The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
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List of the most influential female people in Communications,
#3201
Dorothy Kilgallen
1913 - 1965 (52 years)
Dorothy Mae Kilgallen was an American columnist, journalist, and television game show panelist. After spending two semesters at the College of New Rochelle, she started her career shortly before her 18th birthday as a reporter for the Hearst Corporation's New York Evening Journal. In 1938, she began her newspaper column "The Voice of Broadway", which was eventually syndicated to more than 140 papers. In 1950, she became a regular panelist on the television game show What's My Line?, continuing in the role until her death.
Go to Profile#3202
Anita Loos
1889 - 1981 (92 years)
Corinne Anita Loos was an American actress, novelist, playwright and screenwriter. In 1912, she became the first female staff screenwriter in Hollywood, when D. W. Griffith put her on the payroll at Triangle Film Corporation. She is best known for her 1925 comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and her 1951 Broadway adaptation of Colette's novella Gigi.
Go to Profile#3203
Adela Rogers St. Johns
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Adela Nora Rogers St. Johns was an American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. She wrote a number of screenplays for silent movies, but is best remembered for her groundbreaking exploits as "The World's Greatest Girl Reporter" during the 1920s and 1930s and her celebrity interviews for Photoplay magazine.
Go to Profile#3204
Violeta Parra
1917 - 1967 (50 years)
Violeta del Carmen Parra Sandoval was a Chilean composer, singer-songwriter, folklorist, ethnomusicologist and visual artist. She pioneered the Nueva Canción Chilena , a renewal and a reinvention of Chilean folk music that would extend its sphere of influence outside Chile.
Go to Profile#3205
Leatrice Joy
1893 - 1985 (92 years)
Leatrice Joy was an American actress most prolific during the silent film era. Early life Joy was born in New Orleans, Louisiana to dentist Edward Joseph Zeidler, who was of Austrian and French descent, and Mary Joy Crimens, who was of German and Irish descent. She had a brother, Billy, who later worked at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Go to Profile#3206
Una Merkel
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Una Merkel was an American stage, film, radio, and television actress. Merkel was born in Kentucky and acted on stage in New York in the 1920s. She went to Hollywood in 1930 and became a popular film actress. Two of her best-known performances are in the films 42nd Street and Destry Rides Again. She won a Tony Award in 1956 and was nominated for an Oscar in 1961.
Go to Profile#3207
Ma Rainey
1886 - 1939 (53 years)
Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was an American blues singer and influential early-blues recording artist. Dubbed the "Mother of the Blues", she bridged earlier vaudeville and the authentic expression of southern blues, influencing a generation of blues singers. Rainey was known for her powerful vocal abilities, energetic disposition, majestic phrasing, and a "moaning" style of singing. Her qualities are present and most evident in her early recordings "Bo-Weevil Blues" and "Moonshine Blues".
Go to Profile#3208
Maria von Trapp
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Maria Augusta von Trapp DHS , often styled as “Baroness”, was the stepmother and matriarch of the Trapp Family Singers. She wrote The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, which was published in 1949 and was the inspiration for the 1956 West German film The Trapp Family, which in turn inspired the 1959 Broadway musical The Sound of Music and its 1965 film version.
Go to Profile#3209
Elsie Ferguson
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Elsie Louise Ferguson was an American stage and film actress. Seen by some as an early feminist, she promoted suffrage, which she discussed in interviews, and supported animal rights. Early life Born in New York City, Elsie Ferguson was the only child of Hiram and Amelia Ferguson. Her father was a successful attorney. Raised and educated in Manhattan, she became interested in the theater at a young age and made her stage debut at 17 as a chorus girl in a musical comedy. For almost two years, from 1903 to 1905, she was a cast member in The Girl from Kays. In 1908, she was leading lady to Edgar Selwyn in Pierre of the Plains.
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Constance Talmadge
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
Constance Alice Talmadge was an American silent film star. She was the sister of actresses Norma and Natalie Talmadge. Early life Talmadge was born on April 19, 1898, in Brooklyn, New York, to poor parents, Margaret L. "Peg" and Frederick O. Talmadge. Her father was an alcoholic, and left them when she was still very young. Her mother made a living by doing laundry. When a friend recommended Talmadge's mother use older sister Norma as a model for title slides in flickers, which were shown in early nickelodeons, Peg decided to do so. This led all three sisters into acting careers.
