REVOLT, THEY SAID.
a project by Andrea Geyer. 2012 - ongoing
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BIOGRAPHIES OF WOMEN NAMED / LAST NAMES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
Josephine Paddock (1885–1964) was a painter in New York City. Educated at the Art Students League of New York, she was a versatile painter of oil and watercolor portraits and city scenes. Paddock and her younger sister Ethel Louise Paddock, also an accomplished artist, frequently summered at the art colony in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Among other venues, Paddock exhibited at New York’s National Academy of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, the 1951 Paris Salon, the Royal Institute of London, and the Parrish Museum in Southampton, New York. Most notably, she exhibited two small watercolor sketches of swans at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. The Josephine Paddock Fellowship is the highest award for graduate studies in the arts at Barnard College, Columbia University, in New York.

Bertha Honore Palmer (1849–1918) was a socialite and philanthropist from Chicago. She was an early member of the Chicago Women’s Club, a group of working women who met to discuss and propose solutions for social problems presented to women and children by patriarchy. Palmer was appointed the president of the Board of Lady Managers, which oversaw the architectural and interior design of the women’s building at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She worked with Sophia Hayden, Candace Wheeler, and Sarah Tyson Hallowell on the design, as well as the exhibitions and murals for the building. A successful curator, Hallowell proceeded to advise Palmer on the development of an unrivaled collection of Impressionist art, which would later constitute a significant portion of the Impressionist collection at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Eva Palmer-Sikelianos (1874–1952) was an American notable for her study and promotion of Classical Greek culture, theater, choral dance, and music. She both inspired and was inspired by the dancers Isadora Duncan and Ted Shawn, the French literary great Colette, the poet and author Natalie Barney and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. She co-organized a revival of the Delphic Festival in Delphi, Greece. With these festivals of art, music, and theater she hoped to promote a balanced sense of enlightenment that would further goals of peace and harmony in Greece and beyond.

Emmilie Pankhurst (1858- 1928) was a militant British suffragist who advocated for women's right to vote in Britain. Pankhurst’s politics were influenced by her father’s socialism and her mother’s active role in suffragist demonstrations. By the age of fourteen, Pankhurst had attended her first demonstration which lead to a lifetime of arrests, activities, and strikes against the government. She was the first to bring violence into the women’s struggle and revolutionized the notions of fragility attached to women of the Victorian era. She had financial support from powerful personalities as well as logistical support from both men and women, including her husband, Richard Pankhurst. He was the head of the Married Women's Property Committee (1868-1870) and responsible for the drafting of the Women's Property Bill that was passed by Parliament in 1870. The activities of Pankhurst’s organization, Women’s Social and Political Union, influenced and spread the urgency of this cause to the United States through the American members of WSPU, Lucy Burns and Alice Paul; these activists created a women’s political party in the United States known as the National Women’s Party in 1916. However, Pankhurst began to change her views after the declaration of the First World War. The woman who endured imprisonment, hunger strikes, and blatantly disobeyed the government for her cause realigned her agenda and fought in the name of her country. The WSPU suspended activities until the end of the war and Pankhurst became a government propagandist in the war effort and a member of the Conservative Party. She revived the suffragist movement after the war but tragically died shortly before women were given full voting rights.

Helen Parkhurst (1887–1973) was an educator, author, and lecturer from Wisconsin. She studied with educator Maria Montessori and received her M.A. in 1943 from Yale University. Parkhurst was the founder of the Dalton School and originator of the Dalton Plan, a school structure valuing a student’s independence and dependability.

Elizabeth “Eliza” Bliss Parkinson Cobb (1907–2001) was an art collector and former president of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. As the niece of Lillie Bliss, one of the museum’s founders, Eliza Parkinson was encouraged by her aunt’s longtime commitment to the arts and often recalled that Lillie Bliss’s original collection of Impressionist paintings had been stored in her parents’ attic, due to their disapproval of modern art. As a young woman, Parkinson chaired MoMA’s Junior Advisory Committee, then became a Trustee in 1939, co-founded the museum’s International Council, and served as the Council’s President from 1957–1966. She served as a member of virtually every museum committee, participating in curatorial, administrative, financial, educational, and archival areas, chairing, for example, the Building Committee from 1968 to 1977 and the Photography Committee from 1983 to 1987. Her deep and abiding interest in the museum’s staff was well known, and she encouraged their growth with the same vigor and spirit she showed in support of young artists. She was president of MoMA from 1965 to 1968 and remained an active vice chairman until 1993 when she became a life trustee.

