Topic: Women's History
John Henry Ryan and his wife Ella Ryan were two of the earliest African American business owners in Tacoma, where they owned and were the editors of The Forum, a weekly newspaper in the Tacoma area. A...
Seattle restaurateur Patricia McGuinness Ryan was the long-time proprietor of the Denny Regrade's popular Two Bells Tavern. Under her management between 1982 and 1999, the Two Bells became a neighborh...
In 1882, Olive "Ollie" Ryther and her husband Noble Ryther, parents of four children, adopted four orphans. Ollie Ryther vowed to never turn an orphaned child away. She founded Seattle's Ryther Home a...
Painter and enamelist Lisel Salzer was born August 26, 1906, into a well-to-do Jewish family and grew up in Vienna. She began drawing as a girl and studied art at the Vienna Art Academy, graduating in...
Jennie Samuels (1868-1948) was deeply involved with the Women's Club Movement in Washington. She founded the Nannie Burroughs Study Club in Everett, and was an early executive member of the Washington...
A Seattle resident since 1972, Norie Sato is a multidisciplinary visual artist. Sato has worked in various mediums including printmaking, video, sculpture, terrazzo flooring, and glass. Her long caree...
In an era when show-business impresarios often were caricatured as homburg-hatted men wielding large cigars, Seattle had Cecilia Augspurger Schultz, a woman of august ancestry with her own taste in ha...
The San Juan Islands are a remote, rural archipelago in the Salish Sea of the Pacific Northwest between the Washington mainland and Canada's Vancouver Island. In the late 1930s healthcare for the isla...
Mary Ward Scott was a human rights activist who fought for causes ranging from civil rights in the Jim Crow South to increasing LGBTQ materials in libraries. Scott helped develop support systems for p...
More than a century ago, a debate about the ethics and authority of law enforcement began in Seattle as citizens, mainly women, voiced concerns about the abuses of power committed against women and gi...
This essay by Adam C. Eisenberg on Seattle's first female patrol officers hired and trained to be cops on the beat equal to men (nine women hired in 1976), originally appeared in the Seattle Post-Inte...
Since she took over the Otto Seligman Gallery in 1966, Francine Seders has been a major player in the Northwest art scene, representing some of the region's premier artists, including internationally ...
Elizabeth Shackleford, a lifelong Tacoman, was a lawyer and judge in her hometown for 60 years. She was the second female justice of the peace in Pierce County and for several years the only female la...
Dr. Ruby Inouye Shu was the first Japanese American woman physician in Seattle and an icon in the local Japanese community. Her general practice was in Seattle's Nihonmachi or Japantown. She delivered...
Eleanor Siegl was founder of The Little School, one of the first pre-schools in Seattle. Her philosophy of education -- let children discover their own talents, as opposed to the traditional "Do as yo...
The Pacific Northwest has rarely suffered from a shortage of committed political activists or spirited community leaders, but longtime Seattle organizer Yalonda Sinde remains one of the most effective...
Actress Jean Elizabeth Smart was born in Seattle on September 13, 1951, the second of four children. After graduating from Ballard High School in 1969, she entered the University of Washington’s...
Helen Sommers was elected as a Democrat in November 1972 to represent Seattle's 36th District in the state House of Representatives. She won re-election 17 consecutive times over the next 36 years, wa...
Michael Spafford was a young art student at Pomona College in Claremont, California, in 1956 when a car accident put him out of commission for months. When he returned to school, he found another youn...
Lillian E. Anderson Sylten Spear was an important player in Snohomish County's public-power movement. She began her career as an educator, served as president of the Snohomish County Parent-Teacher As...
Shirley Ross Speidel, the devoted wife of Seattle Underground Tour founder Bill Speidel (1912-1988), was active in her community. She was one of the first members of the King County Landmarks Commissi...
St. Nicholas School was a private nonsectarian girls' school founded in 1910 and located in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. The school was named to honor St. Nicholas, the patron saint of childr...
Bernice Stern devoted much of her life to public service, starting at age 15, and was the first woman elected to the King County Council, where she served for 11 years, retiring in 1980. Before and af...
The author of this People's History, Barbara Fleischman Cochran, was a regional historian in Spokane, author of Exploring Spokane's Past, and a member of the faculty at Washington State University. Sh...