Morning,

This week’s Feminist Friday is brought to you in association with Julia Holmes, who has been doing the research on interesting women in the early days of Hollywood.

Josephine Baker was:

• The first black woman to star in a major motion picture
• The only female speaker at the March on Washington
• The first American woman to receive full French military honours at her funeral

More firsts! Anna May Wong was the first Chinese American movie star. As one might expect, she found Hollywood in the 1920s racist, keen to stereotype, and set in the habit of casting non-Chinese actors to play Chinese characters. She took her skills and beautiful face to the stage and to Europe. This included learning to sing operas in German. If I had to learn to sing operas in German in order to progress, I would hit a career roadblock soon and hard.

She also became more outspoken in her advocacy for Chinese American causes and for better film roles. In a 1933 interview for Film Weekly entitled "I Protest", Wong criticized the negative stereotyping in Daughter of the Dragon, saying, "Why is it that the screen Chinese is always the villain? And so crude a villain – murderous, treacherous, a snake in the grass! We are not like that. How could we be, with a civilization that is so many times older than the West?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_May_Wong

Eve Arnold, pioneering celebrity photographer, was taking photos until she was 85. I am always inspired when people keep doing their jobs, because they love their jobs. Enjoy the slideshow, which includes Josephine Baker:

[I]n 1951, she applied for an associate job at Magnum Photos' new New York office. “I had no illusion or hope that they would consider me for membership, but I was desperate,” she later said. Magnum did hire her: She and Inge Morath, who was hired around the same time, were the first two women to join the photo cooperative.

http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/05/portraits-from-a-pioneering-female-photographer.html

I hope you enjoy this beautiful day,

Alex.