Overview
Equal rights were not just an American issue. Women from all over the world desired their freedoms and fought to achieve them. The creative women featured on the cover of Equal Rights, however, tended to be English or Americans with strong European connections, most likely due to the language barrier.
Ethel Leginska (1886-1970)
Born Ethel Liggins in Hull, England, she changed her last name to “Leginska” as at the time the most well-regarded musicians were Polish. She first gained international fame as a highly respected pianist and then transitioned to conducting, making her American debut leading the New York Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. She also composed piano pieces, songs, chamber music, orchestral works and eventually three operas for which she conducted the premieres of two of them.
Miss Esther Sayles Root (1894-1981)
American who volunteered as an ambulance driver in France during World War I and subsequently published her letters home alongside those of a fellow driver in a book entitled Over Periscope Pond: Letters from Two American Girls in Paris, October 1916-January 1918. She was the first American woman to travel with a passport under her own name, having successfully petitioned the courts to have it issued to “Esther Sayles Root, wife of Franklin Pierce Adams.”
https://hdl.handle.net/10428/6558
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
English modernist writer. At the time this cover was printed, she had released her masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway only four months prior. While Woolf had discussed feminism in both her public and private writing by this point, she had a very conflicted attitude toward referring to herself as such. Nonetheless, she was a strong admirer of Mary Wollstonecraft and stated in 1929 that “…we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.”
