 1900s, women entrepreneurs were few. At the age of the 24, Helena set off to Australia aboard the Prinz Regent Luitpol with a parasol, twelve jars of face cream and twelve talismans. Helena opened her first beauty institute in Melbourne in 1902, capitalizing on women's burgeoning independence and turned equal rights into a marketing opportunity for her products. She sold the company to Lehman Brothers in 1928 before the Great Depression. She bought back $1.5 million in stock and increased its valuation to $100 million.

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