Wonderous Unsung Women from Her-story

A compilation for Women’s History Month

but we celebrate women everyday so it’s relevant no matter the month

(In no particular order)

BY MEIRA BERLOW | April 19, 2022

Kitty B. Perkins

While the term “Black Barbie” has solidified its namesake in current pop culture online, the history behind the introduction of more racially comprehensive casts to the Barbie universe and the original creation of the Black Barbie itself is rarely brought to the limelight. 

Louvenia Perkins, more affectionately referred to as Kitty, was born one of seven siblings in the segregated late 1940s South Carolina. Despite her gilded future as one of the most omnipresent staples in Barbie history, she was originally never able to purchase a Barbie doll as a child. Not only was poverty rampant in her town of Spartanburg, but due to the fact that Barbie was a popular and high end fashion doll a majority of the releases were only regulated to “White Only” private shopping areas. 

Perkins was not only born with an intuitive grasp on fashion, but also in defying the odds. She was able to attain both a highschool and college diploma in a time of growing American anxiety over women’s education and independence. With a fashion design degree under her belt she dove straight into the industry. She found a classified ad for a Mattel and bought her first Barbie doll in preparation for the interview. Kitty came with over five different sketches and drawings for Barbie’s outfits and won over the Mattel team on the spot, officially becoming the first Black fashion designer to be involved with Barbie since her creation. 

While there were technically different races of Barbie predating Kitty joining the company, they only came in the form of palette swapped versions of the original Barbie. They had the exact same mold as the original Barbie, meaning they were completely devoid of any actual non-white features and just looked like an uncanny valley version of the blonde hair and blue eyed doll. The black versions of these dolls were also only produced with straight hair, because synthetic fibres were the cheapest to manufacture. They were also constantly lowballed in terms of quality when it came to their shoes and clothes despite Barbie being a fashion doll known for her pretty dresses and accessories. Not to mention how the dolls were also significantly marked up in terms of prices regardless of their cheap materials. All in all, Mattel wanted the monetary gain of tapping into a non-white market, but they never wanted to put in the work to actually construct a doll that would entice and represent a majority of customers.

Knowing this, Perkins decided to make a change that would irrevocably distort the company’s history, as she was given the opportunity to both design and create the first African American official Barbie doll. Not only did she design intricate outfit details but she also made sure that the doll was the first one produced with textured hair and a face mold that more accurately reflected Black features. The initial release was made with critical acclaim, and garnered so much support from consumers that she was eventually able to create an entire Barbie line with a varying cast of skin tones and hair textures. By the time that Perkins retired from the company in 2003, she held the highest position in fashion design at Mattel and had won numerous creative awards for her strides in the professional doll making industry.

Yoshiko Kawashima

Born Asin Xianyu, lead a life more fitting for a publicized soap opera rather than the trenches of a war stricken japan; but reality is always stranger than fiction. 

Kawashima was one of the last viable heirs for the dying Qing Dynasty, being the fourteenth Manchu princess out of thirty eight children fathered by the king. Despite the impressive title, by the time she was born a majority of the direct lines to the Qing throne were being brutally executed over the grapple for power in China. She was eventually the last living princess of Manchuria. Due to this fact, Asin Xianyu was given the name Yoshiko Kawashima to live her days undercover in Japan at the age eight in order to escape. 

She was forced to cut all of her hair off, something unheard of underneath the Qing rule, and donned Japanese robes in the house of her distant uncle. Even despite the fact that she was meant to keep a low profile, rumors of an unconventional woman living within their providence soon garnered a lot of attention. As she grew up Kawashima continued to cut her hair short, learned how to ride horses, and instead preferred to don men’s yukatas instead of women’s ones in contrast to the traditional female gender roles at that time. Not to mention how she was also talked about for attempting to worm herself out of multiple arranged marriages at the hands of her uncle, and also having a myriad of different suicide attempts; an affliction that was revealed to be due to rampant sexual abuse that her uncle facilitated. With little support or respect from her environment, Kawashima decided to commit to her male persona full time and utilize her natural charisma to go undercover as a spy for the Japanese army, who were in direct competition to her home country of China and the Manchus in particular. 

Despite her birthright as a Chinese princess, Kawashima’s real claim to fame was her military work for the Japanese government. Ruthlessly denying her roots as the last hope for the Qing throne, she transformed herself into a Japanese powerhouse, seemingly wanting revenge for the deaths of her many siblings at the hands of the new Chinese government. Soon after this, Kawashima and her male Japanese military uniform became a ubiquitous duo.  Being a cunning and elusive spy she was able to lead militias on horseback composed of thousands of men against the Manchu army while simultaneously weaponizing her male identity to coax information out of high ranking officers. Not to mention how she was able to have multiple affairs with many diplomats, including her controversial love scandal with the Empress of China at the end of the Qing dynasty rule, Wan Jung. Yoshiko was eventually able to seduce and charm both the last monarch of Qing, Pu Yi, and Wan Jung into leading a blossoming new region, named Manchuko after the lost Manchuria; and once again returned to her place as a powerful figure in Chinese society. 