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Mary Gray Peck
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
Mary Gray Peck was an American journalist, educator, suffragist, and clubwoman. She was interested in economic and industrial problems of women, and investigated labor conditions in Europe and the United States. Born in New York, she studied at Elmira College, University of Minnesota, and University of Cambridge before becoming an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Later, she became associated with the General Federation of Women's Clubs, College Equal Suffrage League, National American Woman Suffrage Association, Women's Trade Union League, Woman Suffrage Party, and the Modern Language Association.
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Anny Ondra
1902 - 1987 (85 years)
Anny Ondra was a Czech film actress. She began her career in 1920 and appeared in Czech, German, Austrian, French and English films. In 1933, she married German boxing champion Max Schmeling. Life Ondra was born in Tarnów to Czech parents, Bohumír Ondrák, an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and Anna Ondráková . She had two brothers, Tomáš and Jindřich. She spent her childhood in Tarnów, Pula and Prague. At seventeen she acted in the theatre and in her first film, which was directed by her then boyfriend, director and actor Karel Lamač. When her family learned of it, they had a shouting m...
Go to Profile#3213
Edna May Oliver
1883 - 1942 (59 years)
Edna May Oliver was an American stage and film actress. During the 1930s, she was one of the better-known character actresses in American films, often playing tart-tongued spinsters. Career Born in Malden, Massachusetts, the daughter of Ida May and Charles Edward Nutter, Oliver quit school at age 14 to pursue a stage career.
Go to Profile#3214
Alice Brady
1892 - 1939 (47 years)
Alice Brady was an American actress who began her career in the silent film era and survived the transition into talkies. She worked until six months before her death from cancer in 1939. Her films include My Man Godfrey , in which she plays the flighty mother of Carole Lombard's character, and In Old Chicago for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Go to Profile#3215
Rosa Ponselle
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Rosa Ponzillo, known as Rosa Ponselle was an American operatic dramatic soprano. She sang mainly at the New York Metropolitan Opera and is generally considered to have been one of the greatest sopranos of the 20th century.
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Lois Weber
1879 - 1939 (60 years)
Florence Lois Weber was an American silent film director, screenwriter, producer and actress. She is identified in some historical references as among "the most important and prolific film directors in the era of silent films". Film historian Anthony Slide has also asserted, "Along with D.W.Griffith, Weber was the American cinema's first genuine auteur, a filmmaker involved in all aspects of production and one who utilized the motion picture to put across her own ideas and philosophies".
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Pernel Strachey
1876 - 1951 (75 years)
Pernel Strachey or Joan Pernel Strachey was an English scholar of French and Principal of Newnham College. Life Strachey was born in Clapham Common in London in 1876. She came from a large family led by Lieutenant General Sir Richard Strachey and the suffragist Jane Maria Strachey. Her mother was a friend of Millicent Garrett Fawcett who had co-founded Newnham College in Cambridge. Her brothers included Lytton Strachey and Oliver Strachey, husband of Ray Costelloe.
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Big Mama Thornton
1926 - 1984 (58 years)
Willie Mae Thornton , better known as Big Mama Thornton because of her height and weight , was an American singer and songwriter of the blues and R&B. She was the first to record Leiber and Stoller's "Hound Dog", in 1952, which was written for her and became her biggest hit, staying seven weeks at number one on the Billboard R&B chart in 1953. According to Maureen Mahon, a music professor at New York University, "the song is seen as an important beginning of rock-and-roll, especially in its use of the guitar as the key instrument".
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Doris Lloyd
1896 - 1968 (72 years)
Hessy Doris Lloyd was an English–American film and stage actress. She is perhaps best known for her roles in The Time Machine and The Sound of Music . Lloyd appeared in two Academy Award winners and four other nominees.
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Nada Klaić
1920 - 1988 (68 years)
Nada Klaić was a Croatian historian. She was a Croatian medievalist of the 20th century. A substantial part of the work was devoted to criticism of medieval sources. Academic career Nada Klaić was born in Zagreb, the granddaughter of the historian Vjekoslav Klaić and sister of landscape architect Smiljan Klaić. She was a university professor and a prominent Croatian medievalist, graduated at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb, the same faculty where she was involved in teaching for 45 years. She started her teaching and scientific career at the faculty's Department of History in 1943, to become a full professor of the Croatian medieval history in 1969.
