American feminist writers

Louisa May Alcott (; November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet best known for writing the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott, she grew up among many well-known intellectuals of the day, including Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.Alcott's family suffered from financial difficulties, and while she worked to help support the family from an early age, she also sought an outlet in writing. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used pen names such as A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote lurid short stories and sensation novels for adults that focused on passion and revenge.Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts, and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters, Abigail May Alcott Nieriker, Elizabeth Sewall Alcott, and Anna Alcott Pratt. The novel was well-received at the time and is still popular today among both children and adults. It has been adapted for stage plays, films, and television many times.
Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried throughout her life. She also spent her life active in reform movements such as temperance and women's suffrage. She died from a stroke in Boston on March 6, 1888, just two days after her father's death.

Cherríe Moraga (born September 25, 1952) is a Xicana feminist, writer, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English since 2017, and in 2022 became a distinguished professor. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Xicana Indígena, which is network fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights. In 2017, she co-founded, with Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought, Art, and Social Practice, located on the campus of UC Santa Barbara.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin (née Kroeber; KROH-bər lə GWIN; October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) was an American author best known for her works of speculative fiction, including science fiction works set in her Hainish universe, and the Earthsea fantasy series. She was first published in 1959, and her literary career spanned nearly sixty years, producing more than twenty novels and over a hundred short stories, in addition to poetry, literary criticism, translations, and children's books. Frequently described as an author of science fiction, Le Guin has also been called a "major voice in American Letters". Le Guin said she would prefer to be known as an "American novelist".Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, to author Theodora Kroeber and anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber. Having earned a master's degree in French, Le Guin began doctoral studies but abandoned these after her marriage in 1953 to historian Charles Le Guin. She began writing full-time in the late 1950s and achieved major critical and commercial success with A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which have been described by Harold Bloom as her masterpieces. For the latter volume, Le Guin won both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, becoming the first woman to do so. Several more works set in Earthsea or the Hainish universe followed; others included books set in the fictional country of Orsinia, several works for children, and many anthologies.
Cultural anthropology, Taoism, feminism, and the writings of Carl Jung all had a strong influence on Le Guin's work. Many of her stories used anthropologists or cultural observers as protagonists, and Taoist ideas about balance and equilibrium have been identified in several writings. Le Guin often subverted typical speculative fiction tropes, such as through her use of dark-skinned protagonists in Earthsea, and also used unusual stylistic or structural devices in books such as the experimental work Always Coming Home (1985). Social and political themes, including race, gender, sexuality, and coming of age were prominent in her writing. She explored alternative political structures in many stories, such as in the philosophical short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973) and the anarchist utopian novel The Dispossessed (1974).
Le Guin's writing was enormously influential in the field of speculative fiction, and has been the subject of intense critical attention. She received numerous accolades, including eight Hugos, six Nebulas, and twenty-four Locus Awards, and in 2003 became the second woman honored as a Grand Master of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The U.S. Library of Congress named her a Living Legend in 2000, and in 2014, she won the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Le Guin influenced many other authors, including Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, and Iain Banks. After her death in 2018, critic John Clute wrote that Le Guin had "presided over American science fiction for nearly half a century", while author Michael Chabon referred to her as the "greatest American writer of her generation".

Alvera Mickelsen (1919 – July 12, 2016) was an American academic, author, and women's equality activist. Mickelsen, an evangelical Christian, spent her professional life advocating "that being a feminist is a Christian responsibility," despite resistance from some sectors. She published numerous books and scholarly articles on the topic of women's equality within Christianity. Alvera Mickelsen joined her colleagues to co-found Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE) in the late 1980s, a non-profit organization of churches and individuals which advocates for the equality of women within the church, as well as in their homes and society. Additionally, Mickelsen was a longtime professor of journalism at Bethel University in Minnesota from 1968 to 1986.Mickelsen, who was born in 1919 as one of 5 children of Swedish immigrant parents, was raised in a small farmhouse just outside La Porte, Indiana. The family moved to nearby Michigan City, Indiana, when she was nine years old. However, the Great Depression soon left her parents destitute just one year after they relocated to Michigan City. Mickelsen still graduated from high school in 1936 and became the first member of her family to enroll in college. She transferred between several colleges and universities due to scholarships, before graduating from Wheaton College in Illinois in 1942.Following her graduation from Wheaton College, she received her master's degree in journalism from Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She then became an editor for several Christian magazines and publications based in Chicago, before returning to Wheaton College as a professor. She met her husband, A. Berkeley Mickelsen, while teaching at Wheaton. The couple married in 1952 and had two daughters. Alvera Mickelsen continued to teach at Wheaton while simultaneously completing her second master's degree, this time in education, also from Wheaton.In 1965, the family moved to Arden Hills, Minnesota, where Berkeley Mickelsen had been hired as a professor of Greek, Hebrew and theology at Bethel Seminary. Alvera Mickelsen also became a professor of journalism at Bethel College (now called Bethel University) in 1968, where she taught until 1986.During the 1970s, Mickelsen and her husband, who were progressive evangelicals, became concerned by the perception of a backlash against women's rights and equality within the evangelical community. Together, Alvera and A. Berkeley Mickelsen published two books which cited Biblical passages that supported the equality of the sexes. They began touring Minnesota to debate leading pastors and theologians on the topic of gender equality within Christianity. The Mickelsens later helped to establish the non-profit group, Christians for Biblical Equality (CBE), during the 1980s. Alvera Mickelsen also served as the first chair of CBE's board of directors.After the unexpected death of A. Berkeley Mickelsen, aged 69, in 1990, Alvera Mickelsen continued to tour worldwide to promote gender equality and feminism within evangelicalism. According to Mimi Haddad, the current President of Christians for Biblical Equality, Mickelsen was once asked by a Christian radio show host how she could be both a traditional evangelical Christian and a feminist simultaneously. Mickelsen replied that the host should look up feminism in a dictionary, where the word was defined as "a belief that women should have social, political, and economic equality with men." The host replied that " 'Well, I believe in all those things', to which Mickelsen responded, 'Well, then, you are a feminist!' "Alvera Mickelsen died from natural causes on July 12, 2016, at the age of 97. She was survived by her two daughters, Ruth and Lynnell Mickelsen; her brother, Mel Johnson; and four grandchildren.

Ruthe Lewin Winegarten (August 26, 1929 – June 14, 2004) was an American author, activist, and historian.

Carolyn See (née Laws; January 13, 1934 – July 13, 2016) was a professor emerita of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of ten books, including the memoir, Dreaming: Hard Luck and Good Times in America, an advice book on writing, Making a Literary Life, and the novels There Will Never Be Another You, Golden Days, and The Handyman. See was also a book critic for the Washington Post for 27 years.

Helen Gurley Brown (née Helen Marie Gurley; February 18, 1922 – August 13, 2012) was an American author, publisher, and businesswoman. She was the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine for 32 years.