Women's Rights Advocate

physician and politician, was one of three children born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Sidney S. Allen Sr., a Georgia native, Democratic committeeperson, and tailor with a seventh-grade education whose dream of becoming a doctor was realized by his daughter. Ethel's mother, the former Effie Jean Goodall, was a Democratic committeeperson born in Maryland who operated a tailoring business with her husband for many years. Ethel Allen became fascinated by medicine and the mysteries of life and death as a child while living in North Philadelphia, and she began to move toward medicine while studying at a Catholic institution, the then mostly white John W. Hallahan Girls Catholic High School, although her parents were Baptists.

Allen s intellectual curiosity led to intense scientific and medical inquiry prompted by a visit to an uncle s dental practice as well as by visits to a local physician who kept animal specimens ...

literary agent, was born Faith Hampton Childs in Washington, D.C., one of four children of Thomas Childs and Elizabeth Slade Childs, both public school English teachers who had attended Hampton University. Her father, a book collector, encouraged his daughter to learn about the world through reading, which Childs has credited for sparking her interest in literature. Following her graduation from high school, Childs studied history and political science at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, graduating in 1973 Five years later she acquired a law degree at American University in Washington D C Despite practicing law for several years in three different cities Childs found herself in her early thirties in need of a drastic career change The work she has claimed was simply not intellectually challenging Sachs et al and she wished to enter a life of the mind Baker p 50 that her father had encouraged ...

physician and advocate of reproductive rights, was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Ruby Goodwin and Benedict F. Edelin. After finishing eighth grade in the segregated Washington school system, he enrolled at the Stockbridge School, a now-defunct progressive private boarding school in western Massachusetts, from which he graduated in 1957.

Edelin earned a BA at Columbia University in 1961 and returned to Stockbridge for two years to teach science and mathematics. He then entered Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, where in 1964 he helped found the Student National Medical Association. As a medical student, Edelin assisted in treating a seventeen-year-old girl with a massive uterine infection caused by an improperly-performed, illegal abortion. The girl's death inspired him to become an advocate of safe and legal abortions.

Edelin earned his MD from Meharry in 1967, the year in which he married Ramona Hoage The couple ...

Egyptian feminist, physician, fiction writer, and political activist, was born in the village of Kafr Tahla, near Cairo, Egypt, on 27 October 1931. She was the second of nine children born to al-Sayed El Saadawi (1897–1959), a peasant family’s son who became an inspector in the Ministry of Education, and Zayneb Hanem Shoukry (1913–1958), daughter of an impoverished feudal family descending from Grand Vizier Talaʿat Pacha of Istanbul. Both of her parents were anxious to have their daughters as well as their sons educated. Nawal El Saadawi began her schooling at Muharram Bey Girls’ School in Alexandria, where the family briefly lived until al-Sayed was transferred to the small district town of Menouf in the Nile Delta in punishment for his participation in anti-British and antiroyal demonstrations. From 1938 until 1948 the El Saadawis remained in Menouf where Nawal attended the English primary school Despite his aversion to ...

Gambian politician, women's rights activist, playwright, and nurse, was born in May 1924 in Banjul, Gambia, to Sir John Mahoney, the first Speaker of the Gambian Legislature, and Lady Hannah Mahoney, a typist. She attended St Joseph's Convent and the Methodist Girls’ High School in Banjul, where she sat her Cambridge School Leaving Certificate Examination in 1942.

From 1942 to 1946 she worked as a nurse assistant at the Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH) in Banjul, before traveling to England in 1946 to study medicine at the Royal Infirmary, Bristol, where she obtained her State Registered Nurse (SRN) certificate in 1953. On returning to Gambia, she was posted as a nursing sister to Basse, 400 kilometers from Bathurst, where she met and married Dawda Kairaba Jawara. Their marriage at Basse in February 1955 was described in the Bathurst press as a unique occasion which ...

African‐Americanabolitionist and women's rights campaigner born in Salem, Massachusetts, to John and Nancy Lenox Remond, free middle‐class Blacks. Despite her family's wealth, racial discrimination within the northern segregated school system meant that she received a limited education and she was primarily self‐educated. Raised in a family that included many abolitionists, Remond learned from childhood of the horrors of slavery and witnessed many incidents involving the Underground Railroad. Her parents played host to many of the movement's leaders, including William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and to more than one fugitive slave.

At the age of 16 Remond began to join her brother Charles Lenox Remond, the leading abolitionist of his day, on anti‐slavery lecture circuits across northern states. A vociferous opponent of both slavery and of the racial segregation that existed in the ‘free’ North, in 1853 she successfully won a case for damages for ...

