The Authentic Glow

I built the Women in History app because I want women and girls to be able to look backward and see possibility.

To find mentors across time.

To see that women were inventing, discovering, leading, writing, creating, and changing the world long before their names were centered in the story.

We are not rewriting history.

We are making it more complete.

The app is live now. Link in bio. 💛

Agnes Pockels helped make the invisible measurable.

Working outside a university, she built an apparatus that let scientists study how molecules behave at the surface of water. It was work that helped shape modern surface chemistry.

But history kept remembering the kitchen.

The full story of Agnes Pockels is on Substack.

This week brought violence that still demands answers, a gender gap that somehow found its way into the bonus check, new hope in advanced breast cancer treatment, and women across Kenya, India and Myanmar rewriting record books.

The news about women is not only what is being done to them.

It is also what they are surviving, building, discovering and winning.

Here’s what happened to women last week. 💛

A jar of marmalade turned into a movement.

Ghanaian entrepreneur Esther Afua Ocloo started with just a few shillings and built Nkulenu Industries into a successful food business.

But she didn’t stop with her own success.

She trained other women, pushed for women’s access to credit, and helped found Women’s World Banking so women around the world could build businesses of their own.

Sometimes the most powerful thing a woman can build isn’t just a company.

It’s a door for other women to walk through.

Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti did not ask politely for women to be heard.

She organized.

In 1947, thousands of women in Abeokuta protested unfair taxation, shut down markets, surrounded the Alake’s palace, and kept coming back until the system changed.

She became known as the Lioness of Lisabi.

This is what happens when women stop waiting for permission.

Na Hye-seok refused to disappear inside the roles assigned to her.

She became a painter, writer, independence activist, mother, divorcee, and one of Korea’s earliest feminist voices. Long before her own marriage became a public scandal, she was already asking a radical question:

What does a woman owe everyone else—and what does she owe herself?

In 1933, she said she wanted only to be “the rooster that crowed at dawn.”

The full story of Na Hye-seok is now on Substack.

Women in History: In the 1950s, Bette Nesmith Graham got tired of retyping entire pages because of one tiny mistake.

So she mixed up a white correction fluid in her kitchen, called it Mistake Out, and eventually turned it into Liquid Paper.

What started as a secretary’s workaround became a multimillion-dollar company.

And yes, she was also Michael Nesmith’s mother, as in The Monkees. 😂

Sometimes innovation starts with a grand vision.

Sometimes it starts with one annoying typo.

What happened to women last week?

From women and girls facing sexual violence in Sudan, to Team USA making basketball history, a new global fund fighting FGM, growing legal battles over AI-generated sexual abuse, and the loss of Italian feminist leader Emma Bonino.

This week was a reminder that women’s lives are being shaped by very different systems, in very different places.

Different countries. Different forms of power. Same fight for safety, autonomy, visibility, and dignity.

Before solar panels were common, Mária Telkes was already figuring out how to use sunlight to solve real problems.

During World War II, she helped develop a solar-powered desalination device for lifeboats so stranded sailors could turn seawater into drinking water.

Then she helped design one of the first modern solar-heated homes.

Her nickname?

The Sun Queen. ☀️

Long before solar energy became part of the climate conversation, Mária Telkes was already asking what else sunlight could do for us.

Women in History: Angela Ruiz Robles

In 1949, Spanish teacher Ángela Ruiz Robles looked at children lugging around heavy textbooks and thought:

There has to be a better way.

So she designed the Mechanical Encyclopedia. A portable learning device with interchangeable text reels, illumination, buttons, and plans for audio.

But decades before e-readers existed, she was already imagining a future where students could carry a whole library in one device.

Sometimes innovation starts with a huge breakthrough.

And sometimes it starts with a teacher looking at a child’s backpack and saying, absolutely not. 😂