Hattie B. BWIP aims to empower young girls from marginalized Black and Brown communities, with a focus on girls residing in rural and underserved areas. Its Girls Confidence Camp provides academic enrichment, fosters sisterhood, and nurtures life skills, emotional resilience, and self-assurance for all girls in Southern Arizona.
Equipping Girls in Marginalized Communities with Essential Life Skills
Mary’s Pence grant will support the Acacia B. Girls Confidence Camp, a day and overnight program. The Girls Confidence Camp provides academic enrichment, fosters sisterhood, and nurtures life skills, emotional resilience, and self-assurance for all girls.
Hattie B. BWIP’s annual overnight Girls Confidence Camp was hosted at Mount Lemmon, Arizona, in 2022, the year this photo was taken. This photo depicts the youngest group at the camp, eight-year-olds and their group leader enjoying swimming, one of the many activities girls participate in, including how to change a tire, women’s health, suicide prevention and awareness, and many others.
Calendar of Women – January 2025
1 | Day of Prayer for Peace
Pray for peace in our hearts, our homes, our communities, our country and our world.
Mary of Nazareth: God Bearer. Each of us is asked to bear the peace and love of Christ to the world.
2 | Sadie Alexander
(b.1/2/1898 d.11/1/1989)
Sadie Alexander was the first Black woman to receive a Ph.D. in economics in the United States (1921) and the first woman to earn a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She was the first Black woman to practice law in Pennsylvania.
3 | Bella Abzug
(b.7/24/1920 d.3/31/1998)
Bella Abzug was a leading liberal activist and politician, especially known for her advocacy for women’s rights. She graduated from Columbia University’s law school, and became involved in the antinuclear peace movement. In the 1960s, she helped organize the Women’s Strike for Peace and the National Women’s Political Caucus. Bella wanted to have a greater impact, so she ran for and won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from New York. As a member of congress, she continued to advocate for women’s rights and the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Bella Abzug left Congress in 1977, but continued to lend her efforts toward many causes, including the establishment of the Women’s Environmental Development Organization.
4 | St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
(b.8/2/1774 d.1/4/1821)
Elizabeth Ann Seton, S.C. was the first native-born citizen of the United States canonized by the Roman Catholic Church (September 14, 1975). She established the first Catholic girls’ school in the nation in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where she also founded the first American congregation of religious sisters, the Sisters of Charity.
When she was 19 years old, Elizabeth married William Seton. They experienced financial hardship, the stress of which exacerbated William’s tuberculosis. A doctor suggested that William spend time in Italy because of its favorable climate. William died while they were in Italy, and Elizabeth relied on the hospitality of a business associate. While in Italy, Elizabeth became acquainted with Roman Catholicism through her hosts, and became a convert. In order to support herself and her children, Seton had begun an academy for young ladies, as was common for widows of social standing in that period. After news of her conversion to Catholicism spread, however, many parents withdrew their daughters from her tutelage. Elizabeth contemplated moving to Canada, which had a larger Catholic community. However, An order of priests, the Sulpicians, recruited her to begin a school for Catholic immigrants. This was the beginning of the parochial school system in the US. The group of women who began the school in Emmitsburg, Maryland took vows and became the Sisters of Charity.
5 | Sonia Sotomayor
(b.6/25/1954)
Sonia Sotomayor is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, serving since August 2009. She has the distinction of being its first Latina justice. She is the third female justice. Justice Sotomayor is of Puerto Rican descent. She was raised by her mother following the untimely death of her father. Author: My Beloved World.
Sonya Sotomayor aspired to the bar from an early age. She attended Princeton on full scholarship graduating summa cum laude. She then attended Yale Law School on full scholarship as well and received her JD. Sotomayor began her legal career as an assistant district attorney in New York. She has had several federal appointments culminating in her appointment to the Supreme Court in 2009.
6 | Charlotte Ray
(b.1/13/1850 d.1/4/1911)
Charlotte Ray was the first Black woman attorney in the United States. She graduated from Howard University School of Law in 1872, and was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar. Later, she became the first woman admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. The racial and gender biases of the time made a career in law financially unsustainable. Charlotte became a teacher in Brooklyn and became involved in the National Association of Colored Women.
