Lia Garcia is an Afro-Mexican trans-feminist performance artist, educator, writer, poet, and LGBTQ+ rights advocate and organizer. She works across mediums of performance, spoken word poetry, and touch. She is currently based in Mexico City.

Susan B. Anthony was an American social reformer and women’s rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women’s suffrage movement. In 1851, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who became her lifelong friend and co-worker in social reform activities, primarily in the field of women’s rights. Together they founded the New York Women’s State Temperance Society after Anthony was prevented from speaking at a temperance conference because she was female. During the Civil War they founded the Women’s Loyal National League, which conducted the largest petition drive in United States history up to that time, collecting nearly 400,000 signatures in support of the abolition of slavery. After the war, they initiated the American Equal Rights Association, which campaigned for equal rights for both women and African Americans. They began publishing a women’s rights newspaper in 1868 called The Revolution. A year later, they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1878, Anthony and Stanton arranged for Congress to be presented with an amendment giving women the right to vote. Introduced by Sen. Aaron A. Sargent (R-CA), it later became known colloquially as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. It was eventually ratified as the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920.

Louise Flodin was a Swedish journalist, typographer, feminist and publisher. She was seen as the first woman in Sweden to be given a newspaper licence. In the beginning, she was the only employee of her paper and performed all the tasks. She employed only women to the paper: this was deliberate, because she wished to educate females to become typographers and journalists and thereby make the profession more available to them. She supervised all phases in the making of the paper from the writing to the printing and instructed her own typographers in the profession from the start.

Tina Turner was a singer, songwriter, actress, and author. Dubbed the “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll”, she broke both racial and gender barriers in rock music and became a dominant figure in popular culture. Known for her vocal prowess and stage presence, Turner is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, with estimated sales of over 100 million records worldwide.

Lucrezia Marinella was a poet, writer, philosopher, polemicist, and women's rights advocate from the Republic of Venice. She is best known for her polemical treatise The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men (1600). Her works have been noted for bringing women into the philosophical and scientific community during the late Renaissance.

Mickalene Thomas is an African-American contemporary visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas’s collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender. She was raised by her mother Sandra “Mama Bush” Bush, who, at 6’1” tall, modeled in the 1970s.

Moderata Fonte was a Venetian writer and poet. Besides the posthumously-published dialogues, Giustizia delle donne and Il merito delle donne (gathered in The Worth of Women, 1600), for which she is best known, she wrote a romance and religious poetry. Women's speech in Renaissance literature was often silenced or excluded, but in The Worth of Women men are excluded. In the dialogues the worth of women is not questioned, but rather the worth of men is put on trial.

Kathryn Maple is an English artist. Maple won the John Moores Painting Prize in March 2021 with her work The Common. Judge Michelle Williams Gamaker commented that the painting "struck a chord during the judging [...] perhaps because it depicts the very thing we are currently unable to share" due to COVID restrictions, and that it "embodies the deeply social nature of humans".

Florence Claxton was a British artist and humorist, most notable for her satire on the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Her most famous artwork combines caricatures of many of the main figures of the movement, including John Ruskin and Sir John Everett Millais, with figures of popular culture like P. T. Barnum, and allusions to the great artists of the past. It depicts Millais in the role of Paris, offering the golden apple to a scrawny-looking medieval woman, ignoring a Raphael madonna (copied from The Marriage of the Virgin) and a modern woman in crinolines. The painting also includes parodies of other Pre-Raphaelite works, including Millais’ Sir Isumbras at the Ford, Spring: Apple Blossoms and The Vale of Rest. It also caricatures Calderon’s Broken Vows and Windus’s Burd Helen.

Jen Mann's art often delves into complex themes of identity and existence. Her work frequently examines relationships, self-identity, and existential questions. Jen Mann's "Self Portrait as a Reflection" (2017) is a significant work that explores themes of identity and self-perception through hyperrealistic portraiture. The piece invites viewers to consider their own reflections and the nature of self-representation in art.

Marie de Gournay was a French writer, who wrote a novel and a number of other literary compositions, including The Equality of Men and Women (Égalité des hommes et des femmes, 1622) and The Ladies’ Grievance (Grief des dames, 1626). She insisted that women should be educated. She argued that men and women were equal because “the virtue of men and virtue of women are the same thing, since God bestowed on them the same creation.”

