31 Heroines for Women’s History Month 2026

Zaida Ben-Yúsuf, born in London, 1869, the first-born daughter to German and Algerian parents, was a New York based portrait photographer. Zaida’s mother would emigrate to the United States of America in 1891, with Zaida herself following in 1895, joining her mother as a milliner, but would soon begin to work in photography. As one of America’s foremost photographers, receiving acclaim early on in her career, Zaida’s work plays a central component of modernism in art and photography’s consideration as an art form unto itself. Her career in photography and fashion, show how both could be used as a way for women in the 19th and early 20th century to make an independent living, at a time when careers for women were limited.

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• Zaida Ben-Yúsuf by volunteer Emery

Hou was a Chinese photographer who, with her husband Xu Xiaobing (1916-2009), documented the rise and reign of Chairman Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976), the founder of the People’s Republic of China, in over 400 official photographs.  Hou Bo (1924-2017) was born in September 1924 into a peasant family in Shanxi province and was orphaned as a teenager. A committed member of the Communist Party from the age of 14, she learned photography as a propaganda tool from Japanese prisoners of war in WWII.  After 1949, she was chosen by Mao as his official photographer for her skills and suitable peasant background, representative of the new China, and lived with her family in the top party official compound Zhongnanhai from 1950 to 1961, where she took both official propaganda photos and family snapshots. 

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• Hou Bo by volunteer Paula Vellet

Anna Atkins was the first person to create a book made entirely from photographic images and is widely acclaimed for her use of cyanotypes in the study of British algae. Between 1843 and 1853, Anna produced three volumes of cyanotypes titled ‘Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions’, which served as a scientific guide to British algae. Seventeen copies are thought to have been produced, however, as they were individually made, and bound by the recipient, many remaining volumes have omissions or duplicates. It is believed that these volumes originally heled 14 pages of text and 389 pages of algae.

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• Anna Atkins by Melissa Spreadborough
• Facsimiles of Anna’s work
• In the Library – Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Imperfections  by Mandy Barker, book inspired by Anna Atkins

Celebrating St Patrick’s Day remembering the Irish photographer and mountaineer, Lizzie Le Blond. Her main passion was mountain photography, capturing mountain scenery, which she combined with mountaineering. She was also an author and autobiographer; in 1883 she published The high Alps in winter, or mountaineering in search of health, describing her mountaineering experiences. Each climb from the valley began by wearing a skirt, but once out of public sight she would change into riding breaches to avoid causing offence to Victorian sensitivities.

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• Lizzie Le Blond by volunteer Hannah Ahmed

Described by the New York Times as a quiet trailblazer in photojournalism, Ruby Washington was the first African American woman to work as a staff photographer for the paper. One of twelve children, she grew up on a farm in rural Georgia. According to those who knew her best she was at once highly ambitious and humble.

She received multiple awards for her work and yet preferred to accept them in private instead of attending the galas where they were presented. She persisted in an industry marked by male chauvinism and despite consistent harassment from male colleagues in the beginning of her career she went on to be one of the paper’s most celebrated photographers.

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• Ruby Washington by volunteer Haley Drolet

Penny Tweedie, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, 1970. Postcard from the Heroines Collection.

Legendary photographer Penny Tweedie worked for the top publications of her era, from Queen Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, National Geographic Australia, and Newsweek to Paris Match magazine. She began her career in 1961, taking powerful black and white photographs of post-war housing conditions in Glasgow for the homeless organisation Shelter. She was famously fired in 1971 by The Sunday Times for refusing to photograph the execution of four prisoners during victory celebrations at the end of the Bangladesh War of Independence.

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• Penny Tweedie by volunteer Paula Vellet
• In the Collection: Some postcards of Penny’s images

Zofia Rydet was born in Stanislawow, Poland and died in Gliwice.  In the interim years, her lifelong dedication to the craft led her to become one of the leading women in photography – a status by which she is recognised today.

It wasn’t until she was well over forty that she took up photography; a self-taught artist, she built on a hobby from earlier years, and joined the Gliwice Photographic Society in 1954, which helped her develop her skills.

In 1978, at the age of 67, Zofia’s final project was the Sociological Record – a mission to photograph every household in Poland. She took more than 30,000 black and white photos depicting people from all walks of life in their typical surroundings, capturing a spectrum of emotions from loneliness, fear, and loss, to happiness and hope.

