Marlene Dietrich

Marie Magdalene “Marlene” Dietrich (/mɑːrˈleɪnə ˈdiːtrɪk/, German: [maʁˈleːnə ˈdiːtʁɪç] (listen); 27 December 1901 – 6 May 1992) was a German and American actress and singer whose career spanned from the 1910s to the 1980s.

In 1920s Berlin, Dietrich performed on the stage and in silent films. Her performance as Lola-Lola in Josef von Sternberg‘s The Blue Angel (1930) brought her international acclaim and a contract with Paramount Pictures.

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She starred in many Hollywood films, including six iconic roles directed by Sternberg: Morocco (1930) (her only Academy Award nomination), Dishonored (1931), Shanghai Express and Blonde Venus (both 1932), The Scarlet Empress (1934) and The Devil Is a Woman (1935), Desire (1936) and Destry Rides Again (1939).

She successfully traded on her glamorous persona and exotic looks, and became one of the era’s highest-paid actresses.

Throughout World War II she was a high-profile entertainer in the United States. Although she delivered notable performances in several post-war films, including Billy Wilder‘s A Foreign Affair (1948), Alfred Hitchcock‘s Stage Fright (1950), Billy Wilder‘s Witness for the Prosecution (1957), Orson Welles‘s Touch of Evil (1958) and Stanley Kramer‘s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), she spent most of the 1950s to the 1970s touring the world as a marquee live-show performer.

Dietrich was known for her humanitarian efforts during World War II, housing German and French exiles, providing financial support and even advocating their American citizenship. For her work on improving morale on the front lines during the war, she received several honors from the United States, France, Belgium and Israel.

In 1999, the American Film Institute named Dietrich the ninth greatest female screen legend of classic Hollywood cinema.

“Wikiwand – Marlene Dietrich.” Wikiwand, http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Marlene_Dietrich. Accessed 20 Jan. 2023

Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel
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Criterion Channel Teaser
Circa 1945
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Tamara De Lempicka

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FRANCE – JANUARY 01: Tamara de Lempicka, in a dress by Marcel Rochas. Paris. Photography by d’Ora, around 1931. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images)

Tamara Łempicka (born Tamara Rozalia Gurwik-Górska;[1] 16 May 1898 – 18 March 1980), better known as Tamara de Lempicka, was a Polish painter who spent her working life in France and the United States. She is best known for her polished Art Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, and for her highly stylized paintings of nudes.

Born in Warsaw, Lempicka briefly moved to Saint Petersburg where she married a prominent Polish lawyer, then travelled to Paris. She studied painting with Maurice Denis and André Lhote. Her style was a blend of late, refined cubism and the neoclassical style, particularly inspired by the work of Jean-Dominique Ingres.[2] She was an active participant in the artistic and social life of Paris between the Wars. In 1928 she became the mistress of Baron Raoul Kuffner, a wealthy art collector from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the death of his wife in 1933, the Baron married Lempicka in 1934, and thereafter she became known in the press as “The Baroness with a Brush”.

“Tamara de Lempicka.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamara_de_Lempicka. Accessed 14 Nov. 2021.

“I live life in the margins of society, and the rules of normal society don‘t apply to those who live on the fringe.”

TAMARA DE LEMPICKA
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Tamara de Lempicka at Her Easle. Credit Bettmann/Getty Images)

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Amelia Earhart

Amelia Mary Earhart (/ˈɛərhɑːrt/AIR-hart, born July 24, 1897 – disappeared July 2, 1937, declared dead January 5, 1939) was an American aviation pioneer and author.[2][Note 1] Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.[4] She set many other records,[3][Note 2] was one of the first aviators to promote commercial air travel, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots.[6]

During an attempt at becoming the first female to complete a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937 in a Purdue-funded Lockheed Model 10-E Electra, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island. The two were last seen in Lae, New Guinea, on July 2, 1937, on the last land stop before Howland Island and one of their final legs of the flight. She presumably lost her life in the Pacific during the circumnavigation, just three weeks prior to her fortieth birthday.[10] Nearly one year and six months after she and Noonan disappeared, Earhart was officially declared dead. Investigations and significant public interest in their disappearance still continue over 80 years later.[Note 3]

Amelia Earhart – First Woman to Fly Alone

Records and Achievements:

  • Woman’s world altitude record: 14,000 ft (1922)
  • First woman to fly the Atlantic Ocean (1928)
  • Speed records for 100 km (and with 500 lb (230 kg) cargo) (1931)
  • First woman to fly an autogyro (1931)
  • Altitude record for autogyros: 18,415 ft (1931)
  • First woman to cross the United States in an autogyro (1931)
  • First woman to fly the Atlantic solo (1932)
  • First person to fly the Atlantic twice (1932)
  • First woman to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross (1932)
  • First woman to fly nonstop, coast-to-coast across the U.S. (1932) [314]
  • Women’s speed transcontinental record (1933)
  • First person to fly solo between Honolulu, Hawaii, and Oakland, California (1935)[Note 55]
  • First person to fly solo from Los Angeles to Mexico City (1935)
  • First person to fly solo nonstop from Mexico City to Newark, New Jersey (1935)
  • Speed record for east-to-west flight from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii (1937)[316]
  • First person to fly solo from the Red Sea to Karachi (1937)

“Amelia Earhart.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Earhart. Accessed 6 Nov. 2021.

Amelia Earhart Lockheed Vega 5B (A19670093000) at the Smithsonian Institution National Air and Space Museum. Photo taken by Eric Long. Photo taken on December 28, 2016. (A19670093000.3T8A4249) (A19670093000-NASM2018-10363)

Marian Anderson

Marian Anderson (February 27, 1897 – April 8, 1993) was an American contralto. She performed a wide range of music, from opera to spirituals. Anderson performed with renowned orchestras in major concert and recital venues throughout the United States and Europe between 1925 and 1965.

Anderson was an important figure in the struggle for African American artists to overcome racial prejudice in the United States during the mid-twentieth century. In 1939, during the period of racial segregation, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to allow Anderson to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. The incident placed Anderson in the spotlight of the international community on a level unusual for a classical musician. With the aid of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anderson performed a critically acclaimed open-air concert on Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939, on the Lincoln Memorial steps in the capital. The event was featured in a documentary film, Marian Anderson: The Lincoln Memorial Concert. She sang before an integrated crowd of more than 75,000 people and a radio audience in the millions.

Lincoln Memorial Concert

On January 7, 1955, Anderson became the first African American singer to perform at the Metropolitan Opera. In addition, she worked as a delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee and as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United States Department of State, giving concerts all over the world. She participated in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, singing at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. The recipient of numerous awards and honors, Anderson was awarded the first Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963, the Congressional Gold Medal in 1977, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1978, the National Medal of Arts in 1986, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1991.

Source: Marian Anderson – Wikiwand. Accessed 27 Apr. 2024

Marian Anderson: The Whole World in Her Hands 

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Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn; May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange’s photographs influenced the development of documentary photography and humanized the consequences of the Great Depression.[1]

In the depths of the worldwide Depression, 1933, some fourteen million people in the U.S. were out of work; many were homeless, drifting aimlessly, often without enough food to eat. In the midwest and southwest drought and dust storms added to the economic havoc. During the decade of the 1930s some 300,000 men, women, and children migrated west to California, hoping to find work. Broadly, these migrant families were called by the opprobrium “Okies” (as from Oklahoma) regardless of where they came from. They traveled in old, dilapidated cars or trucks, wandering from place to place to follow the crops. Lange began to photograph these luckless folk, leaving her studio to document their lives in the streets and roads of California. She roamed the byways with her camera, portraying the extent of the social and economic upheaval of the Depression. It is here that Lange found her purpose and direction as a photographer. She was no longer a portraitist; but neither was she a photojournalist. Instead, she became known as one of the first of a new kind, a “documentary” photographer.[16]

“Dorothea Lange.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange. Accessed 6 Nov. 2021.

Words & Pictures:

Dorthea Lange: Words and Pictures via MoMa
Lange, Dorothea. Migrant Mother. Description of artwork. Year, Institution Name, City. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

One of Lange’s most recognized works is Migrant Mother, published in 1936.[18] The woman in the photograph is Florence Owens Thompson. In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:

“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

Dorothea Lange (June 1960)

Dorothea Lange (June 1960).
 “The Assignment I’ll Never Forget” (PDF). Popular Photography. 46 (2). pp. 42–43, 126.