The daughter of a free black immigrant and granddaughter of a black veteran of the American Revolution, Sarah Parker Remond was born into a family that would not tolerate the injustices of slavery and inequality. When Salem's high school would not admit Sarah, the family moved to Newport, Rhode Island, until her graduation. Dedicated to education and political activism for both sexes, her mother, Nancy Remond, was a founder of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society.

In July of 1842, at the age of sixteen, Sarah joined her brother Charles Lenox Remond on the antislavery lecture circuit. She not only spoke out against slavery, but also challenged segregation in churches, theaters, and other public places. In 1856 she began touring the Midwest as a lecturer with the American Anti-Slavery Society and won acclaim as a persuasive speaker Also concerned with the rights of women Remond was a ...

abolitionist, physician, and feminist, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, the daughter of John Remond and Nancy Lenox. Her father, a native of Curaçao, immigrated to the United States at age ten and became a successful merchant. Her mother was the daughter of African American Revolutionary War veteran Cornelius Lenox. Remond grew up in an antislavery household. Her father became a life member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1835, and her mother was founding member of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, which began as a black female organization in 1832. Sarah's brother, Charles Lenox Remond, was a well-known antislavery lecturer in the United States and Great Britain.

Sarah Parker Remond attended local public schools in Salem until black students were forced out by committee vote in 1835 Determined to educate their children in a less racist environment the Remond family moved ...

Sarah Parker Remond was best known for the abolitionist speeches she presented in Great Britain on the eve of the American Civil War. She was among the last of prominent black abolitionists who, as the historian R. J. M. Blackett established, traveled to Britain in order to create “a moral cordon” or “antislavery wall” against British and continental European support for slavery or for the Confederate States of America. Parker was also notable for her feminism and her late, poorly documented career in Italy as a physician.

Remond was born in Salem, Massachusetts. The seventh of eight children in a prosperous family, she enjoyed advantages available to few others of her race and gender during the antebellum period. Her mother, Nancy Lenox Remond, a skilled baker, was the daughter of a black Revolutionary War veteran, who by 1798 owned property in Newton, Massachusetts. Her father, John Remond ...

nurse, organization executive, and reproductive and women's rights activist, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the only child of George and Ozie Wattleton Wattleton s mother was a charismatic preacher who traveled the revival circuit for the fundamentalist Church of God As a result her father worked at an ever changing series of construction and factory jobs and Wattleton often lived with church members during the school year while her parents were on the road Wattleton s childhood experiences of traveling with her parents taught her a great deal about the second class status held by black Americans in the 1940s and 1950s But she also learned important lessons about standing up for herself One example she always remembered was that when her father stopped for gas in the South he would ask the attendant if they had toilet facilities for blacks If the attendant said they ...

Alyce Faye Wattleton was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the only child of Ozie Walton, a seamstress and minister, and George Wattleton, a factory worker. She graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and attended Ohio State University, from which she received a degree in nursing in 1964. She later entered Columbia University to pursue a master's degree in maternal and infant care. At Columbia—during a time when almost all abortions were illegal—her patients included many girls and women who had attempted to abort their pregnancies, often with catastrophic results. Wattleton soon became active in Planned Parenthood. In the late 1960s, she headed a local chapter in Dayton, Ohio, dramatically expanding its services to women and children as well as its donor base. In 1978, she was named president of the PPFA.

At the time Planned Parenthood was known mainly for its several ...

Building on her professional experiences in nursing and midwifery, Faye Wattleton became the first woman to lead Planned Parenthood Federation of America since the birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger started its earlier incarnation, the American Birth Control League, in 1923. Wattleton assumed the presidency of Planned Parenthood in 1978. She defended women’s reproductive rights throughout the 1980s, during a politically conservative period and what many observers considered a backlash on women’s issues. When she left her position in 1992, the organization stood as the seventh-largest charity in the United States. It provided medical and educational services to more than 4 million American women a year through a network of 170 affiliates in all fifty states.

Born in 1943 to Ozie and George Wattleton Alyce Faye Wattleton grew up for part of her childhood in St Louis Missouri An only child she spent the rest of her ...

Cameroonian nurse, politician, and writer of fiction, was born in Lomie, Cameroon, in 1935. She attended the Douala secondary school for girls until 1955. Tsogo then moved to Toulouse, France, where she earned a nursing diploma. In 1960 she returned to Cameroon where she worked as a nurse in several different hospitals. She has three daughters.

Her medical work coincided with a notable political career, and Tsogo was one of the first African women to reach some of the top positions in politics. She rose to power in large part because of her work in women’s associations and her unwavering commitment to working on women’s issues. In 1964, Tsogo was elected as the national president of the Council of Cameroonian Women, a position she held until 1985. She became a member of Parliament in 1965 and held that position until 1972 She was the first ...