7 | St. Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes
(b.1/7/1844 d.4/16/1844)
Bernadette Soubirous was the daughter of a poor miller from Lourdes, France. She is best known for witnessing Marian apparitions of a lady who asked that a chapel be built at a nearby garbage dump. This site would become the grotto of Lourdes, said to be a place of healing. Each year several million pilgrims visit Lourdes seeking healing.
8 | Emily Greene Balch
(b.1/8/1867 d.1/9/1967)
Emily Greene Balch was an American economist, sociologist and pacifist. Balch combined an academic career at Wellesley College with a long-standing interest in social issues. She moved into the peace movement at the start of World War I in 1914, and began collaborating with Jane Addams of Chicago. She became a central leader of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) based in Switzerland. Balch was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946.
9 | Rigoberta Menchú
(b.1/9/1959)
Rigoberta Menchú is a K’iche’ political activist from Guatemala. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the rights of Guatemala’s indigenous feminists during and after the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), and to promoting indigenous rights in the country. She was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. She is the subject of a testimonial biography, I, Rigoberta Menchú (1983).
11 |We remember the women brought out of Africa into slavery, who were baptized against their will.
12| Sr. Dianna Ortiz
(b.1961)
On November 2, 1989, while serving as a missionary in Antigua, Guatemala, Sr. Dianna Ortiz was kidnapped by the Guatemalan military. For 24 hours she was tortured and raped. Since then she has spoken about her ordeal and attempted to raise concern about the plight of victims of abduction and torture. In 1998, she founded the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition (TASSC), which provides support to survivors, especially those in the United States.
13 |Anne Reynolds
(b.1/13/1934 d.3/0/2004)
Anne Reynolds and her husband raised eight children. She became active in assisting Catholic parents of LGBT children by encouraging them to give their children unconditional love. Anne helped create conferences to educate youth, professionals, and the public, and worked with the Catholic Parents Network to assist parents. She wrote letters to publications and to pastors, assisted PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) and was always available to speak with individuals. She cherished the clients she helped with Volunteer Counseling Service.
14 |Sr. Theresa Maxis
(b.1810 d.1892)
Sr. Mother Theresa Maxis Duchemin holds a unique place in Black Catholic history. The story of Black Catholicism is the story of a people who obstinately clung to a faith that gave them sustenance, even when it did not always make them welcome. Like many others, Blacks had to fight for their faith; but their fight was often with members of their own household. Mother Theresa Maxis Duchemin helped to found two religious communities, one for white women and the other for Black women. She served as the leader of both.
In 1831, when a cholera epidemic struck Baltimore, the Oblates (the order Theresa had founded) helped nurse the sick. In the process Theresa’s mother, who had also joined the community, died of the disease. While the city fathers publicly thanked the white sisters for their service, they ignored the Oblates altogether. During the 1840’s, the community experienced a major crisis as ecclesiastical authorities tried to disband it. At that time Theresa, who was seven-eighths white, seems to have made a decision to no longer identify with her Black heritage and left the Oblates. Soon thereafter she met a young Belgian priest named Louis Florent Gillet, who was looking for sisters to teach in Monroe, Michigan.
