Remember the Ladies
In 1776 as the founding fathers of America prepared to write its Declaration of Independence, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband: “And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies.… If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.” Unfortunately, she was ignored and women’s rights were not enshrined in the founding document. Seventeen years later in the aftermath of France’s revolution, Olympe de Gouges, author of Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen the feminist reply to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, was guillotined on the place de la Concorde. At the birth of the two modern nations of my citizenship, women were reminded that progress was not enacted for them. However, this has not stopped them from breaking the mold.
Though recorded History has often relegated women to footnotes, world history is overflowing with examples of exceptional women—women who have had to work twice as hard to earn their place in our collective memory. With this series I honor these women and aim to spark the curiosity of the viewer to learn more about them. I also hope to inspire future generations to see women in a new way, so that young women don’t have to feel the burden of always being the first, and young men do not see strong women as the exception.
We cannot expect to change the future without acknowledging the past. This is true for the art world in particular where women are more likely to be featured in museums as nude models than they are as artists or historical figures. The question posed by the Guerrilla Girls still stands: “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” I have thus paid special attention to the way in which I represent these women: not only are they fully clothed and generally unsmiling, they are overlaid on collaged backgrounds that provide clues to the lives they led and the actions for which they should be remembered. To fully understand the artwork and the significance of these women you have to put in the effort of reading their stories.
Hedy Lamarr
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2021
Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) was born in Vienna Austria and started her acting career there under her maiden name Hedy Kiesler. She became known for her role in the Czech film Ecstasy (the first non-pornographic movie to ever portray a female orgasm), which was acclaimed in Europe but banned in the US, and in Germany (due to her being Jewish). She fled her incredibly controlling husband by moving to Paris, then London, where she met Louis B. Mayer. She talked herself into a $500 a week contract and started her new career under the name Hedy Lamarr. Her first film Algiers (with Charles Boyer) was a success but from then on, she was typecast as the glamorous “exotic” seductress.
At the start of WWII she was refused a place in the National Inventors Council and told to sell war bonds instead. She did this very successfully, selling $25 million ($350 million today) in war bonds in only 10 days. But Hedy knew she could do more. The brilliant self-taught inventor impressed aviation tycoon, Howard Hughes, so much with her ideas about redesigning his planes into more aerodynamic shapes (inspired by fast-flying birds) that he made his team available to her. This allowed her, among other things, to invent a radio-hopping sequence to prevent remote-controlled torpedoes from being jammed. This technology, classified by the army, was later incorporated into Navy ships (1950s-60s) and later used to develop bluetooth and then Wifi! Lamarr received no compensation from any of this and, in her lifetime, received very little recognition for her role in bringing us the technology we all rely on today.
Mona Parsons
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2021
Mona Parsons (1901-1976) was a Canadian actress and nurse. She married the Dutch millionaire, Willem Leonhardt, and moved to the Netherlands, where she was living when the Nazis invaded. During the occupation, she and her husband joined the resistance and hid allied pilots in their home. Mona was arrested in 1941 and condemned to death. The judge was so impressed by the bravery with which she faced her sentence that he commuted it to life imprisonment with hard labor. She was deported to Germany where she was moved to several different camps (the only Canadian civilian ever interned in a Nazi camp), before escaping in 1945. She made her way back to the Netherlands on foot, passing herself off as a mentally-challenged mute (though she had learned some German, her accent would have given her away). She received citations from Eisenhower and the RAF for her role in rescuing their pilots, and was reunited with her husband, who had also survived his imprisonment.
Willem died in 1956, leaving a quarter of his estate to his mistress. Mona also discovered he has an illegitimate son who, under Dutch law, was entitled to three quarters of his father’s estate, leaving her penniless. She returned to Canada, where she eventually remarried. In her later years she was considered a somewhat eccentric old woman for telling her stories, because a Canadian woman in Nazi camps sounded absurd. Records of what she had done were rediscovered in 1994 and she is now getting some recognition in Canada.
Gloria Richardson
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2021
Gloria Richardson (1922-2021) received a BA from Howard University, where she also first started participating in Civil disobedience by taking part in the Woolworths boycott. She moved to Cambridge, Maryland, where she married and started a family. In 1961 when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) started organizing in Cambridge, she and her daughter got involved. In 1962 Gloria was asked to help create the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee (CNAC), the first adult-led affiliate of SNCC. She became their spokesperson. In 1963 she was one of the people to sign the “Treaty of Cambridge,” helping pass the integration of schools, busses, libraries, hospitals, and the promotion of black police officers within the force.
