Although most of the notable pipe smokers we have record of were male, women have enjoyed the calm provided by a bowl of pipe tobacco for as long as men have. However, the habit of smoking a pipe has usually been considered "unladylike". These bold women broke the mold, at varying times in their lives, to take up a pipe and smoke it in public. This is the fifth and final installment in our series on famous pipe smokers.
Angela Davis
Angela Davis is a prominent civil rights activist, philosopher, scholar and writer. She is best known for her affiliations with the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party throughout the 1960’s and 70’s.
Angela Davis was born in 1944 in Birmingham Alabama. There, she was exposed to discrimination and racial prejudice very early on.
The 1963 church bombing by a member of the Ku Klux Klan deeply affected Davis because she knew the young victims involved.
When Davis was young, her mother was a national officer and leading organizer of the Southern Negro Youth Congress. This organization was strongly influenced by the communist party.
After studying philosophy at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, Davis attended grad school at the University of California, San Diego.
Between her undergrad and graduate studies at the University of California, Davis attended the University of Frankfurt in Germany.
During a trip into East Berlin, she decided that East Germany was dealing with the after effects of fascism better than West Germany. Many of her roommates were active in the Socialist German Student Union.
When she returned to the United States, Davis became active with branches of the Black Panther Party and the Communist Party USA.
By 1969 she was an acting assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
That same year, at the urging of Governor Ronald Reagan, Davis was fired for her affiliation with the Communist Party.
After being reinstated, the Board of Regents of the University of California continued to try to find a reason to have Davis permanently released from her position at UCLA. In 1970, they succeeded in firing her for use of inflammatory language during her speeches.
In 1970, Davis was charged and imprisoned for her alleged role in the escape attempt of the Soledad Brothers. She was acquitted in 1972.
After teaching and traveling for some years, Davis returned to teaching. Today she is a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has authored several books, including Women, Race, and Class (1980) and Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003).
Millicent Fenwick
Millicent Fenwick was a four-term Republican member of the United States House of Representatives who was outspoken in favor of civil rights and the women's movement.
She has been credited as the inspiration behind Lacey Davenport in Gary Trudeau’s “Doonesbury.” Trudeau has denied this claim.
Millicent Fenwick was born in 1910 in New York City.
In her younger years, Millicent Fenwick modeled for Harper’s Bazaar.
She then worked as a writer and editor at Vogue magazine for 14 years.
Fenwick didn’t become involved in politics until the 1950’s. Due to her intelligence, wit, and charm she quickly ascended the rungs of the Republican Party.
She was elected to the Bernardsville Borough Council in 1957.
From 1958 until 1974 she served on the New Jersey Committee of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
She was elected to the New Jersey General Assembly in 1969 and served from 1970 to 1973.
Afterwards she became director of the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs under Governor William T. Cahill.
Millicent Fenwick was elected to Congress from New Jersey in 1974. By this time she was a popular figure with the media. Walter Cronkite had referred to her as the “conscious of Congress.”
She was one of the most liberal conservatives in the House of Representatives. He was often at odds with the leaders of her party.
In 1982, she ran for a United States Senate seat, and defeated conservative Jeffrey Bell in the Republican primary election. She would, however, go on to lose the general election to Frank Lautenberg. She subsequently left the House of Representatives.
In 1983 Fenwick was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as United States Ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, Italy. She would retire in 1987 at the age of 77.
When she died in 1992, Charles Millard called Fenwick the “Katherine Hepburn of politics.”
Greta Garbo
The three times Academy Award nominee for Best Actress, Greta Garbo is a legend of the silver screen.
Greta Garbo was born in 1905 in Stockholm Sweden.
When Greta was fourteen, her father died of Spanish flu. To help her family make ends meet, she dropped out of school and took a job in a department store. The store used her as a model in its ads.
After acting in a department store ad, she was discovered by Erik A. Petschler, a comedy director. He gave her a small role in one of his films.
Following her role in the film, she applied for a scholarship to a Swedish drama school and got it.
Greta Garbo began her Hollywood career in 1925 when she was 19 years old. She was offered a contract with MGM.
Garbo became an international film superstar and legend of the silver screen. She was voted the 25th Greatest Movie Star of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
For many years, Greta Garbo was MGM’s highest paid actor.