Sadly, a facade can only last for so long before the cracks begin to show, and Yoshiko’s true identity was soon revealed to the public. With her widespread fame prompting many books and newspaper articles about her she became too much of a well known figure to continue her spy work. Not to mention because of her intimacy with so many high profile people, her true gender was also eventually uncovered, as her military companion Kotone Sonomoto leaked it to the press. The Japanese military and the Chinese socialites that once revered her wit and bravery soon turned on her. She was utilized as a scapegoat for the myriad of war crimes that the Japanese government committed and also had to stand trial for betraying the Chinese throne. In her final moments not even her royal Qing blood could save her as she was ultimately sentenced to be publicly executed, leaving only her legacy and a letter to her secretary telling him to take care of her pets behind.

Hedy Lamarr

With having the face behind the inspiration for both Disney’s Snow White and Batman’s Catwoman, many people typecasted Hedy as the everyday ditzy movie starlet, until she completely rewired the landscape of technology and aeronautics with her Nobel Prize winning inventions.

Before her name was gilded in showlights, Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, in a conservative small town in Austria to wealthy Jewish parents. Despite only being seventeen at the time, she had already developed an appetite for something bigger, and begged her parents to officially enroll her in acting school. In the same year she was booked in her first film, which was banned from viewing in a lot of places by both the Pope and Hitler for its multiple allusions to sexually charged behavior that she was pressured into performing. In spite of the pushback to the film, it soon made her face instantly recognizable because of all the buzz surrounding it’s controversial nature. As soon as she got her face on the big screen, though, she was whisked away into a loveless marriage with an older upstanding business man. 

Friedrich Fitz Mandel not only scored a budding celebrity as a wife but also an influential place in the Nazi regime. Mandel worked in overlooking the manufacture of weapons for Hitler’s dominion, and treated his wife with the same ire that he treated Jewish people. He routinely abused Hedy and kept her locked inside their mansion, which greatly impacted both her work and her psyche. She also heavily opposed his political standing, due to the fact that Hedy herself was Jewish, and eventually concocted a plan to divorce him; which included drugging him, stealing all his money, and dressing up as one of their maids in order to flee out of the back door to Paris and then eventually to the United States. 

Once she had thoroughly escaped Mandel’s reign she set her sights on reigniting her acting career, meeting with MGM’s biggest executives in only a matter of weeks due to her beauty and charm. He was immediately captivated with Hedy and signed her a contract just as quickly as they had met each other. To her mortification, however, she realized that he was paying her practically nothing in comparison to the men that were signed under the same studio. Lamarr once again concocted a plan to sway the tides in her favor, and booked a trip on the same cruise as him all the way to London in order to convince him to raise her pay. Her cleverness once again worked to her advantage and she became one of the top paid actresses in MGM’s company, and Hedwig Kiesler soon became the recognizable Hedy Lamarr. 

Fame turned out not to be what Lamarr was ultimately looking for, as she often retreated into her dressing room to tinker with her inventions during filming. Even though she was one of the leading ladies during MGM’s golden age of Hollywood, Lamarr was unsatisfied with her treatment in show business due to the fact that she wanted to be understand intellectually rather than solely for her pretty face. Her company would auction of kisses to her audience in order to help fund the war efforts overseas, as well as physically assaulting Lamarr during filming when she showed resistance to acting in sexually explicit scenes. She soon checked out of her roles completely and did it just to make ends meet, and turned her passions to science instead. Despite not having any formal education or training in STEM topics she held a masterful understanding over the mechanical, eventually scribing multiple transcripts of her creations.

In order to gain notoriety for her inventions that could hold the key to defeating the Nazis. Lamarr enlisted the help of her partner in crime, and avante garde composer George Antheil. Her writings harbored information that would be vital to the creation of WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular technology. Not to mention how it would’ve positively impacted the war because she was the one who originally wrote about changing plane’s wings to a pointed shape rather than rectangular ones, something that now has become an omnipresent staple in modern air travel. Now that she had enlisted the help of a man to aid in getting her scientific work on the map, Lamarr was sure that it would soon be implemented on a wide scale. Hedy learned firsthand, though, that being beautiful was not always a privilege as the Navy laughed her out of the park and refused to take her findings seriously. No matter how many times both her and Antheil presented the work they would either be refused or Antheil would garner all of the praise for her achievements. This annoyed Lamarr and led to the damnation of their relationship down the line. Soon, the war came to an end and both Lamarr’s scientific prowess and acting career soon fizzled out of the public eye.

Lamarr only gained recognition for her findings when she was well into her 70s, and by that time she had already resigned herself to depression and self loathing, so she rarely even made public appearances to collect her awards before dying alone in 2000.