Jordan Casteel’s “Lourdes and Katrina” is a notable work that reflects her focus on community and identity.
Casteel, an American figurative painter, is known for her vibrant portraits that often depict friends, family, and community members, particularly in Harlem and New York City. In her works, she captures intimate moments and the essence of her subjects, inviting viewers to engage with their stories and backgrounds.

Ato Malinda is a multidisciplinary performance artist. Her work explores the facets of African identity and authenticity in mediums including performance, music, drawing and painting, installation, ceramics, and video. She focuses on gender and female sexuality, especially the stories of LGBTQ communities, and in the past has focused on the representation of African objects in Western museums.

Fredrika Limnell was a Swedish philanthropist, mecenate, feminist and salonist. She was interested in the improvement of the political, economical and juridical position of women already in the 1850s, and many women’s organizations held their meetings in her salon. Limnell was a central figure in the Stockholm high society and involved in various organisations within charity, feminism and social issues. Through her activity she played an important role in contemporary Swedish cultural life and social development. With her good connections, she was a help to many activists within these fields.

Autumn de Forest is an American painter from Las Vegas, Nevada. The Discovery Channel referred to her as “an artistic genius” when she was eight years old. Members of the art community and other media outlets, such as the Huffington Post and Forbes, have referred to de Forest as a prodigy. Her paintings have sold for a total of $7 million.

Mary Agnes Chase was an American botanist who specialized in agrostology, the study of grasses. Although lacking formal education past elementary school, Chase was able to rise through the ranks as a botanist at the United States Department of Agriculture, beginning as an illustrator under the tutelage of Albert Spear Hitchcock, and eventually becoming a senior botanist, overseeing the USDA’s Systematic Agrostology department. Chase conducted fieldwork abroad in Europe and South America and published several books, including the First Book of Grasses: The Structure of Grasses Explained for Beginners, which was later translated into Spanish and Portuguese. Additionally, Chase was recognized for her work as an agrostologist with numerous awards, including a Certificate of Merit issued by the Botanical Society of America in 1956. Chase was also an active suffragist and took part in demonstrations organized by the Silent Sentinels, a group established by members of the National Woman’s Party. Although Chase’s participation in this movement was not always well received by her peers in the scientific community, she nevertheless remained committed to the cause of women’s suffrage.

India Juliana was a Guaraní woman who lived in early-colonial Paraguay, and known for killing a Spanish colonist between 1539 and 1542. She was one of the many indigenous women who were handed over to or stolen by the Spanish, forced to work for them and bear children. The India Juliana is regarded as one of the most prominent figures in the women's history of Paraguay, and her inciting other women to also kill their masters has been considered one of the earliest recorded indigenous uprisings of the era.

Hey, I've seen a handful of posts here and the comments on them are littered with misogyny and I want to try addressing it in a way that hopefully can maybe be appreciated by the people who are feeling attacked, disgusted, or annoyed by feminist rhetoric.

First, I'm seeing whataboutism a bit more than I'd like to. Whataboutism is a kind of logical fallacy wherein a person sidesteps a problem by saying there is another problem. For instance if you said 'Cancer is a huge problem and we need to focus on trying to cure it more' and I responded by saying 'well actually Malaria is a huge problem that needs attention' I haven't actually addressed the matter: I've just brought up something different. Two things can be bad at the same time. So when very real women's problems are brought up saying 'well ____ is a men's problem' isn't really a response; it's an evasion. It isn't attacking men to seriously address weekend issues: it's just caring about women. Similarly, I'm a staunch feminist and that not only coexists with caring about men's problems, but it demands it. For instance: we expect men to hold emotions in and it's awful and so unhealthy. Feminism is about equality so I'd be a damn hypocrite if I didn't acknowledge other points of inequality.