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Frida Leider
1888 - 1975 (87 years)
Frida Leider was a German operatic soprano. Leider was a dramatic soprano. Her most famous roles were Wagner's Isolde and Brünnhilde, Beethoven's Fidelio, Mozart's Donna Anna, and Verdi's Aida and Leonora. She made over 80 recordings, mainly for Polydor and HMV.
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Viola Dana
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Viola Dana was an American film actress who was successful during the era of silent films. She appeared in over 100 films, but was unable to make the transition to sound films. Early life Born Virginia Flugrath on June 26, 1897, in Brooklyn, New York City, where she was raised, she was the middle sister of three siblings who all became actresses. Her sisters were known as Edna Flugrath and Shirley Mason. Dana appeared on the stage at the age of three. She read Shakespeare and particularly identified with the teenage Juliet. She enjoyed a long run at the Hudson Theater in Manhattan. Between 19...
Go to Profile#3223
Mary Robinson
1758 - 1800 (42 years)
Mary Robinson was an English actress, poet, dramatist, novelist, and celebrity figure. She lived in England, in the cities of Bristol and London; she also lived in France and Germany for a time. She enjoyed poetry from the age of seven and started working, first as a teacher and then as actress, from the age of fourteen. She wrote many plays, poems and novels. She was a celebrity, gossiped about in newspapers, famous for her acting and writing. During her lifetime she was known as "the English Sappho". She earned her nickname "Perdita" for her role as Perdita in 1779. She was the first publi...
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Milka Ternina
1863 - 1941 (78 years)
Milka Ternina was a Croatian dramatic soprano who enjoyed a high reputation in major American and European opera houses. Praised by audiences and music critics alike for the electrifying force of her acting and the excellence of her singing in both German and Italian works, her career was curtailed at its peak in 1906 by a medical condition which paralyzed a nerve in her face.
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Maxine Sullivan
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
Maxine Sullivan , born Marietta Williams in Homestead, Pennsylvania, United States, was an American jazz vocalist and performer. As a vocalist, Sullivan was active for half a century, from the mid-1930s to just before her death in 1987. She is best known for her 1937 recording of a swing version of the Scottish folk song "Loch Lomond". Throughout her career, Sullivan also appeared as a performer on film as well as on stage. A precursor to better-known later vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, Sullivan is considered one of the best jazz vocalists of the 1930s. Singer Peggy Lee ...
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Elizabeth Hill
1900 - 1996 (96 years)
Dame Elizabeth Mary Hill DBE was a Russian-born British academic linguist. In addition to a career with the London University School of Slavonic Studies, she was course director of the Joint Services School for Linguists , a UK Government training programme to produce linguists and interpreters of Russian, for military and intelligence purposes.
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Izumo no Okuni
1572 - Present (454 years)
Izumo no Okuni was a Japanese entertainer and shrine maiden who is believed to have invented the theatrical art form of kabuki. She is thought to have begun performing her new art style of theatre in the dry riverbed of the Kamo River in Kyoto. Okuni's troupe quickly gained immense popularity, and were known for their performers, who were often lower-class women Okuni had recruited to act in her all-female theatre group.
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Charlotte Greenwood
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Frances Charlotte Greenwood was an American actress and dancer. Born in Philadelphia, Greenwood started in vaudeville, and starred on Broadway, movies and radio. Standing almost six feet tall , she was best known for her long legs and high kicks. She earned the unique praise of being, in her words, the "only woman in the world who could kick a giraffe in the eye."
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Claire Du Brey
1892 - 1993 (101 years)
Claire Du Brey was an American actress. She appeared in more than 200 films from 1916 to 1959. Her name is sometimes rendered as Claire Du Bray or as Claire Dubrey. Early years Du Brey was born in Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, to an Irish-American mother, Lilly , later Mrs. Richard Fugitt. Her parents married on November 9, 1891 in Pocatello, Bannock County, Idaho. She was raised Catholic and attended a convent school.
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Elizabeth Cotten
1893 - 1987 (94 years)
Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten was an American folk and blues musician. She was a self-taught left-handed guitarist who played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down. This position meant that she would play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as "Cotten picking". NPR stated "her influence has reverberated through the generations, permeating every genre of music."
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Bess Flowers
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Bess Flowers was an American actress best known for her work as an extra in hundreds of films. She was known as "The Queen of the Hollywood Extras," appearing in more than 350 feature films and numerous comedy shorts in her 41-year career.