Claude Cahun

Remarkable Women Claude Cahun
From Jersey Heritage Vimeo

“Claude Cahun (French pronunciation: ​[klod ka.œ̃], born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob,[1] 25 October 1894 – 8 December 1954) was a French surrealist photographer, sculptor, and writer.[2]

They adopted the pseudonym Claude Cahun in 1914.[3] Cahun is best known as a writer and self-portraitist, who assumed a variety of performative personae.

Cahun’s work is both political and personal. In Disavowals, she writes:

Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.

Claude Cahun

Around 1914, she changed her name to Claude Cahun, after having previously used the names Claude Courlis (after the curlew) and Daniel Douglas (after Lord Alfred Douglas). During the early 1920s, she settled in Paris with lifelong partner Suzanne Malherbe, who adopted the pseudonym Marcel Moore.[6]: 69 The two became step-siblings in 1917 after Cahun’s divorced father and Moore’s widowed mother married, eight years after Cahun and Moore’s artistic and romantic partnership began.[10] For the rest of their lives together, Cahun and Moore collaborated on various written works, sculptures, photomontages and collages. The two published articles and novels, notably in the periodical Mercure de France, and befriended Henri Michaux, Pierre Morhange, and Robert Desnos.

Collaboration with Marcel Moore

Cahun’s work was often a collaboration with Marcel Moore. Cahun and Moore collaborated frequently, though this often goes unrecognized. It is believed that Moore was often the person standing behind the camera during Cahun’s portrait shoots and was an equal partner in Cahun’s collages.[12]

With the majority of the photographs attributed to Cahun coming from a personal collection, not one meant for public display, it has been proposed that these personal photographs allowed for Cahun to experiment with gender presentation and the role of the viewer to a greater degree.[12]

During World War II, Cahun was also active as a resistance worker and propagandist. n 1944, Cahun and Moore were arrested and sentenced to death, but the sentence was never carried out, as the island was liberated from German occupation in 1945.[18] However, Cahun’s health never recovered from her treatment in jail, and she died in 1954. Cahun is buried in St Brelade’s Church with partner Marcel Moore.”

“Claude Cahun.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Cahun. Accessed 31 Oct. 2021.

Moms Mabley

Loretta Mary Aiken (March 19, 1894 – May 23, 1975),[1] known by her stage name Jackie “Moms” Mabley, was an American stand-up comedian and actress. Mabley began her career on the theater stage in the 1920s and became a veteran entertainer of the Chitlin’ Circuit of African-American vaudeville.

She came out as a lesbian in 1921 at the age of twenty-seven, becoming one of the first openly gay comedians.[13] During the 1920s and 1930s she appeared in androgynous clothing and recorded several “lesbian stand-up” routines.[14]

During the 1950s, Mabley—influenced by the maternal role she was filling for other comedians on the circuit—adopted the name “Moms” and the appearance of a toothless, bedraggled woman in a house dress and floppy hat. Mabley also credited the name to her grandmother, who had been a driving force in the pursuit of her dreams.[15] The non-threatening persona aided her in addressing topics too edgy for most comics of the time, including racism, sexuality and having children after becoming a widow.[16][17][18] A preference for handsome young men rather than “old washed-up geezers” became a signature bit.

Moms Mabley in character

Moms Mabley
CBS Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Whoopie Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley documentary:

Moms Mabley

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In the 1960s, Mabley became known to a wider white audience, playing Carnegie Hall in 1962,[19] and making a number of mainstream TV appearances, with multiple appearances on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.[20][21] 

Music became a regular part of her act, and a cover version of “Abraham, Martin and John” hit No. 35 on the Billboard Hot 100[1] on July 19, 1969, making Mabley, at 75, the oldest living person to have a U.S. Top 40 hit.[22] She played the Harlem Cultural Festival during this time.[23]

“Moms Mabley.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moms_Mabley. Accessed 16 July 2022.

Mom’s Mabley:
Don’t Sit On My Bed

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Tiny Broadwick

Georgia Ann “Tiny” Thompson Broadwick (April 8, 1893 in Oxford, North Carolina – August 25, 1978 in Long Beach, California), or Georgia Broadwick, previously known as Georgia Jacobs, and later known as Georgia Brown, was an American pioneering parachutist and the inventor of the ripcord. She was the first woman to jump from an airplane, and the first person to jump from a seaplane.