In 1963 Gloria was one of six black women activists on the stage at the march on Washington. She was, however, not allowed to speak. Gloria is famous for a photo taken of her; looking calm and dignified while a policeman points a bayonet at her face, and in another one pushing it away with her hand (very nonchalantly, the mark of a true badass). I chose to base my portrait on a different image of her, choosing this one instead. Her fire and passion shine through in her stance and expression but I wanted to show her holding hands with other protestors as a reminder that movements change history more than the individuals they are made up of.
Margaret
Bourke-White
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2021
Margaret Bourke-White (1904-1971) was an American photojournalist who became known for her industrial photography in the late 1920s. In 1929 she started working for Fortune magazine and became the first Western photographer to document Soviet Industry. In 1936 she was the only female photographer recruited to LIFE magazine. Margaret Bourke-White’s photo of the construction of Fort Peck Dam was chosen as the cover of the first issue of LIFE. Along with Dorothea Lange, Bourke-White covered the Great Depression, she travelled Europe to document the spread of fascism, and travelled to the USSR to photograph Stalin.
During World War II, Bourke-White became the first female war correspondent. She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when the Germans invaded, travelled all over war torn Europe facing bullets and bombs, becoming the first female war correspondent to fly in a combat mission. She photographed the liberation of Buchenwald concentration camp and its countless victims. Later she served as a war photographer in Korea and during the India-Pakistan partition. She interviewed and photographed Gandhi only hours before his assassination. Margaret Bourke-White died in 1971 after suffering from Parkinson's disease for many years. During her years of illness she wrote extensively about it in the pages of LIFE, helping to dispel some of the stigma.
*The photograph on the bottom right side of the collage is one of MBW’s from an article in LIFE magazine in 1941 “Muscovites take up their guns as Nazi horde approached Russian capital.”
Josephine Baker
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2021
Born to a poor family, Josephine Baker (1906-1975) grew up cleaning white people’s homes in a segregated St. Louis USA. She’d married twice by the age of 15 when she moved to NYC to become a dancer, and was soon offered employment in a musical revue heading to Paris. In no time, the young woman won the French capital over with her wild energetic dancing, range of talents, elegance and charisma. She became an icon of modern womanhood in the 1920s and 30s, walking around Paris with a cheetah on a leash.
In 1936 she returned for a tour of the USA expecting to be received as the international star she had become in Europe, but she is met with condescension and racism. She returned to France where she traded her American citizenship for a French one just a few years before the outbreak of WWII. True to her new country she became a spy for the French resistance, risking her life to carry messages and uncover secret information her stardom gave her access to.
A highly decorated veteran of the French resistance she returned to America once again in 1949 to find that she was still being turned away from hotels and refused service. On her next tour she stipulated in her contract that she wouldn’t perform in segregated venues. As she became more involved in civil rights, Baker found herself accused of communist sympathies and at odds with the American government that thwarted her tour of Latin America. Returning to her home in Dordogne Baker adopted 12 children of different origins; she called her family “the rainbow tribe.”
But it wasn’t until 1963 that she experienced the happiest day of her life, according to her that was the day of the march on Washington where she was the only woman to speak to the same crowd MLK made his I have a Dream speech, she was wearing her French army uniform and medals. In November 2021, Josephine Baker’s remains will be interred in the French Panthéon, only 5 women have previously received this honor, Baker will be the first black woman, as well as the first woman to receive the honor unaccompanied by a husband of male counterpart.
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2022
Born in present-day Nigeria, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (1900-1978) was one of the first girls to attend the Abeokuta Grammar School. She continued her education in England, returning to become an educator focusing particularly on the education of Nigerian women. In 1944 she founded the Abeokuta Women’s Union (AWU) which would eventually have 20,000 members. Ransome-Kuti advocated for women’s economic and political rights, leading many protests, the first of which was against unfair taxation on market women. She earned the nickname The Lioness of Lisabi. Forbidden from protesting, the AWU organized “picnics” and “festivals” instead, many of which were still met with brutal repression by the police and Ransome-Kuti began teaching the women how to deal with the teargas that was often thrown at them.