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• Zofia Rydet by volunteer Hannah Ahmed

Born #OTD 1925. After studying photography at the Guildford School of Art in 1946-1949, Jane Bown began working as a wedding photographer before being given an assignment with The Observer newspaper. It was a partnership that would last over 60 years and lead to her photographing the notable figures of British culture, politics and royalty. Her first assignment was the now famous portrait of Bertrand Russell in December 1949.

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• Jane Bown by volunteer Paula Vellett
• In the library: Cats and A Singular Cat by Jane Bown

Florence Henri did not just live through arguably the most exciting period in the history of art – she was at its very frontier. Her extraordinary life led to extraordinary innovations in the field of photography. Born in 1893 in New York, Florence moved around Europe in her childhood. After both of her parents died, she settled in Italy with her aunt. It was in Italy that she was introduced to Futurism, one of the first major movements of modern art.

Photography entered her life when she came to Dessau, Germany. The era of Bauhaus had begun, and Florence was there to learn about and develop this iconic movement. She saw the power that photography had as a new medium and used it to manipulate perception, pioneering Surrealist photography.

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• Florence Henri by volunteer Olga Trunova
• In the library: A copy of Florence Henri: A Reflection on Photography, Fagiolo 1975, Catalogue

Homai Vyarawalla (1913-2012) was a pioneer in more than one sense of the word. Not only was she India’s first female photojournalist but her career documented the overthrow of British colonial rule.

Born in 1913 in Navsari, Gujarat, to a Parsi family, Homai spent her earliest years in and around Bombay. She studied photography at the Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art, where she took striking images of her classmates. Homai recalled, “As a child I once saw a photograph of another child lying on its stomach. I was told that it was taken by a woman and wondered if I would ever get a chance like that.” She certainly did for by the late 1930s she had moved to Delhi and embarked upon what would be a thirty year career in photojournalism.

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• Homai Vyarawalla by volunteer Haley Drolet
• Monika Baker talks about the documentary film she made of Homai – Dalda 13
• Film Dalda 13 – A Portrait of Homai Vyarawalla by Monika Baker

Janet Jevons’ was a photographic partnership between Ruby Caroline Jevons (1894-1974) and Emilie Janet Tyrell (1887-1972) who worked together from 1921-1949. Their first published and credited photograph appeared on 6th December 1921 in the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. They operated their first studio at 66 Piccadilly from 1921-1925 before moving to 19/20 New Bond Street, London.

Ruby had begun her career in photography working as a secretary in the studio of Dorothy Wilding, the leading woman-run studio in London in the 1920s and 1930s. She then set up the joint studio with Janet in 1921. Their work appeared in publications such as The Tatler, Country Life, Theatre World, The Sphere, Bioscope, and The Bystander, for which they photographed the celebrities of the day, from actresses and dancers to socialites and royals.

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• Janet Jevons by volunteer Paula Vellet
• In the Collection: 3 original portraits

Anny Wottitz was born in Budapest, Hungary, 19^th May 1900, though her nationality is recorded as Austrian. One of four daughters, her mother moved the family to Vienna around 1914, after the early death of her husband. According to Anny’s granddaughter,  the family faced severe food shortages and struggled throughout the war years. After secondary school, Anny attended the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Vienna, where she first met Friedl Dicker, a budding artist who would eventually become a renowned industrial and graphic designer. In 1917, Anny left her apprenticeship at a cousin’s bookshop to join Friedl and another soon-to-be Bauhaus artist, Margit Téry, to follow renowned artist Johannes Itten to Weimar, Germany, when he was appointed to the Weimar Bauhaus in 1919. There Anny specialised in bookbinding, experimenting freely with forms and materials, and remained until 1923.

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• Anny Wottitz
• In the Collection: Glass negatives, landscape photographs, photographs from London and Palestine, kindly donated by Ann and Oliver Adler

Lora Webb Nichols (1883-1962) was an American photographer, best known for amassing a collection of 24,000 negatives of the town Encampment, Wyoming. These negatives are widely acclaimed for providing a unique and intimate insight into the daily life and activities of residents in the small Wyoming mining town.

Some of Lora’s most notable work highlights her ability to portray unique moments of women’s lives and friendships. She documented images of young girls playing outside, or intimate portraits of her friends, such as the image of Nora Fleming breastfeeding her new-born. Other photos also feature close familial bonds, such as a mother tending to her daughter’s hair.