Kathleen Parlow (1890–1963) was a Canadian child prodigy, ranked among the best violinists in the world and reaching prominence as one of a mere handful of musicians who represented Canada on the stages internationally. “The Lady of the Golden Bow” was famed as a child prodigy for her unassailable technique. She went on to a successful career as a concert soloist, touring extensively throughout North America and Europe. In 1936 she accepted a position at the Julliard School of Music, where she remained until World War II, when she returned to Canada. While living in Toronto, she was a regular performer with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and founded the successful Canadian Trio that gave concerts across the country. Parlow went on to start the Parlow String Quartet in 1942, which debuted on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1943.

Betty Parsons (1900–1982) was an American artist and art dealer known for her early promotion of Abstract Expressionism. She was known as “the den mother of Abstract Expressionism.” In 1946 she opened the Betty Parsons Gallery in Manhattan, which specialized in Abstract Expressionist works. Many of the artists she launched left her gallery for more commercial galleries, but Parson ran the gallery until her death in the early 1980s. When painter Helen Frankenthaler met Parsons in 1950, she said: “Betty and her gallery helped construct the center of the art world. She was one of the last of her breed.” Parsons was also a painter. Her work is held in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, both in Washington, D.C. Her personal papers and those from her gallery are held at the Archives of American Art.

Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons (1875–1941) was an American cultural anthropologist, sociologist, and folklorist, known for her work among the Hopi and Pueblo tribes. Although she was born into a socially prominent family, she became an outspoken feminist and social critic. She graduated from Barnard College in 1896, and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University a few years later. Her book The Family, which argued for candid sexual education and trial marriage, was published in 1906. She was associate editor for The Journal of American Folklore and helped found the New School for Social Research. Parsons served as president of the American Folklore Society of the American Ethnological Society, and she was elected the first female president of the American Anthropological Association, although she died before giving her inaugural speech. Parsons believed that folklore was a key to understanding a culture and that anthropology could be a vehicle for social change. Every other year, in her honor, the American Ethnological Society awards the Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for the best graduate student essay.

Lucy Parsons (1853–1942) was an American labor organizer, radical socialist, and anarchist communist. Parsons was of African-American, Native-American, and Mexican descent and often went by other surnames to attempt to avoid racial prejudice. As socialist and anarchist ideology was introduced to workers in the United States, Parsons became radicalized and began writing for both the Socialist and the Alarm, the journal for the International Working People’s Association, which she founded with her husband, Albert Parsons. After he was executed for supposedly conspiring in the Haymarket Riots, Parsons remained one of the leading American radical activists, focusing on class struggles and poverty. These priorities often found her clashing with activists such as Emma Goldman who opposed her putting issues of class before those of gender. Parsons briefly participated in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905 and began editing the Liberator, an anarchist newspaper in Chicago. She also organized the Chicago Hunger Demonstrations in January 1915, which pushed the American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party, and Jane Addams’s Hull House to participate in a huge demonstration in February of that year. Parsons was quoted as saying, “My conception of the strike of the future is not to strike and go out and starve, but to strike and remain in and take possession of the necessary property of production.” For almost seventy years, she fought for the rights of the poor and disenfranchised in the face of an increasingly oppressive industrial economic system. Parson’s radical activism challenged racist and sexist sentiment in a time when even radical Americans believed that a woman’s place was in the home. After her death in a house fire in 1942, police seized all of her fifteen hundred books and personal papers.

Pelegrina Pastorino was an editor and translator. She was a friend and collaborator with Victoria Ocampo, the influential writer and publisher of the legendary literary magazine Sur. Together they established the anti-Nazi magazine Lettres Francaises during World War II.