Ransome-Kuti was the only woman involved in the creation of the Nigerian national constitution and was a founder of the Nigerian Women’s Union (NWU). The AWU became a regional branch of the NWU. As the president of the NWU Ransome-Kuti traveled setting up regional branches around Nigeria. In 1953 she organized a conference on women’s suffrage which resulted in the founding of the Federation of Nigerian Women’s Societies. After the death of her husband in 1955 Ransome-Kuti put her time and money into founding schools all over Nigeria and traveled internationally giving lectures. In 1965 she became a member of the Order of Nigeria, in 1968 she was awarded an honorary doctorate of laws, and in 1970 received the Lenin Peace Prize. She was also made a consultant to the Federal Ministry of Education.
Ransome-Kuti had raised four children, all of whom went on to become activists, the most famous was the musician Fela Aníkúlápó-Kuti who was openly critical of the Nigerian government in the 1970s and ‘80s. Fela had already been the target of violence in retribution for his activism but the most violent came in 1977 when armed soldiers attacked his compound, beating him severely and throwing Ransome-Kuti from a second-story window. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti died the following year from her injuries. In a bold act of protest, Fela carried his mother’s coffin on the anniversary of her death and placed it accusingly at the entrance of the presidential residence. He and his accomplices were beaten and imprisoned for this act of defiance. Fela’s song Coffin For Head of State memorializes this event.
Constance Markievicz
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2022
Constance Markievicz (1868-1927) was born the daughter of a wealthy landowner in Ireland. She grew up on the family estate where her favorite pastime was hunting, her rifle skills would prove useful to her later. Wanting to become a painter, Constance moved to Paris where she met her soon-to-be husband, the polish dubiously-titled Count Casimir Markievicz. Constance was already a member of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Society and the couple’s return to Ireland in 1903 saw her ramp up her involvement. She joined the nascent Sinn Féin, introducing a feminist element to their platform. The Countess continued her deep commitment to socialism by starting a commune on her lands and becoming heavily involved in the Dublin Union lockout (1913-14); including joining the Irish Citizen Army to protect striking workers and operating a soup kitchen despite being completely broke at that point.
By the time of the Easter Rising of 1916 Markievicz was an officer in the Citizen Army for which she had designed the uniforms. Of the 80 women arrested she was the only one to be tried as a leader and would have been shot along with the other leaders had it not been for her sex; instead she was kept in solitary confinement, her response to this: “I do wish you lot had the decency to shoot me.” She was released under a general amnesty in 1917 only to be promptly re-arrested the following year. During her second incarceration, she ran in and won an election for a parliamentary seat which she, along with the other elected Sinn Féin members, did not take as it would have meant swearing an oath to the British crown. Markievicz was the only woman elected that year and the first woman ever to be elected to the British house of commons. After her release in 1919, she was named Secretary for labor in Ireland, making her the second woman ever to hold elected office in Europe; it would take 60 years before another woman was elected to the Irish parliament. She continued her activism for the rest of her life, earning her several more prison sentences and life as a fugitive during the Anglo-Irish war. Countess Constance Markievicz died a pauper in a public hospital ward in 1927 having given her fortune and her life to her country.
Victoria Woodhull
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2022
Born in a poor family in Homer, Ohio, USA, Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927) married at the age of 15. The couple had two children, their eldest son was intellectually disabled and Victoria refused to have him institutionalized, a rarity at the time. To support her family, Victoria worked, among other things, as a seamstress, an actress, and a medium alongside her equally noteworthy sister: Tennessee “Tennie” Claflin. Victoria managed to divorce her alcoholic husband and in 1866 marries Union Army Colonel James Blood. This began her lifelong commitment to “Free Love,” which, at the time, meant advocating for women’s freedom to marry and divorce as they pleased and be free from their “sexual slavery” to their husbands.
Victoria and her sister “Tennie” befriended famously wealthy Cornelius Vanderbilt who trusted them both as confidants and mediums; through this connection the sisters became immensely wealthy. In 1870 the sisters opened a brokerage firm, becoming the first female stockbrokers on Wall Street. They were so successful that they were soon able to start a newspaper promoting sex education, equal rights (regardless of sex, race, or sexual orientation), free love, and advocating for legal prostitution. The latter two were so scandalous that they would later lead to Woodhull’s exclusion from the history of the women’s movement written by her contemporaries, though many of them frequented the sisters’ salons.