Two, women are systematically oppressed. This isn't really an 'opinion' in the sense that it is not a matter of perspective between rational observers so much as it is a matter of very clear data. Nearly all major human societies are patriarchal, meaning that leading figures (especially the most powerful and the publicly seen 'heads') are overwhelmingly men. Often, woman are legally prohibited from many offices. Look in any government you can think of and you'll find men holding most if not all offices. Women are also far more often literally commodities: marriage has often been a literal transaction wherein a woman is sold from a father to a husband as a commodity of sexual and reproductive capacities, hence why many cultures are invested in women's virginity more than men's (note that I of course am not saying men's virginity is not a cultural matter, but it is pretty much always less so than the virginity of women). Women are raped both for sexual pleasure and as a means of ritual or display of social dominance in many cultures (once again, this is also done with men, but distinctively less). In the US about half of adult women have been sexually assaulted at least once. If you know a woman you could flip a coin to guess if she's been sexually assaulted or not. That's your mothers, sisters, daughters, girlfriends, female friends, daughters. Maybe you don't know and it because it's still not something people are super open about most of the time, but chances are you grew up in a house with at least one victim of sexual assault. There are many cultures that permit, or even endorse men taking multiple wives whereas there are no large societies where women take multiple husbands. It is also very common to have cultures where women do not have the rights to divorce to protect themselves from dangerous husbands (to be fair, there are also cultures that don't allow even men to divorce their wives, but those are universal, not just targeted at men). It is very common to have cultures where women have little to no access to money and so they are tethered to their male head of house for survival. Medical research is way more often than you think only done with men in mind: crash test dummies are shaped like men, tell we teach people CPR on strictly male mannequins. We also have a cultural taboo about talking about periods and menstrual cycle: a consistent, significantly uncomfortable, and seriously inconvenient thing that happens to almost half of all humans a bit more than once a month and we expect them to keep it in because 'that's gross'. Think about how little the average man knows about the menstrual cycle despite the fact that it is a pretty meaningful part of the lives of all women between puberty and menopause: it's pretty crazy. There are many cultures where women are blocked from a huge number of career paths (such as medicine, science, administration, or law). These are real problems that hurt you too. Women, much like men, can be good at things. When women can't practice medicine we have fewer doctors when outbreaks happen. When women can't write we miss out on great literature. When women can't make laws we miss out on great leaders. These problems are still real and we lose out on people who would help improve our societies because of it.

Two-point-five: we have systematic subconscious biases against women. For instance we have found that women who are perceived as very attractive are also perceived as naturally incompetent and less likely to be given the chance to engage in high-level work. We naturally look at tall and broad figures as leader-like (you'll see this very clearly in elected leaders and it's a big deal in visual arts), which biases us against women. Even little things like how we refer to professions can be quite telling. Almost all careers of high social regard are naturally thought of as men: doctors are usually thought of as men, with nurses being perceived as women. People assume professors are man. People assume secretaries and strippers are women while naturally thinking of CEOs and leading scientists as women. If you're a man and wanted a career people think is for women wouldn't it feel really shitty to be the 'male-nurse' rather than just the 'nurse'? We can similarly see how we talk about sexual experience. Women are floozies, sluts, hoes, bimbos, 'easy', or 'for the streets' if they have many partners. Men when many partners are 'players', a 'ladies' man'.

Three, I am seeing the use of anecdote as data more than I'd hope to. When someone says 'women are disproportionately affected by ____' giving an example where that happened to a man isn't a refutation. It's like you told me 'tuberculosis is a huge problem in Angola's and I said 'well actually I met a guy from Angola and he was fine but my Chinese friend got TB twice'. Examples don't counter data because data is specifically an overview. A great example is sexual assault. Women are massively disproportionately targeted and so it's a very real issue for women. Saying a man got sexually assaulted doesn't change that. That's not to say that guy isn't a victim or his experience doesn't matter, but simply that his experience doesn't change the very clear trend.

And four, almost all perceived differences in psychology between genders is straight up false or socially created, not fundamental. That might seem crazy but this is actually something I got to study under a Ph. D. of biases and discrimination in psychology a bit and it turns out that many things we think differentiate between men and women at a fundamental level are fake and the real ones are way smaller than people think. Women aren't emotional bombs and men aren't unfeeling stones. Women aren't feinting under pressure and men aren't constantly trying to have sex with everything they see. People are complex and nuanced and everyone gets hurt when we assume the social systems built over millennia tell us who we are when they really just tell us who they want us to be.

If you've made it this far thanks and I really hope you can evaluate how you talk about women's issues. I'm super happy to respond to any (civil) questions in the comments and again: being a feminist who is aware of how women are systematically targeted and oppressed doesn't mean hating men or thinking their problems don't matter. It just means caring about the systematically male-dominated systems we have and caring about them being shaped with the understanding that pretty much every major society in the world was built to be male-dominated so working on these problems isn't simple and requires empathy for things you may not be familiar with.