Marvin Breckinridge Patterson (1905–2002) was born into a prominent political and industrial family. After observing the activism of the International Confederation of Students in Copenhagen in 1925, she joined students at Princeton and formed the National Student Federation of America. After college she worked as the first female courier in her cousin’s Frontier Nursing Service. She studied cinematography in order to make a publicity film about the Frontier Medical Service, released in 1930 as The Forgotten Frontier. In 1932 Patterson traveled across Africa with Olivia Stokes Hatch. Hatch released a journal of their travels, illustrated with Patterson’s photographs. Thus began Patterson’s career as a photojournalist, which took her to Turkey, Palestine, and France. After documenting the evacuations of children from British cities at the onset of World War II, Patterson was interviewed on CBS radio as an eyewitness. She continued to work in broadcasting internationally during the war. After retiring from journalism, she focused her work on philanthropy. She was on the Boar d of Directors of the National Symphony Orchestra, the Women’s Committee on the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Women’s Committee of the Smithsonian Institution Associates, and the International Council of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Alice Paul (1885–1977) was a suffragist and activist from Mt. Laurel, New Jersey. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania as well as a doctorate in civil law from American University. She began her activist career after graduation by joining the National American Woman Suffrage Association, where she was appointed Chairwoman of their Congressional Committee. She led the organization’s lobbying of congress for a constitutional amendment that would secure women the right to vote. This became a point of contention within NAWSA, and Paul eventually formed the National Woman’s Party in 1916 with Lucy Burns and other colleagues. The following year, the National Woman’s Party picketed the White House, demanding the right to vote. The picketing—just one example of Paul’s nonviolent civil disobedience tactics—led to her arrest and a brief stay in jail, where she went on hunger strike to protest the poor conditions of the prison. After continued pressure from suffrage groups, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed, granting women the right to vote. Paul was also the original writer of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, which is still under Congressional consideration today.

Anna Pavlova (1881–1931) was a prima ballerina best known for her creation of the role of the Dying Swan. She was a principal artist of the Imperial Russian Ballet and the Ballets Russes of Sergei Diaghilev, and later toured the world with her own troupe, the first ballerina to do so. Her unlikely career began with training at the Imperial Ballet School when she was just ten years old, taking extra lessons to improve her technique. After rising as a prima ballerina and performing and choreographing for Ballets Russes, Pavlova settled in London in 1912 and became influential in the development of British Ballet, most notably inspiring the career of Alicia Markova. She was an ardent classicist however, restricting her troupe to ballets such as Giselle and Sleeping Beauty and never committing to more of the emerging avant-garde ballets. Pavlova also used her success for charitable work after World War I, purchasing a home in Paris to house fifteen Russian girls who had been orphaned in the war. Pavlova died after refusing treatment for pneumonia just before her fiftieth birthday; her last words were “Get my Swan costume ready.”

Joan Whitney Payson (1903–1975) was an American heiress, businesswoman, philanthropist, patron of the arts, and member of the prominent Whitney family. She was a majority owner of the New York Mets, the first woman to own a Major League Baseball team without inheriting it, and was instrumental in founding the team when the New York Giants moved to San Francisco. Payson was also an art collector, amassing a collection of mostly Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work, much of which she donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the Joan Whitney Payson Galleries can be found. Her collection is on permanent loan to the Portland Museum of Art and Colby College as part of a recurring educational tour of the collection throughout the United States. She also helped with operations of her family’s Greentree stable, an equestrian estate and horse-racing stable in Saratoga Springs, New York.

Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) was a painter born in Germany to American parents. Her family moved to Brooklyn in 1890, where she began studying at the Pratt Institute in 1895. After 1900 Pelton trained independently until pursuing further education at the British Academy in Rome. She was invited to exhibit two paintings in the 1913 Armory Show. In 1919 she visited Pueblo Indians in the American Southwest, where she painted portraits and desert landscapes. She painted portraits and still lifes in Hawaii in 1923 and 1924. Pelton settled in Cathedral City, California in 1932, and resided there until her death in 1961. Her work is among the collections of many American museums, including the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California and the Parrish Art Museum.

Hélène Perdriat (1894–1969) was a painter and illustrator born in La Rochelle, France. Perdriat began painting while ill at the age of twenty-one, and spent much of her recovery creating portraits of herself, her friends, and her family. After a trip to Norway where her paintings were well received, Perdriat went on to exhibit in London, Berlin, New York, Chicago, and Paris. She received no formal training and had a distinct and personally poetic style. Her work is included in many prominent collections, including the Katherine Dreier Collection.