In 1870 Woodhull was the first woman to speak before Congress, advocating for women’s right to vote on the basis that it was never explicated in the constitution that they did not have that right. With this approach unsuccessful Victoria decided the next obvious move was to become the first female candidate for president of the United States. She ran on a platform of prison reform, better care for the helpless, a neutral relationship to foreign powers, equal suffrage, marriage reforms, and a government based on “enlightenment and education not the imaginary benefit of mankind.” Her choice of vice-president: the incomparable Frederick Douglass. She toured the country and was a wildly popular speaker but the press vilified her as “Mrs. Satan.” Woodhull made enemies by calling out several powerful men for their hypocritical philandering and harassment of underaged women while condemning free love and was tricked into mailing her newspaper across state lines, allowing her to be prosecuted and jailed for passing “obscene materials through the mail” just days before the election.
Woodhull eventually divorced her second husband and moved to England with her sister, there she married her third and final husband, started another newspaper The Humanitarian, made two more unsuccessful bids for president, and volunteered for the red cross during World War I.
Camille Claudel
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2022
Camille Claudel’s (1864-1943) talent for sculpture was discovered at the age of 12 by her father who showed her work to their artist neighbor Alfred Boucher, both men encouraged her to continue creating. Moving to Paris, Claudel studied at the Academie Colarossi (the Beaux-Arts did not accept female students at the time) and in 1882 rented a workshop with three other female sculptors. Boucher, who had been mentoring her, before moving toFlorence entrusted his pupils to Auguste Rodin, already a renowned sculptor at the time. Rodin was inspired by Claudel who became an assistant and model for him as well as his pupil. She was so skilled that he tasked her with sculpting the hands and feet on his famous Gates of Hell commission. Though Claudel was initially resistant to his advances the two eventually became lovers, this despite Rodin’s 20-year relationship with his former model Rose Beuret. This affair caused her already disapproving mother to kick her out of the family home. In 1892 Claudel ended the 10-year relationship with Rodin. While Claudel has gone down in history as the mistress and Beuret as the wife, Rodin did not, in fact, marry Rose until long after his relationship with Claudel had ended.
Following the breakup Claudel struggled financially. Her work was censored both for her sex and for the sexualized content of her sculptures; for example, the now-famous Waltz (seen in the collage) was said to be shocking for the proximity of the nude bodies. When Claudel collaborated with Rodin (which she did regularly in the six years following the end of their romantic relationship) he would receive all the credit. Due to her talent and persistence, Claudel's career endured; she was the only sculptor of her time to mix bronze and marble and began exploring Art Nouveau styles. In 1900 she created one of her masterpieces, The Mature Age.
After 1905, Claudel appears to have struggled with her mental health. She destroyed many of her statues, isolated herself in her workshop for long periods, and exhibited symptoms of paranoia. This has often been attributed to her break up with Rodin, but it had occurred almost a decade earlier and by her choice, it seems more likely that it was due to the hardship she faced in her career, and the paranoia could be the (not-so-crazy) fear that she was being sabotaged by her immensely famous ex turned rival. In 1913 her beloved father passed away, just 10 days later her mother and brother had her forcibly locked away in a mental institution. Over the years several doctors wrote to her family recommending her release but her family always refused. Claudel would spend the last 30 years of her life locked away without her mother ever visiting her; her brother visited seven times but neglected to properly bury her, so she was placed in a mass grave behind the asylum, thus the remains of one of France’s greatest artists were lost forever.
Genepil
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2022
Genepil (1905-1938) was born Tseyenepil, but her name was changed when she was selected to become Queen Consort of Mongolia. After the death of his first wife, the ruler of Mongolia, Bogd Khan was pressured to marry again in an attempt to uphold the dying Mongolian dynasty. Though Genepil already had a husband she was forcibly married at 19 to the 53-year-old Khan. Genepil was extremely unhappy in her role but was refused permission to return to her parent's home for the sake of appearances. The marriage only lasted until the Khan’s death the following year. With the abolition of the monarchy in Mongolia, which was under soviet control, Genepil was able to return to her family and first husband. Though it appears she wanted to lead a quiet life with her family, Genepil, as the last queen consort of a now communist country controlled by Soviet Russia, was a reminder of the country’s former traditions and culture. When Stalinist repressions in Mongolia began in 1937, the role of queen which had been imposed upon her more than a decade earlier made her a target of the Soviet regime; Genepil and her father were accused of preparing an uprising with the help of Japan. Genepil who was five months pregnant at the time was taken away from her home in the middle of the night, leaving only a precious sugar cube on her children's pillows. Aged only 33 she was executed by a Soviet firing squad. In a continued effort to erase Mongolian culture most images of royalty, including Genepil, were destroyed. The few images that survived became a symbol of Mongolian revival, and later served as inspiration for queen Amidala in Star Wars - The Phantom Menace (1999), and so Genepil lives on in popular culture.
