Catherine of Alexandria, also spelled Katherine is, according to tradition, a Christian saint and virgin, who was martyred in the early fourth century at the hands of the emperor Maxentius. According to her hagiography, she was both a princess and a noted scholar who became a Christian around the age of 14, converted hundreds of people to Christianity and was martyred around the age of eighteen. More than 1,100 years after Catherine's martyrdom, Joan of Arc identified her as one of the saints who appeared to and counselled her.
Anne Hyde was the first wife of James, Duke of York, who later became King James II and VII.
Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, was a prominent English politician and nobleman of the Tudor era. He was an uncle of two of the wives of King Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, both of whom were beheaded, and played a major role in the machinations affecting these royal marriages. After falling from favour in 1546, he was stripped of his dukedom and imprisoned in the Tower of London, avoiding execution when Henry VIII died on 28 January 1547.
Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist and anarchist who, after a bohemian youth, became a Catholic without abandoning her social and anarchist activism. She was perhaps the best-known political radical among American Catholics.
Kateri Tekakwitha, given the name Tekakwitha, baptized as Catherine, and informally known as Lily of the Mohawks, is a Catholic saint and virgin who was an Algonquin–Mohawk. Born in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon, in present-day New York State, she contracted smallpox in an epidemic; her family died and her face was scarred. She converted to Catholicism at age nineteen. She took a vow of perpetual virginity, left her village, and moved for the remaining five years of her life to the Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake, just south of Montreal. She was beatified in 1980 by Pope John Paul II and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI at Saint Peter's Basilica on 21 October 2012.
Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, OP, also known as Mother Mary Alphonsa, was an American Dominican, writer, social worker, and foundress of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne.
The Society of the Holy Child Jesus is an international community of Roman Catholic sisters founded in England in 1846 by Philadelphia-born Cornelia Connelly.
Lidwina (1380–1433) was a Dutch mystic who is honored as a saint by the Catholic Church. She is the patron saint of the town of Schiedam, of chronic pain, and of ice skating.
Lady Jane Grey, also known as Lady Jane Dudley after her marriage and as the "Nine Days' Queen", was an English noblewoman who claimed the throne of England and Ireland from 10 to 19 July 1553.
Julia Peterkin was an American author from South Carolina. In 1929 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Novel/Literature for her novel Scarlet Sister Mary. She wrote several novels about the plantation South, especially the Gullah people of the Lowcountry. She was one of the few white authors who wrote about the African-American experience.
Isabel Burton, later known as Lady Burton, was an English writer, explorer and adventurer. She was the wife and partner of the explorer, adventurer, and writer Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890).
Uta Ranke-Heinemann was a German theologian, academic, and author. In 1969, she was the first woman in the world to be habilitated in Catholic theology. She held a chair of ancient Church history and the New Testament at the University of Duisburg-Essen. When her license to teach was revoked by the bishop because of her critical position in matters of faith, the university created a nondenominational chair of History of Religion. Her 1988 book Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven, criticising the Catholic Church's stance on women and sexuality, was published in several editions, and translated in 12 languages. Her 1992 book Nein und Amen, revised in 2002, said there were "fairy tales you don't need to believe to have a living faith".
Ellen Gates Starr was an American social reformer and activist. With Jane Addams, she founded Chicago's Hull House, an adult education center, in 1889; the settlement house expanded to 13 buildings in the neighborhood.
Martha Gallison Moore-Avery was an American socialist who later converted to Catholicism and became an anti-Socialism activist. After her conversion, she became the founder of the Catholic labor organization Common Cause Society and of the Catholic Truth Guild, which became the most extensive lay apostolate of the Catholic Church in America.
Agnes McLaren FRCPI was a respected Scottish doctor who was one of the first to give medical assistance to women in India who, because of custom, were unable to access medical help from male doctors. Agnes was active in social justice causes including protests against the white slave trade. She signed the 1866 women's suffrage petition and was secretary of the Edinburgh National Society for Women's Suffrage alongside her stepmother, Priscilla Bright McLaren. In 1873 she travelled with Priscilla and Jane Taylour to give suffrage lectures in Orkney and Shetland. Her father had supported the campaign of first women who sought to study medicine at University of Edinburgh and Agnes became friends with Sophia Jex-Blake, one of the Edinburgh Seven. Her father did not however, support Agnes' own ambitions in this area. And as she could not graduate in medicine in Scotland, she went to study in France and later, in order to be permitted to practice at home, became a member of the Royal College of Dublin.
Patrick N. Allitt is a British historian and academic who serves as the Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University. He has written seven books on religious history, education, politics and environmental history, and has produced several lectures for The Great Courses.
Frances Anne Rollin Whipper was a political activist, teacher, and author. Whipper and her four sisters were socially and politically active within the South Carolina state government during the Reconstruction era. In 1867, she won one of the earliest Civil Rights lawsuits for being denied first class passage on a steamship traveling between Beaufort and Charleston, South Carolina. Whipper wrote and published the biography of the abolitionist, nationalist, and highest ranking Black commissioned officer in the Union army, Martin R. Delany (1812-1885). Published under the name Frank A. Rollin in 1868, The Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, was the first full-length biography written by an African American. Whipper's 1868 diary, one of the earliest known diaries by a southern Black woman, details her social and intellectual activities in Boston, as well as her courtship and early months of marriage to William James Whipper, a member of the South Carolina legislature and proponent of women's suffrage.
Mary Ann Harris Gay was an American writer and poet from Decatur, Georgia, known for her memoir Life in Dixie During the War (1897) about her life in Atlanta during the American Civil War. Author Margaret Mitchell said Gay's memoir inspired some passages in her novel Gone with the Wind (1936). Gay also published a book of poetry in 1858, which she republished after the war to raise money to help support her mother and sister.
Virginia Mary Crawford was a British Catholic suffragist, feminist, journalist and author, cited in the publicised Dilke scandal and divorce in 1886, founder of the Catholic Women's Suffrage Society.
Josephine Mary Ward was a British novelist and nonfiction writer whose works were informed by her Roman Catholic faith. She published ten novels and a novella, including One Poor Scruple (1899), Out of Due Time (1906), The Job Secretary (1911) and Tudor Sunset (1932). Her novels were generally well received during her lifetime, but fell into obscurity after her death. Some of her fiction has been reprinted in the 21st century. She also wrote articles and religious tracts, and edited her husband Wilfrid Ward's lectures for publication. She provided the initial finance for the Catholic publishing house Sheed and Ward, founded by her daughter Maisie Ward and her husband.