Irene Rice Pereira (1902–1971) was an American abstract artist, poet, and philosopher, who grew up in Massachusetts and New York. She played a significant role in the development of Modernism in America, using the principles of the Bauhaus in much of her work. Best known for Geometric abstraction and Abstract Expressionism, Pereira attended some sessions at the Académie Moderne in Paris but primarily studied at the Art Students League in New York, alongside colleagues Hilla Rebay and Arshile Gorky. She exhibited at the ACA Galleries and the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she became the first woman to receive a retrospective at a major New York museum.

Francis Perkins (1880–1965) became the first woman to be appointed to the U.S. Cabinet in 1933 as the U.S. Secretary of Labor. She served until 1945, helping to integrate the labor movement into the New Deal coalition. Perkins advocated many public works and social justice-based initiatives, including the Social Security Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act. Her work was key in establishing unemployment benefits, pensions, and welfare benefits for the poor as well as minimum-wage and overtime laws. She had advocated for similar reforms while working at various positions in the New York State government before being appointed to the cabinet. After her time as Secretary of Labor, Perkins served on the U.S. Civil Service Commission until 1952. She went on to work as a teacher and lecturer at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University until her death in 1965.

Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence (1867–1954) was a British women’s rights activist. She attended private schools in England, France, and Germany, and her independent-minded father greatly influenced her own passion for justice and her willingness to go to great lengths to fight for it. With Mary Neal in 1895, Pethick-Lawrence founded the Espérance Club for working-class girls, advocating an eight-hour day, minimum wage, and annual holiday. In 1906 she joined the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and was appointed treasurer; her home became the organization’s London headquarters and a hospice for suffragettes recovering from their prison experience. She herself served six terms of imprisonment for her involvement in direct actions. She and her husband edited the journal Votes for Women. In 1912, they were expelled from the WSPU for their opposition to the window-smashing and arson campaigns organized by Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst. During the 1920s, Pethick-Lawrence became involved Marie Stopes’s birth control campaign, a program unfortunately tainted by Stopes’s racist commitment to eugenics.

Pauline Pfeiffer (1895–1951) was an American journalist. She was born in Iowa and moved to St. Louis with her family in 1901. She attended the University of Missouri Journalism School in Columbia, Missouri, writing headlines for the local newspaper. After graduation, Pfeiffer left for New York and began writing for the New York Morning Telegraph. She later worked for Vanity Fair and Vogue. Her work with Vogue sent her to Paris, where she remained until retiring to Key West, Florida, in 1928.

Marjorie Acker Phillips (1893–1985) began painting while studying at the Art Students League of New York in 1915. She painted a variety of scenes, from farm landscapes to urban cityscapes, in a distinct Post-Impressionist style. Phillips participated in numerous major exhibitions, including Century of Progress in Chicago in 1933 and was notably collected by patron Katherine Dreier. Phillips herself developed a collection of contemporary art and photography, much of which is housed in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts and in Washington, D.C., at the Phillips Collection.

Suzanne Phocas (1897–unknown) was a painter born in Lille, France, and raised in Greece. Her paintings, part naïve and part Cubist, were among those collected by Katherine Dreier and included in the Société Anonyme.

Marjorie Pickthall (1883–1922) was an English librarian, writer, and poet who grew up in Toronto, Ontario. She sold her first story “Two-ears” to the Toronto Globe while still a student at Bishop Strachan School. She was employed as an assistant librarian at Victoria College Library, Toronto, from 1910 to 1912. Pickthall moved to England in 1912 and lived near Salisbury until 1919. She participated in World War I as an ambulance driver, farm laborer, and library clerk. After the war she returned to Toronto, then moved to Vancouver, where she continued to write. Pickthall published over two bundred short stories and approximately one hundred poems along with numerous articles in journals such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and Scribner’s. She also contributed to young people’s magazines.