Ada Gobetti
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2022
Ada Gobetti (1902-1968) and her husband Piero were Italian anti-fascist who wrote for various publications advocating against the rise of the far-right in the 1920s. Piero was severely beaten by a fascist squad and forced into exile in Paris where he died of bronchitis in 1926. Ada Gobetti vowed to continue their work. She fought against the fascist black shirts in the Bienno Rosso (1919-1920) and was one of the original members of Giusticia e Libertà, an Italian anti-fascist resistance movement active from 1929 to 1945. She also cofounded Gruppi di Difesta Della Donna (Women’s Defence group), a female partisans group, and organized women into fighting the German occupiers. Gobetti’s home in Turin was often used to hide resistance members and smuggle documents. With her son Paolo, Gobetti smuggled guns and dynamite for the resistance. She undertook the remarkable dual task of risking her life for the resistance while also watching over her 18-year-old partisan son. Paolo not only survived the war but went on to have a successful career as a film critic and director.
Gobetti wrote a coded diary throughout the war, undergoing great personal risk, and decoded it at the end, creating a remarkably rare first-hand account of daily life as an Italian partisan. After the war, she became vice mayor of Turin for the Partito d’Azione (a left-wing political party she had helped create), and cofounder of the Women's International Democratic Federation, which advocates for women's rights, anti-fascism, world peace, and child welfare (it still exists to this day, though it was most active during the Cold War). Child education care became a particularly important cause for Gobetti who translated several articles for young parents and contributed to various left-leaning publications on the topic. She was posthumously awarded the Silver Medal Medal for Military Valor for her 25 years fighting fascism in Italy.
Kate Edger
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2022
Kate Edger (1857-1935) was born in UK, and emigrated with her family to New Zealand in 1862. Receiving most of her early education from her father, she showed great academic promise. At a time when no women were allowed to attend university, Edger applied for a scholarship at Auckland College and Grammar School, omitting her gender, and was accepted. In 1877 she became the first woman in New Zealand (and the 2nd in the entire British Empire) to graduate university, with a Bachelors in mathematics and Latin. She went on to obtain a Masters degree, yet another unprecedented achievement.
Edger became the first principal of the newly-founded Nelson College for Girls, where she also taught a plethora of subjects. While she intended to keep her position at the school after her marriage to William Evans, he first pregnancy forced her to resign. With her husband doing unpaid charitable work, Edger supported her family by running a private school from their home. She was an active supporter of Women’s suffrage (New Zealand being the first self-governing country where women achieved the right to vote). Edger also became involved in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union New Zealand (WCTUNZ), where she served in several important positions and was known as an avid pacifist. She later participated in the founding of the Wellington's Society for the Protection of Women and Children, and took up a role in the League of Nations Union of New Zealand. A charitable trust exists in her name, creating scholarships to this day for women to pursue undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in New Zealand.
While she has been described as a woman of small stature and quiet dignity, I chose this, rather disgruntled, image of her for her portrait because it spoke to me so strongly of the confusion and frustration of an educated woman being talked down to by a less knowledgeable male peer, which I can only speculate must have happened to her innumerable times since it continues to happen regularly in an era where women’s education is an established part of the western world.
Liliane Kandel
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2022
The portrait of Liliane Kandel (born 1933), is the most personal of the series, a long-time friend of my mother, Liliane has always been like a godmother to me. At the age of 13 I began to discover her past. As I began to take an interest in the history of the Holocaust, she was kind enough to let me interview her about her experience. That’s when I learned that by my age she had already experienced war, had had her life turned upside down by the prohibitions imposed on Jews, and, although the city’s Jews were spared from deportation, she had to take refuge in a hospital where her brother had his tonsil’s removed as a pretext to escape the pogrom that was ravaging the streets of Bucharest. She and her family immigrated to Paris in 1946.
