Joanna Scutts

TIME • 29th July 2016

The Woman Who Worked to Save 19th-Century Victims of Sex Trafficking

At the end of the 19th century, journalist and reformer Victoria Earle Matthews sounded the alarm about what amounted to a system of sexual slavery then thriving in post-emancipation America.

TIME • 11th July 2016

The Society Girl Who Became a Martyr for Suffrage

When she died at the age of 30, in 1916, Inez Milholland was a celebrity whose fame was one part movie star Mary Pickford and one part anarchist Emma Goldman. Though her activism was almost overshadowed by her beauty and her time as a society girl, she was most famous as the leader of the huge 1913 suffrage parade in Washington D.C.

TIME • 14th June 2016

The Manhattan Project Physicist Who Fought for Women's Rights

From an early age, nuclear physicist Chien-Shiung Wu had to travel in order to learn: first 50 miles, then 150—and eventually, to the other side of the world.

TIME • 17th May 2016

The Mysterious Woman Behind J.P. Morgan’s Library

By all accounts, not much was said in the 1905 meeting between the 68-year-old, walrus-mustached financier J. Pierpont Morgan and the young woman who would become his personal librarian—a gruff greeting, a quick nod of approval, perhaps a handshake.

TIME • 19th April 2016

The Woman Who Kicked Down Wall Street’s Doors

On her first trip away from her home in Ohio, in the early 1950s, a teenaged Muriel Siebert visited the New York Stock Exchange. Later, in her autobiography, she would recall the trading floor, seen from above, as a "sea of men in dark suits,” resounding with the “clamorous human buzz of… thousands of deals.”

TIME • 5th April 2016

The Journalist Who Lived at the White House

Journalist Lorena Hickok, known as “Hick,” is best remembered today for her intimate, not-quite-definable friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. For a few years in the early 1930s, the two women were so close that Hickok had to quit her job reporting on the Roosevelt Administration, and instead, join it, as a New Deal researcher.

TIME • 22nd March 2016

The Writer Once Called ‘The World’s Greatest Girl Reporter’

When she was involved in a brawl outside the New York bar Bill’s Gay Nineties in the summer of 1937, TIME identified Adela Rogers St. Johns as a "cinemauthor" - a portmanteau that demonstrated how difficult it was to squeeze her many lives into a single epithet.

TIME • 9th March 2016

The Writer Who Taught American Women How to Live Alone

Is it possible for a woman to be single and happy? Even after multiple waves of feminist revolution and backlash, the answer to that question still comes with caveats: Yes, if she’s young. Yes, if she's rich. And it depends what you mean by happy….

TIME • 3rd February 2016

The Woman Who Changed the Game for Black Writers

To say that Dorothy West had a sheltered upbringing for a young African American girl born in 1907 is an understatement. Once, when a copy of the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis dropped through the mailbox, her mother was horrified at the thought of her daughter encountering the magazine’s graphic accounts of racial violence, seemingly so far removed from their genteel middle-class life in Boston.