In November 1845, Sister Theresa and Father Gillet founded the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (I.H.M.). She became the first Mother Superior (of a white community). Over the next decade, the Sisters opened several schools and orphanages in Michigan. In 1858, they opened schools in Pennsylvania. In doing so, they incurred the wrath of Detroit’s Bishop, Peter Paul Lefevre, who used his authority to depose Mother Theresa. Lefevre knew about her racial background, and prejudice played a big part in his animosity toward her. After the bishop in Pennsylvania refused to take her, she became an exile without a community. She was forced to take refuge in Canada with the Grey Nuns of the Sacred Heart. For nearly twenty years Theresa lived with them, but she always considered herself a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. In 1885, Bishop James Wood of Philadelphia lifted the ban, and at age seventy-five, Mother Theresa was allowed to return to the community she had founded. Few founders of a religious community have followed, as one historian puts it, “so tortuous a path
15 |Etty Hillesum
(b.1/15/14 d.1/30/1943)
Etty Hillesum was the author of confessional letters and diaries which describe both her religious awakening and the persecutions of Jewish people in Amsterdam during the German occupation. Her diaries record the increasing anti-Jewish measures imposed by the occupying German army, and the growing uncertainty about the fate of fellow Jews who had been deported by them. As well as forming a record of oppression her diaries describe her spiritual development and deepening faith in God. Hillesum addressed God repeatedly in her diaries, regarding him not as a savior, but as a power we must nurture inside of is: “Alas, there doesn’t seem to be much You Yourself can do about our circumstances, about our lives. Neither do I hold You responsible. You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.” In 1943 she was deported and killed in Auschwitz concentration camp. Etty is the author of An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum.
16 | Dian Fossey
(b.1/16/1932 d.12/26/1985)
Dian Fossey was an American zoologist, primatologist, and anthropologist who undertook an extensive study of mountain gorilla groups over a period of 18 years. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda. Her 1983 book, Gorillas in the Mist, combines her scientific study of the gorillas at Karisoke Research Center with her own personal story. It was adapted into a 1988 film of the same name. Fossey was murdered in 1985; the case remains open. During her time in Rwanda, she actively supported conservation efforts and strongly opposed poaching and tourism in wildlife habitats. It has been theorized that her murder was linked to her conservation efforts.
17 | Martha Cotera
(b.1/17/1938)
Martha P. Cotera, is a writer, and influential activist of both the Chicano Civil Rights Movement and the Chicana Feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Her two most notable works are Diosa y Hembra: The History and Heritage of Chicanas in the U.S. and The Chicana Feminist. Cotera was one of six women featured in a documentary, Las Mujeres de la Caucus Chicana, which recounts the experiences of some of the Chicana participants of the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas.
18 | Coretta Scott King
(b.4/27/27 d.1/30/2006)
Coretta Scott King, the wife of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was an American author, activist and civil rights leader. Coretta Scott King helped lead the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. King was an active advocate for racial equality. King played a prominent role in the years after her husband’s 1968 assassination when she took on the leadership of the struggle for racial equality herself and became active in the Women’s Movement. Coretta founded the King Center and sought to make Martin’s birthday a national holiday. She finally succeeded when Ronald Reagan signed legislation which established Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. She later broadened her scope to include both opposition to apartheid and advocacy for LGBT rights. King became friends with many politicians before and after Martin Luther King’s death, most notably John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Robert F. Kennedy.
19 | Mourning Dove
(b.1888 d.8/8/2016)
Mourning Dove is the literary name chosen by Christine Quintasket, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes. Mourning Dove earned her living most of her adult life as a migrant worker, picking fruits and vegetables by day and writing in her camp tent at night. She is known for being an ethnographer, orator, pamphleteer, teacher, and novelist. She believed that her description and analysis of indigenous American culture would ensure better treatment for her people.
20 |Anne Clough
(b.1/20/1820 d.2/27/1892)
Anne Clough was a British Suffragist and promoter of higher education for women. She was the first principal of Newnham College at Cambridge University. Her personality, commitment and drive made her “a recognised leader in the education of women.”
21 | Sophia Jex-Blake
(b.1/21/1840 d.1/17/1912)
Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake was an English physician, teacher and feminist. She led the campaign to secure women access to a University education when she and six other women, collectively known as the Edinburgh Seven, began studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1869. She was the first practicing female doctor in Scotland, and one of the first in the wider United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; a leading campaigner for medical education for women and was involved in founding two medical schools for women in London.
