The list of notable Florida women is long. We’ve highlighted some of those lesser-known heroes in the pages of the Summer 2021 FORUM, shining a light on legacies that Floridians see every day, often unaware of the powerful females behind them. Florida Humanities, however, has also frequently featured women whose names and accomplishments are far more familiar. You’ll find them in the vast FORUM archives

Here’s a look at just a few of those you’ll find there:

Mary McLeod Bethune – prominent civil and women’s right leader, top black educator, college founder, and advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“Mary McLeod Bethune, a suffragist, too”

“Women’s suffrage centennial” by Peggy Macdonald

Marjory Stoneman Douglas – journalist, environmentalist, and author of the seminal The Everglades: River of Grass, which popularized the view of the Everglades as a treasure worth protecting.

“Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ Florida:

“Tracing the noted writer’s journey as she began a long and impactful life in the state she loved and protected” By Jack Davis

Zora Neale Hurston – author, anthropologist, folklorist. and filmmaker, her best known novel is Their Eyes Are Watching God. In 2018, her book Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo, was finally published. It is the true story of Cudjo Lewis, who she interviewed in 1927. At the time she interviewed him, he was believed to be the last living person captured in Africa and brought over enslaved to the United States.

“Singing Along the Backroads,” by Stetson Kennedy, FORUM, Fall 2013

“Zora Neale Hurston in the Turpentine Camps” (digital) Florida Humanities 

“The Undiscovered Zora Neale Hurston” (digital) Florida Humanities

Betty Mae Jumper – The first and to this date only female chief of the Seminole Tribe of Florida.  She co-founded the tribe’s first newspaper and was also its editor.  She published her. She published a memoir, A Seminole Legend.

From FORUM Magazine, WOMAN OF LEGEND, Spring 2007

plus, the transcript of an Interview with Betty Mae Jumper by the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida in June 1999

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings – the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of such books as

The Yearling, Cross Creek, and Down Moon Under

“Be Proud Things Come So Bountiful:  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ Florida,”  by Mary F. Rogers, and

“Fifty Years Since The Yearling:  A celebration of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings” 

“Dear Honey: Letters home during the World War 11,”  by Betty Jean Steinshouer