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Isa Miranda
1909 - 1982 (73 years)
Isa Miranda was an Italian actress with an international film career. Biography Miranda was born Ines Isabella Sampietro in Milan, the daughter of a street car conductor. When she was 10 years old, she began working as an errand girl for a dressmaker. She later had jobs in a box factory and a handbag factory. When she was 15, she became a model, a job that provided enough income for her to learn bookkeeping and typing in night school. She worked as a typist while attending the Accademia dei Filodrammatici in Milan and trained as a stage actress. She went on to play bit parts in Italian films in Rome.
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Stefi Geyer
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Stefi Geyer was a Hungarian violinist who was considered one of the leading violinists of her generation. Biography Born in 1888 in Budapest, she was the daughter of Josef Geyer, a police doctor who played the violin himself. When she was 5 years old she started playing the violin, with remarkable results for someone who had not practiced at all. She subsequently studied under Jenő Hubay.
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Etta Lemon
1860 - 1953 (93 years)
Margaretta "Etta" Louisa Lemon was an English bird conservationist and a founding member of what is now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds . She was born into an evangelical Christian family in Kent, and after her father's death she increasingly campaigned against the use of plumage in hatmaking which had led to billions of birds being killed for their feathers. She founded the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk with Eliza Phillips in Croydon in 1889, which two years later merged with Emily Williamson's Manchester-based Society for the Protection of Birds , also founded in 1889. The new or...
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Cass Elliot
1941 - 1974 (33 years)
Ellen Naomi Cohen , known professionally as Cass Elliot, was an American singer and voice actress. She was also known as "Mama Cass", but she reportedly hated the name. She was a member of the singing group the Mamas & the Papas. After the group broke up, Elliot released five solo albums. She received the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Performance for "Monday, Monday" . In 1998, she was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for her work with the Mamas & the Papas.
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Helene Chadwick
1897 - 1940 (43 years)
Helene Chadwick was an American actress in silent and in early sound films. Early life and career Chadwick was born in the small town of Chadwicks, New York, which was named for her great-grandfather. Her parents were George W. Chadwick Jr. and Marie Louise Norton Chadwick. Her mother was a singer who performed on the stage and her father was a business man.
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Marilyn Monroe
1926 - 1962 (36 years)
Marilyn Monroe was an American actress and model. Known for playing comic "blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as an emblem of the era's sexual revolution. She was a top-billed actress for a decade, and her films grossed $200 million by the time of her death in 1962. Long after her death, Monroe remains a pop culture icon. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her as the sixth-greatest female screen legend from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
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Ethel Clayton
1882 - 1966 (84 years)
Ethel Clayton was an American actress of the silent film era. Early years Born in Champaign, Illinois, Clayton attended St. Elizabeth's school in Chicago. Career Clayton debuted on stage as a professional as a member of the chorus in a production at the Chicago Opera House. After that, she worked with stock theater companies in Milwaukee and Minneapolis.
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Nadia Reisenberg
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Nadia Reisenberg Sherman was an American pianist of Lithuanian birth. Biography Nadia Reisenberg was born in Vilnius to a Jewish family. Her parents were Aaron and Rachel Reisenberg. Her sister Anna was born two years later, and Clara in 1911 who later took the married name of Clara Rockmore and became renowned for her virtuosity on the theremin. The three sisters remained extremely close. When Nadia was six, her uncle Paul sent the family a piano, and Nadia immediately knew she would be at the keyboard for the rest of her life. Her talent demanded that the family move to St. Petersburg for ...
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Alice Blinn
1889 - 1982 (93 years)
Alice Blinn was an American educator, home efficiency expert, and magazine editor. Born in Candor, New York, she attended the New York State normal school and became a teacher. After teaching briefly, in 1913, she entered Cornell University and earned a degree in Domestic Science. While in school, she founded and managed the Cornell Women's Review. After graduation in 1917, she became a food conservation demonstrator for the New York Extension Service and then returned after a year to teach and manage the publications office for the Extension Service at Cornell.
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Mabel Normand
1892 - 1930 (38 years)
Amabel Ethelreid Normand , better known as Mabel Normand, was an American silent film actress, director and screenwriter. She was a popular star and collaborator of Mack Sennett in their Keystone Studios films, and at the height of her career in the late 1910s and early 1920s had her own film studio and production company, the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. On screen, she appeared in twelve successful films with Charlie Chaplin and seventeen with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, sometimes writing and directing films featuring Chaplin as her leading man. In the 1920s Normand's name was linked wit...