22 | Hildegard Gross-Mayr
(b.1/22/30)
Hildegard Goss-Mayr was a teacher of non-violence. She and her husband were in Rome during the Second Vatican Council lobbying for the recognition of the conscientious objection by the Roman Catholic Church. In the 1960s/70s, they lived and worked for some time in South America, training groups in active nonviolence and helping in the creation of the SERPAJ ( Servicio Paz y Justicia is a Human Rights Non Governmental Organization in Latin America, founded in 1974.) whose first coordinator was Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. They trained others groups in active nonviolence in Europe, Asia, Middle East and Africa. They participated in the preparation of the People Power Revolution in the Philippines in 1986.
23 | Anne Cloughertrude Elion
(b.1/23/1918 d.2/21/1999)
Gertrude Elion was an American biochemist and pharmacologist, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George H. Hitchings and Sir James Black. Working alone as well as with Hitchings and Black, Elion developed a multitude of new drugs, using innovative research methods that would later lead to the development of the AIDS drug AZT. She developed the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used for organ transplants.
24 | Maria Tallchief
(b.1/24/1925 d.4/11/2013)
Maria Tallchief, a dancer of electrifying passion and technical ability who forged a path breaking career that took her from an Oklahoma Indian reservation to world acclaim. Tallchief was honored by the people of Oklahoma with multiple statues and an honorific day. She was inducted in the National Women’s Hall of Fame and received a National Medal of Arts. In 1996, Tallchief received a Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime achievements. Her life has been the subject of multiple documentaries and biographies.
25 | Ramabai Ranade
(b.1/25/1862 d.1/25/1924)
Ramabai Ranade was an Indian social worker and one of the first women’s rights activists in the 19th century. At the age of 11, she was married to Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade, who was a distinguished Indian scholar and social reformer. Ramabai, soon after her marriage, started to learn reading and writing with strong support and encouragement from Mahadev Govind Ranade. Starting with her native language Marathi, she strove hard to master English.Ramabai Ranade with her husband and other colleagues established in 1886 the first girls’ high school in Pune, the renowned Huzurpaga.
Inspired by her husband, Ramabai started ‘Hindu Ladies Social Club’ in Mumbai to develop public speaking among women.After the death of her husband, Ramabai devoted the rest of her life to the betterment of women’s lives mainly through the activities ‘Seva Sadan Society’ in Mumbai and Pune.
26 | Angela Davis
(b.1/26/44)
Angela Davis is an American political activist, academic scholar, and author. She emerged as a prominent counterculture activist and radical in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. Her interests include prisoner rights; she co-founded Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She was a professor (now retired) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in its History of Consciousness Department and a former director of the university’s Feminist Studies department.
27 | St. Angela Merici
(b.3/21/1474 d.1/27/1540)
St. Angela Merici sought to lead young girls to a Christian life in a decadent society. In her early sixties, Sr. Merici founded the Ursulines, a group of women who remained in their own homes but worked for the needy and met monthly for spiritual support. Her hope was to transform society through the renewal of family life and Christian education.
28 |We Honor Women Theologians
29 | Sr. Kaye Ashe
(b.1/29/30 d.2/15/2014)
Sr. Kaye Ashe served as the first board president of Mary’s Pence. A leader in justice and religious organizations, she challenged and encouraged those in the Catholic faith community and beyond to seek out common ground and fight against injustice. She was especially passionate about issues of sexism and racism as well as women’s involvement in the Roman Catholic Church.
30 |Sr. Ritamary Bradley
(b.1/30/16 d.3/20/2000)
Sr. Ritamary Bradley, Professor Emeritus at St. Ambrose College, was born in Iowa in 1916. At 17 she entered the Sisters of Humility of Mary of Ottumwa. After college, she taught English at Marycrest College, all the while working during 14 summers for her M.A. and PhD. She explained her choice to specialize in Chaucer as “determined by the fact that women were barred from studying theology and it was only through back doors like medieval literature or general courses like Christian Wisdom that one could obtain a background in theology and philosophy.
31 |Ludmila Javorová
(b.1/31/1932)
Ludmila Javorová is a Czech Roman Catholic woman who worked in the underground church during the time of communist rule in Czechoslovakia and served as a vicar general of a clandestine bishop. She is known for being one of a number of Czech women who underwent an ordination ceremony.