Mary Pickford (1892–1979) was one of silent film’s major actresses and producers. Born in Toronto, Pickford began her career touring the United States with local productions. By 1907 Mary earned a supporting role on Broadway and screen-tested for the Biograph Company in 1909. She appeared in over fifty films in 1909 alone and became instantly identifiable by audiences. Pickford worked entirely in film after 1913, when she joined Paramount pictures. As the most famous actress of the 1920s, she starred in fifty-two feature films over the course of her career including The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), Pollyanna (1920) and Little Lord Fauntlery (1921). In 1929 she won an Oscar for her performance in Coquette. The end of film’s silent er a, as well as Pickford’s ascent into middle age, brought waning box-office sales. She retired from acting in 1933 but continued to produce Hollywood films. She helped establish United Artists in 1919, a film distribution company that exceptionally supported independent filmmakers.

Caroline H. Polhemus  was an art collector. She donated a collection of paintings to the Brooklyn Institute of Art and Sciences, which later became the Brooklyn Museum, and $10,000 to preserve and expand the collection.

Lina Poletti (1885–1971) was an Italian feminist, best known for her affairs with writer Sibilla Aleramo and actress Eleanora Duse. She is credited with being one of the first Italian women to openly describe herself as a lesbian. Poletti attended the First National Congress of Women in Rome, where she met Aleramo, who would go on to become one of Italy’s leading feminists.

Anna Pollitzer (1823–1915) was a friend of painter Georgia O’Keeffe. She introduced O’Keeffe’s work to gallery owner and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who went on to champion O’Keeffe’s career.
Theodate Pope (1867–1946) was an American architect known for her design of the Avon Old Farms School and Westover School. In 1926 she became the first woman to be a licensed architect in both New York State and Connecticut. She had graduated from Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, and hired faculty members as private tutors in architecture. With her professor and maid, Pope was a passenger on the ocean liner Lusitania that was torpedoed by a German submarine in 1915. She was the only one of her companions to survive.

Lyubov Popova (1889–1924) was a Russian avant-garde painter born near Moscow. She began studying painting at age eleven through private lessons at her home. By 1913 she had been influenced by Cubism and Futurism, using the term “painterly architectonics” to describe many of her paintings. In 1916 she joined the Suprematist movement of Russia’s revolutionary avant garde. Her paintings earned her the recognition of American collector Katherine Dreier, who added Popova’s work to the Société Anonyme. Popova eventually focused more on political efforts and became associated with the Constructivists, who emphasized the use of art for social purposes. By 1921 the group would reject easel paintings and devote their creative work to the service of social revolution. Popova worked extensively on theater and textile design, collaborating in the early 1920s with her Constructivist colleague Varvara Stepanova to create textiles for mass manufacture at the First State Textile Factory in Moscow.

Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887–1973) was a businesswoman and socialite born in Springfield, Illinois. At age twenty-seven, Post inherited the Postum Cereal Company, subsequently becoming the wealthiest woman in America. Post was responsible for expanding the company’s production and changed the name to General Foods Corporation in 1929. From 1937 to 1938, Post lived in the Soviet Union, at which time she became an art collector and acquired many valuable works originally owned by the Romanov family and other Russian aristocrats. This large collection can be viewed at Hillwood, a Washington, D.C., estate where Post formerly resided. Many pieces of Marjorie Post’s jewelry collection are on view at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., including the Blue Heart Diamond and a pair of diamond earrings that once belonged to Marie Antoinette.

Grace Potter was a New York–based social worker, Freudian psychoanalyst, and staff journalist at the New York World. She was secretary of the 1909 Free Speech Committee and participated in the first New York protest meeting against the death sentence for recently convicted Japanese anarchists and socialists. Potter was a member of the Heterodoxy Club, a feminist debate club in Greenwich Village, as well as an accomplished writer. She contributed articles to the New York Call, Everyman, Physical Culture, and Mother Earth, including its inaugural issue. Her article “What We Did To Bernard Carlin” was first published in Mother Earth.

Lillian Powell (1896–1992) was a Canadian-born American dancer who performed in early and experimental silent films, later pursuing a twenty-year career in television. She trained at the Denishawn studio in California, eventually touring with the troupe and performing the title role in Julnar of the Sea. She pursued teaching dance and physical education throughout the 1930s and ’40s, and in 1954 she began acting in television productions with roles in classic series such as Dragnet, The Man Behind the Badge, and My Three Sons. Powell retired in 1970.

