Congress Woman Patsy Mink served for a total of 12 terms, representing Hawaii's 1st &2nd congressional districts. While in Congress she was noted for authoring the Title IX Amendment of the Higher Education Act. Mink was the first woman of color and the first Asian American woman elected to Congress and became the first Asian American to seek the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in the 1972 election, where she stood in the Oregon primary as an anti-war candidate.
Aphra Behn was prolific dramatist of the English Restoration, the first English professional female writer. Her writing contributed to the amatory fiction genre of British literature.
She now dominates much cultural-studies discourse as both a topic and a set of texts. Much early criticism emphasized her unusual status as a female writer in a male-dominated literary world; more recent criticism has offered more thorough discussions of her works.
Today, the affinities between Behn's work and that of Romantic writers seem more pronounced than the publicly acceptable discussion of sexuality. According to scholars, Behn's writings unveil the homosocial role of male rivalry in stimulating heterosexual desire for women and explores the ways in which cross dressing and masquerade complicate and destabilize gender relations. Behn also analyzes female friendships.
In several volumes of writings by author Janet Todd, Behn's explorations of some of the key issues in Romantic studies, such as the role of incestuous and homosocial bonding in romance, the correlations between racial and gender oppression, female subjectivity, and, more specifically, female political and sexual agency are detailed.
She is credited with saying one of my favorite quotes of all time: "Women have two choices in life, marriage or prostitution. I consider prostitution the nobler of the two."
Aphra Behn died on 16 April 1689, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. The inscription on her tombstone reads: "Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be / Defence enough against Mortality." She was quoted as once stating that she had led a "life dedicated to pleasure and poetry."
Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (December 3, 1842 – March 30, 1911) was the foremost female industrial and environmental chemist in the United States in the 19th century, pioneering the field of home economics. Richards graduated from Westford Academy (2nd oldest secondary school in Massachusetts). She was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and its first female instructor, the first woman in America accepted to any school of science and technology, and the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry.
Richards was a pragmatic feminist, as well as a founding ecofeminist who believed that women's work within the home was a vital aspect of the economy.