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1. FRIDA KAHLO (1907–1954)
Museo Frida Kahlo (Casa Azul), Mexico City
At a time when women artists were expected to work in decorative genres – still lifes, domestic scenes – Kahlo laid bare her own body and suffering, depicting the miscarriages, the spinal surgeries, and the disability from a bus accident at 18 that left her in pain for the rest of her life. That unflinching honesty is what made her one of the most influential painters of the 20th century – of the roughly 150 paintings she made, a third are self-portraits, and in November 2025 one of them sold for $54.7 million, the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by a female artist. She was also openly bisexual and politically active in a deeply conservative, Catholic Mexico. Her marriage to muralist Diego Rivera was its own kind of daring – they divorced in 1939 and remarried the following year, with both of them unfaithful throughout, including his affair with her own sister. Kahlo had affairs too, with men and women, including with exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who briefly sheltered at Casa Azul with his wife after fleeing Stalin’s Soviet Union. Casa Azul – the cobalt-blue house in Mexico City where she was born and lived, and where she died at the age of 47 – is now the Museo Frida Kahlo, her clothes, corsets, wheelchair and unfinished paintings still largely as she left them.
2. JANE AUSTEN (1775–1817)
Jane Austen’s House, Chawton, England
Published under near-anonymity in a world that didn’t expect women to write novels for money — her first book, Sense and Sensibility (1811), carried no name at all on its title page, just “By a Lady.” The ones that followed read “By the author of Sense and Sensibility,” so even as she built a following, most readers had no idea who she was. It was only after her death that her brother revealed her identity to the public. In the meantime, she spent her books quietly mocking the marriage conventions she was supposed to live by. Austen wrote all six of her novels — including Pride and Prejudice and Emma — from a small writing table by the window at Chawton, working in snatches, hiding the pages if visitors came in. She never married, never owned property and never lived to see her name in print. The cottage is now Jane Austen’s House Museum — her writing table is still there, along with her jewellery, letters and first editions.
3. MARIE CURIE (1867–1934)
Musée Curie, Paris
Curie was born in Warsaw, where a small museum in her childhood home on Ulica Freta also marks her beginnings — but Paris is where the science happened. She discovered two new elements, polonium and radium, and pioneered the study of radioactivity, a word she coined herself. She became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, then the first person ever, man or woman, to win a second one in a different scientific field. Her actual laboratory is preserved inside the Musée Curie on Rue Pierre et Marie Curie — her radium-stained notebooks are still kept behind lead-lined cases, too radioactive to handle safely more than a century on. Around the time of her second Nobel, the French press exposed her affair with a married colleague and turned viciously xenophobic, casting the Polish-born widow as a foreign scandal; a mob gathered outside her house, and she was quietly advised to skip the Nobel ceremony. She went anyway. The museum today is free, small, and unglamorous — much like she insisted on being. Note: closed 1 August–1 September for annual holiday, reopening 2 September.
4. ROSA PARKS (1913–2005)
Rosa Parks Museum, Montgomery, Alabama
On 1 December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus to a white passenger – a quiet, deliberate act that got her arrested and sparked the 381-day Montgomery Bus Boycott, the campaign that broke segregated public transport and helped launch the American civil rights movement. She wasn’t the first to refuse; others had done it before her and were arrested too. What made her arrest the turning point was the movement built around it — including a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr, who led the boycott to victory. The Rosa Parks Museum, run by Troy University, sits on the exact site of her arrest in downtown Montgomery – the only museum in the US dedicated to her. Inside: her original fingerprint arrest record, a restored 1950s city bus, and a “Cleveland Avenue Time Machine” exhibit that puts visitors on the bus itself, that night.
https://www.troy.edu/student-life-resources/arts-culture/rosa-parks-museum/index.html
5. WANGARI MAATHAI (1940–2011)
Karura Forest, Nairobi
In 2004, Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, honoured for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace”. It capped a career that began decades earlier with a simple response to rural Kenyan women who said they had to walk further each year for firewood and clean water. In 1977, she founded the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots campaign that has since planted more than 50 million trees across Kenya. In the early 1990s, Maathai led fierce protests against government plans to clear parts of Karura Forest, on the edge of Nairobi, for private development. She was beaten by police during one demonstration and arrested more than once, but the campaign ultimately succeeded. Today, Karura Forest is one of Nairobi’s favourite green spaces, with walking trails, waterfalls and a visitor centre – a living reminder of the campaign she refused to abandon.
https://friendsofkarura.org/
6. ANNE FRANK (1929–1945)
Anne Frank House, Amsterdam
Born in Frankfurt, Germany, Anne Frank fled with her family to Amsterdam in 1933 as the Nazis rose to power – only for the occupation to catch up with them nine years later. In July 1942, 13-year-old Anne went into hiding with her family in a concealed annexe behind her father’s office on the Prinsengracht canal. For just over two years, she kept a diary – observant, funny, self-critical, aching with the ordinary frustrations of adolescence and the terror of discovery – while eight people lived in near-total silence during the day, dependent on a handful of loyal helpers outside. In August 1944, the annexe was betrayed and raided. Anne died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany in early 1945, just weeks before the camp was liberated. Her father, Otto, the only one of the eight to survive, later published her diary after discovering the notebooks she had left behind. The Anne Frank House preserves the annexe as it was and visitors can see the bookcase that concealed the entrance to their hiding place, Frank’s handwritten notebooks and movie star clippings still pinned to her wall.
7. OLIVE SCHREINER (1855–1920)
Schreiner House Museum, Nxuba, Eastern Cape
Schreiner published The Story of an African Farm in 1883 under a male pen name (Ralph Iron), tackling religion, gender and pregnancy outside marriage with a frankness that shocked Victorian readers. She went on to become one of South Africa’s most outspoken early feminists and human rights advocates, campaigning against war and racial injustice decades before either was fashionable to oppose. The house where she lived with her siblings from 1868 to 1870 still stands in Nxuba (formerly Cradock). Now a museum, it holds her personal library, letters and possessions and was refreshed with new exhibitions as recently as this past June. About 25km from Cradock, on the summit of Buffelskop, Schreiner, her husband Samuel, their infant daughter and their dog are buried together in a simple sarcophagus.
amazwi.museum/schreiner-house/
WHAT’S MISSING: The Women’s Living Heritage Monument, Pretoria
Ten years after being unveiled by then-president Jacob Zuma on Women’s Day in 2016, the Women’s Living Heritage Monument in Pretoria has still not opened to the public. At Lilian Ngoyi Square, it was designed as an exhibition space and training centre, with artworks and archival material tracing over a century of women’s struggle. The centrepiece is four statues, of Ngoyi, Sophia Williams-de Bruyn, Helen Joseph and Rahima Moosa, who led the 1956 march of 20,000 women to protest apartheid pass laws — the same march which National Women’s Day commemorates.
Though Zuma’s unveiling was premature, as construction was only completed two years later, it was done to mark the 60th anniversary of the march. More than R280m in public money has gone into it, including an ongoing maintenance budget, yet it has never received an occupancy certificate due to noncompliant fire-safety systems.
In November 2025, TimesLive quoted provincial officials as saying they expected the certificate to be finalised by March 2026. That deadline has since passed and now, on the 70th anniversary of the march, the site remains fenced off.
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