The Women's L Project Blog

Zerrie Campbell

Zerrie Campbell

Zerrie Campbell (born 1951) began her career in academics as an English and Communications instructor at Malcolm X College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. Following her years as...

Maria Cerda

Maria Cerda (1939-2020) was born and raised in Lares, Puerto Rico. After earning an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Puerto Rico, she headed north to enter the...

Hema Rajagopalan

Hema Rajagopalan

Born in 1951 in Chennai (formerly known as Madras), India Hema Rajagopalan immigrated to Chicago in 1974. At that time, she had a masters degree in nutrition and planned to...

Mother Cabrini

Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917), the youngest of thirteen children, was born in a small village near Milan, Italy. From an early age, she set her heart on becoming a...

Vichitra Nayyar

Vichitra Nayyar

When Vichitra Nayyar (1945 - 2010) was doing graduate school studies in English Literature in Kanpur, India, she was the captain of the volleyball, basketball and field hockey teams. Though...

Mahalia Jackson

Mahalia Jackson

Mahalia Jackson (1911-1972), “The Queen of Gospel” and civil rights activist, came to Chicago from Louisiana as a teen to study nursing. In Chicago, she joined the Greater Salem Baptist...

Jane Addams

Jane Addams (1860-1935) grew up in a Quaker home 120 miles northwest of Chicago. Her father was an abolitionist, a friend of Abraham Lincoln and a successful businessman who wanted...

Chantay Moore

Chicagoland has the third largest urban population of Native Americans, numbering nearly 65,000, from over one hundred tribal nations. Uniting them and promoting fellowship among them is the mission of...

Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks

When Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) was an infant, her family moved from Topeka, Kansas to the South Side of Chicago. She began writing poetry as an elementary school student; her first...

Cordi-Marian Nuns

Cordi-Marian Nuns

The Cordi-Marian Nuns fled anti-Catholic persecution in Mexico in the late 1920s traveling to Chicago where they served Mexican immigrants in Packingtown, South Chicago and the Near West Side. The...

Florence Scala

Florence Scala (1918-2007), the daughter of Italian immigrants, grew up in Chicago’s Little Italy neighborhood. During her formative years, she took classes at Jane Addams’ Hull House where seeds of...

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros

Sandra Cisneros is best known as a novelist but she is also an author of short stories, a poet, an artist, an essayist and a performer. Born in Chicago in...

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