Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971)

“Usually I object when someone makes overmuch of men's work versus women's work, for I think it is the excellence of the results which counts.”

The photographer and photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White was born June 14, 1904 in Bronx, New York, U.S.A. and grew up in Bound Brook, New Jersey. Her father, Joseph White, was an engineer-designer for the printing industry and her mother, Minnie Bourke White, worked in publishing. She was encouraged early by her parents to set high standards for herself. In 1922, she began studying herpetology (the study of reptiles and amphibians) at Columbia University in New York. She then developed an interest in photography after studying with Clarence White, a leader in pictorial school of photography and switched colleges several times before graduating from Cornell University in 1927. In 1925, she married Everett Chapman, a graduate student in engineering, but they divorced a year later. Before graduating from Cornell, she made a photographic study of the rural campus for the Cornell Alumni News. Following her graduation, she moved to Cleveland, Ohio to embark on a career in photography.

In 1929, she accepted a job with the new Fortune magazine as an associate editor. She was talented, took risks and was becoming more successful than some of her male colleagues. Beginning in 1930, she was sent to the Soviet Union on assignment, becoming the first Western photographer allowed into that country. In 1931, she published Eyes on Russia. In the mid-thirties, she photographed drought victims of the Dust Bowl. In 1935, she joined the newly created Life magazine. Bourke-White's photograph of the Fort Peck Dam appeared on Life's first cover. She then traveled the American South with a writer, Erskine Caldwell, to document living conditions of poor tenant farmers. In 1937, they published a book You Have Seen Their Faces. That same year, one of her most famous photographs was published in Life. It featured black victims of a flood in Louisville, Kentucky standing in a breadline beneath a billboard of smiling white family in a car. The headline on the billboard read: "World's Highest Standard of Living- There's no way like the American Way."

Bourke-White married Caldwell in 1939 and together they published two more books. North of the Danube (1939) chronicled life in Czechoslovakia before the Nazi invasion and Say, Is This the U.S.A. (1941) was about life in the U.S.A. just before entering World War II. They were both in Moscow when the Germans attacked that city and Bourke-White sent a series of spectacular photos of the event to Life magazine. She was the only foreign photographer in the Soviet Union at the time. Bourke-White and Caldwell divorced in 1942, and she went on to photograph action in North Africa and in Italy. She was the first woman accredited by the U.S. Army as a war correspondent and crossed the German border with Patton's troops. She was also one of the first photographers to enter and document death camps. Her photos were so compelling that Life published them, breaking the tradition of avoiding the horrific aspects of the war. The Living Dead of Buchenwald became a classic. After the war, she was sent to India, where she took one of her most famous photographs, Gandhi at His Spinning Wheel. From 1949 to 1953, she photographed life in South Africa under apartheid, as well as the Korean War.

In the mid-1950's, Burke-White discovered she had Parkinson's disease and gradually withdrew from professional photography. In 1963, she published an autobiography, Portrait of Myself. Many of her photographs may be found in museum collections.

Margaret Bourke-White died in Connecticut in 1971.

http://www.npr.org/2003/02/26/1175402/bourke-white-s-photography-of-design

Judy Chicago (1939-)

“Because we are denied knowledge of our history, we are deprived of standing upon each other's shoulders and building upon each other's hard earned accomplishments. Instead we are condemned to repeat what others have done before us and thus we continually reinvent the wheel. The goal of The Dinner Party is to break this cycle.”

 

JUDY CHICAGO, is an artist, author, feminist, educator, and intellectual whose career now spans over five decades. Her influence both within and beyond the art community is attested to by her inclusion in hundreds of publications throughout the world. Her art has been frequently exhibited in the United States as well as in Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. In addition, a number of the books she has authored have been published in foreign editions, bringing her art and philosophy to thousands of readers worldwide.

Although Chicago has been an influential teacher and prolific author, the primary focus of her career has been her studio work. For over five decades, Chicago has remained steadfast in her commitment to the power of art as a vehicle for intellectual transformation and social change and to women’s right to engage in the highest level of art production. As a result, she has become a symbol for people everywhere, known and respected as an artist, writer, teacher, and humanist whose work and life are models for an enlarged definition of art, an expanded role for the artist, and women’s right to freedom of expression.

One of Judy Chicago’s primary goals was to overcome the erasure of women’s achievements that is symbolically expressed in The Dinner Party, her monumental history of women in Western Civilization, now permanently housed at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. But The Dinner Party is only one work in Chicago’s prodigious career and making sure that a range of her work is available for future generations has also been an important aim. The Legacy Page is intended to help students, scholars and museums locate aspects of Chicago’s oeuvre, also, her archives, which are split between the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America at Radcliffe/Harvard and at Penn State University which houses the Judy Chicago Art Education Collection. Together, these institutions will make possible a comprehensive view of Chicago’s artmaking, writings and educational theories. 

http://www.judychicago.com/

Ethel Percy Andrus (1884–1967)

“What I spent, is gone; what I kept, I lost; but what I gave away will be mine forever.”

In 1944, while driving to a faculty meeting at the Los Angeles high school where

she’d served as principal for almost three decades, Ethel Percy Andrus made a decision that surprised even her. She decided to retire and leave the school she loved in order to take care of her mother, Lucretia, who had been in poor health.

That decision, wrapped in a simple act of human kindness, resulted in the founding of two organizations that have made life better for millions of people — the National Retired Teachers Association and AARP.

The Early Years

Ethel Percy Andrus was born in San Francisco in 1884, but spent most of her childhood in Chicago. After earning a Bachelor of Philosophy degree from the University of Chicago, she began teaching. At night, she conducted classes for residents of two pioneering settlement houses — Hull House and Chicago Commons.

After her family returned to California, Andrus taught in Los Angeles at Santa Paula High School and Manual Arts High School. In 1916, she moved to East Los Angeles High School and soon was appointed principal — making her, at age 32, California’s first female high school principal. She changed the name of the school to Abraham Lincoln High School, hoping to inspire its large (2,500) and ethnically diverse student body. She set high academic standards and established innovative community-involvement programs that developed the students’ character and skills while breaking down cultural barriers between them. She also offered night-school programs for parents, and continued her own education, culminating in a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) from the University of Southern California.

Standing Up for Retired Teachers

Following her many years in education and nursing her mother back to health, Dr. Andrus turned her attention to the needs of people in the second half of their lives. She volunteered time with the California Retired Teachers Association and its committee for retired teachers’ welfare. Shocked to learn that so many retired educators had no health insurance and inadequate pensions, Dr. Andrus founded the National Retired Teachers Association in 1947 to give them a national voice. Until Medicare was created in 1965, there was no national program of health care for people over age 65. Even after dozens of insurance companies turned down her pleas to offer group health insurance to retired educators, she persisted until a company agreed to develop a health plan for NRTA members. The offering became so popular that non-educators sought to purchase it. Dr. Andrus established AARP (then known as the American Association of Retired

Persons), in 1958 to meet their needs. Throughout her life and career, Dr. Andrus sought to foster stronger ties between the generations and encouraged all to view aging as an achievement to be celebrated.

“To Serve, Not to Be Served”

Dr. Andrus, who died in July 1967, lived her life by the motto, “To serve, not to be served,” which remains AARP’s motto. She founded AARP on the principles of collective purpose, collective voice and collective purchasing power. Nearly 50 years later, AARP still champions these principles in a world that is rapidly changing – all in the spirit of its spirited founder, Ethel Percy Andrus.

http://www.aarp.org/aarp-foundation/