It was only later that I began to recognize the names of her friends, colleagues, and acquaintances: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lanzmann, etc. The woman I knew for her wonderful laugh and the books she gave me was also a member of the Women’s Liberation Movement that she joined during the lead up to the Manifeste des 343, written by Simone de Beauvoir who declared having aborted clandestinely, which opened the way for the fight that would lead to the Veil law legalizing abortion in France. She was, under the pseudonym Rose Prudence, one of the main authors of the column Sexism Ordinaire, in Temps Modernes (a political, literary, and philosophical journal founded by Beauvoir and Sartre). A volume with the same title was published in 1979 with an introduction by Beauvoir. Liliane was also the organizer of a conference on Feminisms and Nazism, and the editor of a book with the same title. It would take an entire book to pay tribute to all her contributions to the feminist movement, of which I could devote a long chapter to what she has brought to me personally.
Diana Rigg
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2022
Dame Diana Rigg (1938-2020) was born in Doncaster, England, and spent the first eight years of her life living in India where her father was a railway engineer. She was sent back to Yorkshire to attend a boarding school and despite a total lack on support from her school or parents, Rigg pursued her studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, eventually joining the Royal Shakespeare Company (from 1959 to 1967).
While Rigg’s career was spent mostly in the theatre, she is remembered for several iconic roles such as Tracy Bond (the only Bond girl to marry the elusive spy), Olenna Tyrell (the Queen of Thorns from Game of Thrones), and most importantly as the action hero Emma Peel in the Avengers. It is for the latter of these three roles that I particularly wanted to honour her as my mother, who idolised her, later bought me the VHS set of the Avengers at a time when, other than Princess Leia from Star Wars, there still weren’t a lot of strong female leads in action movies and TV.
The role of Emma Peel was originally written for a man before the actor dropped out and the show cast a woman instead without rewriting the script which explains Emma Peel’s unique place as an early feminist icon. During filming, Rigg found out she was being paid less for her lead role than the male cameramen and had to fight to earn better pay. She recalled that with better pay came more respect, but she was still portrayed by the media as mercenary for it. Rigg was extremely uncomfortable with her new status as a sex-symbol, but when asked for her opinion on whether the sexiness and catsuits detracted from the strength of the character she responded with: “Why not present glamour as well as self-sufficiency.” This portrait honours both the fictional action- hero who inspired so many, and the woman who brought her to life for us.
Tosia Altman
Digital drawing on collaged paper
2022
Tosia Altman (1919-1943), daughter of a watchmaker, grew up in Lipno, Poland. A leader of the Warsaw branch of the Jewish youth group, Ha-Shomer, she headed youth education. During the 1939 evacuation of Warsaw, she escaped East, mostly on foot, to Vilna. Ha-Shomer was concerned for the members left behind in Nazi-occupied Poland and Altman accepted a mission to be the first to return.
Despite a ban on Jews travelling, Altman risking her life, travelled among ghettos spreading a message of resistance, linking the organisation to ghetto leadership. She corresponded in code with leaders in Vienna, Palestine, and Switzerland, and snuck back into Vilna to report on worsening conditions in the ghettos, rumoured massacres, and the strong resistance movement. In later travels across Poland, she reported on the systematic slaughter of Jews, helplessly witnessing massacres first-hand.
By 1942, with only 10% of the original 600,000 Jews alive in Warsaw, armed resistance began and Altman and other women smuggled in weapons. Altman traveled among ghettos, now an emissary of the Jewish fighting organization, the ZOB, saving several people from certain death, and coordinating with Jewish armed groups in Krakow.
On Jan 18, 1943 Altman participated in an attack on German troops rounding up Jews. Most were killed; Altman, among those captured, was rescued by a Jewish police officer.
On April 18, 1943 with the Warsaw Ghetto surrounded, the revolt began. The leadership joined Altman in the bunker on Mila Street. When the Germans discovered it and filled it with gas, most took their own lives rather than surrender. Alman and five others, wounded, escaped the ghetto and hid in the attic of a factory. On May 24 it caught fire; Altman, engulfed by the flames, jumped. She was caught by the Polish police who handed her over to the Germans. Left untreated and possibly tortured, she died two days later. She is remembered as the first to answer the call and the last to fall.
The Ghetto uprising resisted the Germans almost as long as the Polish army had during the 1939 invasion. It inspired the 63 day-long Warsaw uprising.