Image courtesy of the American Heritage Center.

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• Lora Webb Nichols by volunteer Anya Chuykov

Hannah Wilke was a multidisciplinary artist, born to Hungarian Jewish parents in New York City on March 7th, 1940, growing up in the shadow of the holocaust. Through drawing, sculpture, performance, photography and video, Wilke explored themes of femininity and gender. She used her body as a medium to drive conversation on female agency, describing this dialogue between her body and process saying “I become my art, my art becomes me. My heart is hard to handle, my art is too”. Her practice emerged in the period of second wave feminism, a time in which the slogan ‘the personal is political’ was popularized. A fundamental theme that runs throughout her own work.

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• Hannah Wilke by volunteer Hattie Alwen
• In the library: Features in some compendium volumes

Berenice Abbott undertook her best-known work in New York, documenting the city’s changing face during the New Deal. Shot independently using a large format camera from 1929 – 35, and later funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), she captured dizzying bird’s-eye and worm’s eye views of the city. Thrusting skyscrapers, soaring stations and bridges, sharp angles and modernist composition contrast the old and new to document this dynamic period.

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• Berenice Abbott by volunteer Paula Vellet
• Virtual Gallery
• Ralph Harrington at the Anemoia Symposium
• In the collection: Books and postcards

Maud Sulter was a contemporary photographer and writer whose works primarily focused on the representation and histories of Black women. Working in many mediums including photography, collage, video and poetry, Maud used her art as a way of depicting the history and reality of the Black Diaspora in Europe. 

Born on the 19th of September 1960 to a Ghanaian father and Scottish mother, Maud Sulter received her Master’s degree from the University of Derby. She began to work as a writer, publishing numerous poems and plays in which she continuously explored her Scots and Ghanaian heritage, including the poem titled As a Black Woman (1985), for which she won the Vera Bell Prize for poetry. Some of her poems are in Scots/Glaswegian dialect, as she was very interested in the overlaps between the two cultures.

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• Maud Sulter, by volunteer Verena Thomson

Died on this day 1949.

Lena Connell, also known professionally as Beatrice Cundy, was a British photographer who left her mark on both the fight for women’s suffrage and the art of portraiture. Born Adelin Beatrice Connell in 1875, her life and career intertwined with the feminist movement of the early 20th century.

 Lena’s life and work offer a fascinating glimpse into the early 20th century. She was a woman who defied convention, using her camera to advocate for change while establishing herself as a successful photographer.

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• Lena Connell – An Introduction, by volunteer Harper Black

In the Collection: A number of Lena’s images

Born on this day in 1856.

The work of Amélie Galup is a significant example of the rise in popularity of amateur photography during the late 19th century.  She documented life in a small rural community in South West France photographing rural life, fairs, markets and landscapes. This was a rapidly vanishing way of life and thanks to her work a valuable, comprehensive record of that era remains. 

We have a series of her postcards in the Collection.

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• Amélie Galup – An Introduction, by volunteer Sarah Grant
• Amélie’s archive is held by Médiathèque du patrimoine et de la photographie

In the Collection: A series of Amélie’s postcards

Lady Clementina Hawarden was a pioneer because of her photography of  her daughters. As an aristocrat, she wasn’t allowed to go out wandering with her camera, so instead, she encourage her daughters to stage scenes wearing theatrical costumes. Although the images look quite tame today, in Victorian times, they were considered provocative and risqué. Clementina shattered the stereotype of how women should be portrayed.

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Lady Clementina – overview by volunteer Shyama Laxman

In the library: Lady Hawarden: Studies from Life, 1857-64, by Virginia Dodier

Our first pioneer is Claire Aho, whose work we’re showing in our next exhibition Colour Me Modern: Claire Aho and the New Woman. Known as ‘the Grand Old Lady of Finnish Photography’, Claire was a pioneer of editorial photography recognised for her innovative use of colour techniques. Her vibrant images showcase her keen eye for composition and surprisingly modern aesthetic.

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• Claire Aho – overview, by volunteer Satu Lehtinen
• Capturing the Zeitgeist, by volunteer Katie Walters
• Claire’s archive is held by the Aho & Soldan Foundation

In the library: Aho & Soldan, Suomi: Finland in 1950’s Colour, featuring Claire’s work