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Chung Chil-sung
1897 - 1958 (61 years)
Chung Chil-sung , also known by her pen name Geumjuk , was a Korean dancer, feminist, and independence activist. Biography She was born in Daegu province, one of twenty three provinces of the Joseon kingdom. It was said that she came from a poor family. Her exact birth year is questioned often as others say she was born in 1902, 1905, and 1908, but others say that 1897 seems to be more appropriate. There are no details about her childhood or her family clan.
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Marie Tempest
1864 - 1942 (78 years)
Dame Mary Susan Etherington, , known professionally as Marie Tempest, was an English singer and actress. Tempest became a famous soprano in late Victorian light opera and Edwardian musical comedies. Later, she became a leading comic actress and toured widely in North America and elsewhere. She was, at times, her own theatre manager during a career spanning 55 years. She was also instrumental in the founding of the actors' union Equity in Britain.
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Maria Korchinska
1895 - 1979 (84 years)
Maria Korchinska was a distinguished 20th-century Russian harpist and one of the leading 20th-century harpists in Great Britain. Early life Korchinska entered the Moscow Conservatory to study both piano and harp in 1903 but on the advice of her father decided to concentrate on the harp from 1907 on. Her father believed that Russia was entering a time of great change and that given the relatively high number of pianists in Russia it would be easier for his daughter to find work as a harpist than as a pianist. In 1911 she won the first Gold Medal given to a harpist by the Moscow Conservatory.
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Shovkat Mammadova
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Shovkat Hasan qizi Mammadova was an Azerbaijani opera singer and music instructor. People's Artist of the USSR . Early life and musical career Mammadova was born in Tiflis to the low-class Azeri family of Hasan Mammadov and Khurshid . She had a younger brother named Mugbil. Her father, a shoemaker who hailed from the village of Goshakilsa , noticed her musical gift when Shovkat was six years old.
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Lucia Sturdza-Bulandra
1873 - 1961 (88 years)
Lucia Sturdza-Bulandra was a Romanian actress and acting teacher. She is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of Romanian theater. In addition to her acting career, she played an important role in shaping an entire generation of Romanian actors and directors, her students including the likes of George Calboreanu, Dina Cocea, Haig Acterian, Radu Beligan and Victor Rebengiuc. She is the namesake of the Bulandra Theatre in Bucharest.
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Elisabeth Karg-Gasterstädt
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Klara Elisabeth Karg-Gasterstädt was a German medievalist, professor of German philology at the University of Leipzig and head of the effort to publish the Old High German Dictionary. Biography Karg-Gasterstädt was the daughter of Karl Gasterstädt, a factory director from Swabia, and his wife, Sophie, née Schönleber. Klara attended a teachers' college in Stuttgart from 1909 to 1912, and after graduation she was allowed to teach middle and higher grades. From there she went on to work as a substitute teacher at the Königin-Katharina-Stift, and then became a full-time teacher at the Prieser Hig...
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Queena Mario
1896 - 1951 (55 years)
Queena Marian Tillotson , known professionally as Queena Mario, was an American soprano opera singer, newspaper columnist, voice teacher, and fiction writer. Early life Queena Marian Tillotson was born in Akron, Ohio, the daughter of James Knox Tillotson and Rose Tillotson. Queena was raised in Plainfield, New Jersey, where she graduated from Plainfield High School. She studied voice with Marcella Sembrich, who advised her name change. She paid for voice lessons by writing newspaper advice columns under the name Florence Bryant, including childrearing advice; "You know a lot when you're 16, y...
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Lois Towles
1912 - 1983 (71 years)
Lois Towles was an American classical pianist, music educator, and community activist. Born in Texarkana, Arkansas, she grew up in the town straddling the Arkansas and Texas line. From an early age, she was interested in music and began piano lessons at age 9. After graduating as valedictorian of her high school class, she obtained a bachelor's degree from Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and worked as a high school teacher from 1936 to 1941. In 1942, Towles enrolled in the University of Iowa and earned two master's degrees in 1943. She went on to further her education at Juilliard, the Univ...
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Gertrude Foster Brown
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Gertrude Foster Brown was a concert pianist, teacher, and suffragist. Following the passage of women suffrage in New York State in 1917, and pending passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Brown wrote Your Vote and How to Use It, published in 1918. She was Director-General of the Women's Overseas Hospitals in France, founded by suffragists, in 1918. In addition to her work in the New York suffrage movement, she helped to found the National League of Women Voters. She was the Managing Director of the Woman's Journal from 1921-1931.
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