Caroline Ladd Pratt (1861–1946) was a trustee at both Pratt Institute and the Brooklyn Museum.

Florence Balsdon Gibb Pratt was a civic leader and art collector who resided primarily in and around New York City. She was involved in campaigning for women’s suffrage as well as for the repeal of Prohibition. She was also was a lender to the 1913 Armory show.

Pearl Primus (1919–1994) was a Trinidadian dancer, choreographer, and anthropologist raised in New York City. She attended Hunter College and graduated with a degree in biology. Unable to find a laboratory job open to blacks and seeking support for graduate studies, she applied to the National Youth Administration and was enrolled in a dance group. She later studied with the New Dance Group, where she connected with modern dance pioneers such as Martha Graham. They encouraged her to continue dancing, and she was able to combine her anthropological and social education studies with her dance training. Her first compositions combining dance and her research on Afro-Caribbean dance were performed in 1943 at the 92nd Street YMHA to rave reviews. Later that year, she would perform in front of 20,000 people at Madison Square Garden during the Negro Freedom Rally. Primus traveled to the Deep South to research the culture and dances of Southern black communities. After a national tour and sequence of major theater productions, she was awarded a fellowship to study dance in West Africa. Primus received her Ph.D. from New York University in 1978 and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1991.

Ida Sedgwick Proper (1873–1957) was an American painter and member of the Heterodoxy, a feminist debate group based in Greenwich Village.

Nancy Elizabeth Prophet (1890–1960) was a sculptor of African-American decent. Encouraged by family and friends after high school, Prophet enrolled in the renowned Rhode Island School of Design, working as a domestic to pay her tuition. Graduating at the time of the Harlem Renaissance, she lived in uptown New York briefly. In 1922, with financial assistance from Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Prophet went to Paris to study. While there she came to the attention of artist Henry O. Tanner. Her work impressed him, and he recommended her for the Harmon Foundation Prize, which she won. She exhibited at the Paris August Salons from 1924–1927 and at the Salon d’Automne in 1931 and 1932. In the United States, her works were shown in group exhibitions throughout the 1930s through the Harmon Foundation and the Whitney Sculpture Biennial. In 1932 she returned to the States and began teaching at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1939 Prophet began teaching at Atlanta University. Realizing there was little room for opportunity for her as an African-American woman to become part of the Atlanta art community, she returned to Rhode Island in 1945, but a lack of contacts in her field forced her to start her career over. Prophet went to work as a domestic again. She had one known solo exhibition in 1945 at the Providence Public Library. She died in poverty and obscurity. In 1978 her pieces were part of the Four from Providence exhibition at the Bannister Gallery of Rhode
Island College.

Dorothy Puccinelli (1901–1974) was a multitalented and bold San Francisco­–based painter, sculptor, stage designer, and interior decorator. Born in Texas, she was raised in Half Moon Bay, California, and studied at the California School of Fine Arts and the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design. She was one of the pioneers in the Federal Art Project, painting a mural at the post office in Merced, and, with Helen Forbes, creating egg-tempura murals depicting scenes from the story of Noah’s Ark in the Mother’s Building at the San Francisco Zoo.

Nina Wilcox Putnam (1888–1962) was a prolific American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright who wrote over five hundred short stories, a thousand magazine articles, several books, regular newspaper columns, and comic books. “I and George,” her syndicated column for the Saturday Evening Post, was carried by four hundred newspapers. Though her novels brought her the most success, Putnam made her mark on the world of comic books with Sunny Funny Bunny and the comic strips “Witty Kitty.” Many of her stories were turned into movies, including The Mummy (1932), starring Boris Karloff, as well as The Fourth Horseman, Sitting Pretty, and The Beauty Prize. Putnam wrote the screenplay for Democracy: The Vision Restored (1920) and was estimated to have earned a million dollars for her writing by 1942. Putnam was also a vocal advocate for Victorian dress reform, decrying the horrors of corsets and experimenting with her own dress designs.

Mary Pyne (c. 1896–1919) was a reporter for the New York Press and a member of the theater collective the Provincetown Players. She was known to be in a romantic relationship with writer Djuna Barnes at the time of Pyne’s death in 1919.

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