Tiny Broadwick was an abandoned mother working in a cotton mill, aged 15, when she saw Charles Broadwick‘s World Famous Aeronauts parachute from a hot air balloon and decided to join the travelling troupe, leaving her daughter in the care of her parents. She later became Broadwick’s adopted daughter, to ease travel arrangements. Although she would eventually make her jumps from airplanes, in her early career she jumped from balloons.

Billed as “the doll girl,” Tiny Broadwick began performing aerial skydives and stunts while wearing a “life preserver,” or parachute, designed by her adopted father, making her first jump out of a hot air balloon on December 28, 1908. The skydiving family traveled around and performed at fairs, carnivals, and parks. The appeal of the Broadwick flying troupe, according to Tiny Broadwick, was that “it was a very neat and fast act.”

Tiny Broadwick with open chute, c.1913-1922
State Archives of North Carolina, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
Interview with Tiny Broadwick

    In 1914, she demonstrated parachutes to the U.S. Army, which at the time had a small, hazardous fleet of aircraft. The Army, reluctant at first to adopt the parachute, watched as Tiny Broadwick dropped from the sky. On her fourth demonstration jump, the static line became entangled in the tail assembly of the aircraft, so for her next jump she cut the static line short and did not attach it to the plane. Instead, she deployed her chute manually by pulling the shortened, unattached line while in free-fall in what may have been the first planned free-fall jump from an airplane. This demonstrated that pilots could safely escape aircraft by using what was later called a ripcord.

    Also in 1914, Broadwick jumped into Lake Michigan, becoming the first woman to parachute into a body of water.

     She was then said to have made over 1,100 jumps. Although she was not a pilot, she was one of the few female members of the Early Birds of Aviation.

    In 1964, Tiny Broadwick donated a parachute, handmade by Charles Broadwick of 110 yards of silk, to the Smithsonian Air Museum, the precursor to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

    Source: Tiny Broadwick – Wikiwand. Accessed 27 Apr. 2024

    Tiny Broadwick Podcast

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    Augusta Savage

    “Augusta Savage (born Augusta Christine Fells; February 29, 1892 – March 27, 1962) was an American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance.[2] She was also a teacher whose studio was important to the careers of a generation of artists who would become nationally known. She worked for equal rights for African Americans in the arts.[3]“

    “Augusta Savage.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusta_Savage. Accessed 29 Oct. 2021.

    The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, and politics centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s.

    “Harlem Renaissance.” Wikipedia, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Renaissance. Accessed 29 Oct. 2021.

    Savage, Augusta. Gamin. Sculpture. 1929.
    via the Smithsonian American Art Museum

    Augusta Savage: African American Sculptor

    Augusta Savage: African American sculptor
    Augusta Savage
    US Gov., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

    Augusta Savage is best known for the piece that was commissioned for the 1939 New York World’s Fair called “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

    Savage was the only Black woman commissioned for the Fair, and the sculpture (which was retitled “The Harp” by organizers) was also sold as miniature replicas and on postcards during the event. Like other temporary installations, the sculpture was destroyed at the close of the fair.

    “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was first written as a poem by James Weldon Johnson. Today “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is one of the most cherished songs of the African American Civil Rights Movement and is often referred to as the Black National Anthem.

    Source: Lift Every Voice and Sing – Wikiwand

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    Bessie Coleman

    Bessie Coleman (January 26, 1892 – April 30, 1926)[2] was an early American civil aviator. She was the first African-American woman and first Native American to hold a pilot license.[3][4][5][6] She earned her license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale on June 15, 1921,[4][5][7] and was the first Black person to earn an international pilot’s license.[8]

    Born to a family of sharecroppers in Texas, Coleman worked in the cotton fields at a young age while also studying in a small segregated school. She attended one term of college at Langston University. Coleman developed an early interest in flying, but African Americans, Native Americans, and women had no flight training opportunities in the United States, so she saved and obtained sponsorships in Chicago to go to France for flight school.

    She then became a high-profile pilot in notoriously dangerous air shows in the United States. She was popularly known as Queen Bess and Brave Bessie,[9] and hoped to start a school for African-American fliers. Coleman died in a plane crash in 1926. Her pioneering role was an inspiration to early pilots and to the African-American and Native American communities.

    “Bessie Coleman.” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bessie_Coleman. Accessed 16 Dec. 2022.

    Bessie Coleman’s French Pilot’s License

    Embed from Getty Images

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