Although she never won an Academy Award, she received an honorary one. True to her mysterious nature, she didn’t show up to the ceremony.
In 1950, she became an American citizen.
Garbo was never married, nor did she have any children.
Garbo always preferred to be alone. She didn’t sign autographs, answer letters and rarely ever gave interviews. Throughout her life she perpetuated a distant and socially withdrawn mystique.
She was once designated the most beautiful woman who ever lived by the Guinness Book of World Records.
Garbo won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress for both Anna Karenina in 1935 and Camille in 1936.
She retired at the age of thirty five after acting in twenty eight films. Though she was offered numerous chances to return to acting, she turned them all down. She spent most of her retirement in private.
Forugh Farrokhzad
Forugh Farrokhzad is widely considered one of the most influential Iranian female poets of the twentieth century. In her short life she published four volumes of poetry and directed an award winning documentary.
Forugh was born in Tehran in 1935. She had six brothers and sisters.
She went to a regular school until the ninth grade. Afterward she was sent to a girl's school for the manual arts where she was taught painting and sewing.
She was married at sixteen. A year later she gave birth to her only child, Kāmyār.
Farrokhzad and her husband divorced in 1954. She won custody of her child and moved back to Tehran to write poetry.
She published her first volume, The Captive, in 1955.
As a female divorcee, who wrote poetry in a strong feminine voice, Farrokhzad often was the subject of negative attention and disapproval.
During 1958, Farrokhzad spent nine months in Europe. When she returned to Iran, she met filmmaker and writer Ebrahim Golestan. After publishing two more volumes of poetry, she made her directorial debut with the documentary The House is Black.
The House is Black is about Iranians affected by leprosy. The film won several international awards.
While shooting her film, Forugh became attached to a child of two lepers. She adopted him and brought him to live at her mother’s house.In 1964, she published Another Birth.
In 1967 Forugh Farrokhzad was killed in a car accident at the age of thirty two.
Her poem, Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season was published posthumously. It is considered by some to be one of the best-structured modern poems in Persian.
After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Farrokhzad’s poetry was banned for over a decade.
Helene Knoop
As one of Norway’s premier figurative painters, Helene Knoop has garnered recognition for her “kitsch painting.”
She is one of the founders of worldwidekitch.com.
Kitsch painting, according to Knoop, involves “pathos, poetry, drama and sincerity communicated through the mastery of craft.”
From 2003 to 2003 Helene Knoop studied figurative painting with world renowned figurative painter Odd Nerdrum.
After leaving Nerdrum’s studio Knoop studied ancient sculpture in Italy.
Helene Knoop always paints using a live model. When she paints landscapes, she paints inplein air.
Her paintings are strongly influenced by the Italian Renaissance and Baroque art.
Knoop has held solo exhibitions in London, Stockholm and New York. She has also participated in many group shows. Her paintings are represented in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, Italy, Nicaragua and the United States.
She currently lives and works in Oslo.
Andie MacDowell
American film actress Andie MacDowell was born in 1958 in South Carolina.
She dropped out of college and signed a contract with the prestigious Elite modeling agency in New York City in 1978.
In the 1980’s, MacDowell modelled for “Vogue magazine and appeared in ad campaigns for Yves Saint Laurent, Vassarette, Armani perfume, Sabeth-Row, Mink International, Anne Klein and Bill Blass.”
She got her big break in acting after she garnered attention from a series of Calvin Klein television ads as well as billboard ads in Times Square.
Her first movie role was in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes in 1984. During post-production, MacDowell’s lines were dubbed by Glenn Close because her southern accent was too pronounced for the role of an Englishwoman.
After studying method acting with teachers from the Actors Studio, and working privately with the renowned coach Harold Guskin, MacDowell landed a role in Steven Soderbergh’s independent film Sex, Lies, and Videotape 1989.
For her performance, she earned an Independent Spirit Award, a Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress and several other award nominations.
She world achieve movie stardom following the success of Harold Ramis’s 1993 comedy “Groundhog Day” and Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994.
Through all of her success in acting, MacDowell has kept modeling. Since 1986 she has appeared in print and television advertisements for the cosmetic and haircare company L'Oréal.
Though she took time toward the end of the 1990’s to spend time with her children, Andie MacDowell has long since returned to acting in television series and independent films.
Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria's father was Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, the fourth son of the reigning King of the United Kingdom, George III.
Victoria was the only daughter of Prince Edward, who died shortly after she was born.
Because her three uncles did not have any surviving child of their own, Victoria became heir to the throne upon the death of King William IV, and was coroneted in 1838.
From 1876 onward, she used the additional title of Empress of India.
Her reign lasted sixty three years and seven months, which is longer than that of any other British monarch and longer than any female monarch in history.
Victoria was a naturally gifted artist and dedicated diarist. At the time of her death, Queen
Victoria’s detailed journal encompassed 122 volumes.
Her reign took place during, what many consider, the golden age of the British Empire.
In 1840 she married Prince Albert. Between 1840 and 1857 the two had nine children.
When Albert died in 1861, Queen Victoria was very depressed. To show her dedication to her late husband, she wore black for the rest of her reign.
The general influence of the middle years of her reign was the support of peace and reconciliation. In 1875 she helped to avert a second Franco-German war with a letter that she sent to the German Emperor.
There was also a noticeable shift away from sovereign rule during Victoria’s reign. A series of Acts broadened the social and economic base of the electorate.
During her reign the role of constitutional monarch became prevalent. The monarch would remain above political parties there forth. She was still a very strong supporter of Empire.
Though conservative, Queen Victoria supported many progressive measures involving the poor and charities.
She was active in her royal duties right up until the time of her death in 1901.
Rachel Jackson
Rachel Jackson, wife of President Andrew Jackson, was the subject of some of the most malicious smear campaigns in American History.
Rachel Jackson was born Rachel Donelson in Virginia in 1767. She had seven brothers and sisters.
When Andrew Jackson moved to Nashville, Tennessee in 1788 he boarded with Rachel Donelson’s mother.
Believing that the divorce from her first marriage was final, Rachel Donelson and Andrew Jackson married in Mississippi.
Rachel and Andrew Jackson’s marriage was deemed bigamous and invalid when it was discovered that her divorce was not completed.
The two remarried in 1794, but the debacle surrounding the end of her first marriage and her second haunted Jackson’s Presidential campaign in 1828.
Supporters of John Quincy Adams accused Rachel Jackson of being a bigamist. Jackson still won the election by a landslide.
Rachel Jackson died suddenly just as Andrew Jackson was set to assume the role of President in Washington DC. Her death left the President Grief Stricken. He never remarried.
Gertrude Stein
American writer, poet, art collector, and influential Lost Generation figure Gertrude Stein was born in 1874 in Pennsylvania.
Her father was a wealthy merchant, so her family spent a lot of time in Europe during her childhood before settling in Oakland, California.
Gertrude Stein’s parents died when she was only a teenager. Her oldest brother then sent Gertrude and her sister to live with maternal relatives in Baltimore.
Later, Gertrude Stein studied medicine at Johns Hopkins Medical School. She never fully completed her studies.
In 1903, Gertrude Stein moved to Paris. For eleven years she lived with her brother, Leo.
Leo and Gertrude became collectors of post- impressionist paintings in 1904. She would famously collect many works by Pablo Picasso, who would eventually go on to paint Gertrude’s portrait.
They also acquired paintings by Henri Manguin, Pierre Bonnard, Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Honoré Daumier, Henri Matisse, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
In April 1914 Leo relocated to Settignano, Italy, and their art collection was divided.
Gatherings at Gertrude Stein’s home at 27 rue de Fleurus would become famous for defining modernism in literature and art. Such talented people as Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, Ezra Pound, Gavin Williamson, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, Francis Cyril Rose, René Crevel, Élisabeth de Gramont, Francis Picabia, Claribel Cone, Mildred Aldrich, Carl Van Vechten and Henri Matisse regularly frequented her home on Saturday nights.
Stein preferred to host organized gatherings as to avoid impromptu visits. That way, she could focus on her own writing in peace.
Upon the birth of his son, Ernest Hemingway asked Stein to be the godmother of his child.
Around this time, it is said that Gertrude Stein famously coined the term the “Lost Generation.”
In 1933 she published her only commercial success, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
After lecturing in America in 1934, Gertrude Stein returned to France where she would remain throughout World War II. She died shortly after the War ended.