Janine Lahovary was the wife of a retired Romanian ambassador. Lahovary became romantically involved with American playwright, poet, and novelist Natalie Barney, and the two remained lovers for thirteen years. At the time, Barney was also involved with Romaine Brooks. Lahovary made a point of winning Brooks’s friendship, Barney reassured Brooks that their relationship came first, and the triangle appeared to be stable. Barney died in Lahovary’s arms in 1972.

Mrs. Henry Lang was the second vice president at the Montclair Art Association as well as an art collector and patron to the arts in New Jersey.

Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist best known for her work during the Great Depression with the Farm Security Administration. Humanizing the economic climate during the early 1930s, Lange’s work greatly influenced the development of documentary photography. Educated at Columbia University, Lange set out to travel the world but settled in San Francisco after being robbed. By 1919 she had opened a successful portrait studio, but with the onset of the Great Depression, she turned her camera to the street. Her work received attention from the Farm Security Administration, which employed her as a photojournalist, bringing public attention to the plight of sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers. In 1941, Lange was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship Award, but after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Lange abandoned the award to document the forced evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans from the West Coast, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority. Capturing the spirit of the camps, Lange created images that frequently juxtaposed signs of human courage and dignity with physical evidence of the indignities of incarceration. The Army impounded most of the images, and they were not seen for over fifty years. After World War II, Lange accepted a position teaching at California School of Fine Arts and later went on to found the photography magazine Aperture.

Martyl Suzanne Schweig Langsdorf (1917–2013) was an American artist who created the Doomsday Clock image for the June 1947 cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She earned a degree from Washington University in St. Louis. The Doomsday Clock illustration was her only magazine cover; both before and after that project she painted abstract landscapes and murals. Her work includes an oil-on-canvas mural titled Wheat Workers for the Russell, Kansas post office, commissioned by the Treasury Section of Fine Arts and completed in 1940.

Ellen Lanyon (1926–2013) was a painter and printmaker from Chicago. She was educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Iowa, and the Courtauld Institute. Lanyon’s art has been characterized as Surrealist, and she often used the word “dreamscape” to describe her work. Lanyon’s early paintings included portraits of relatives and the rooms they inhabited. Later she depicting objects from her collection of curios, many of which were inherited from relatives. In 1976, Lanyon received a commission from the Department of the Interior to work in the Everglades, which, she wrote, “awakened [her] to the environmental crisis” and led to more art with a heavy focus on flora and fauna. She has had over seventy five solo exhibitions, including eleven museum exhibitions. Her work is in the collections of the Art Institute and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Milwaukee Museum of Art, among others.

Esther Lape (1881–1981), born in Wilmington, Delaware, was a highly respected English professor who taught at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, the University of Arizona, and Barnard College in New York City. She was well known as a journalist, researcher, and publicist. In 1920 Lape was a founding member of the League of Women Voters, which was established just six months before women were given the right to vote in the United States. Through her partner, Elizabeth Read, she was introduced to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1920, and the women formed a close relationship. Three years later Roosevelt and Lape administered the competitions for the Bok Peace Prize, which was ultimately investigated by the federal government and claimed to be “a tool of foreign government and institutes.” Roosevelt and Lape were tried in court but the charges were dropped after the death of President Wilson. Lape and Roosevelt met regularly to work on policies regarding Social Security and in their many letters they frequently discussed the importance of the United States’ relationship with the Soviet Union. Following World War II, Lape became a public advocate for improved healthcare in America. In 1965, she addressed the Nobel Committee, proposing that Roosevelt be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously, but the prize was awarded to UNICEF that year.

Nella Larsen (1891–1964) was born in Chicago to a Danish mother and a father of West Indian descent. As a member of a mixed family, she experienced racial discrimination within the ethnically white immigrant community in Chicago but her racial heritage also prevented her from entrée into Chicago’s historically black communities. Larsen moved to New York City in 1914 to enroll in nursing school at Lincoln Hospital. After spending two years working at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Larsen returned to New York and became the first black woman to graduate from the New York Public Library School in 1921. She became involved in the black artistic and literary circles of the Harlem Renaissance, first through the Harlem branch of the NYPL, and then as an author in her own right. Larsen published the semiautobiographical Quicksand, her first novel, to great critical acclaim in 1928. Her second novel, Passing, was published the following year. Both novels dealt with issues of racial ambiguity and “passing” in segregated communities. Larsen received a Guggenheim Fellowship and traveled to Europe in the early 1930s. She later returned to New York City and to nursing, though not to the cultural scene in Harlem.

Julia Clifford Lathrop (1858–1932) was an American social reformer in the area of education, social policy, and children’s welfare. As director of the United States Children’s Bureau from 1912 to 1922, she was the first woman to head a United States federal bureau. Lathrop graduated from Vassar College in 1880. In 1890 she moved to Chicago where she joined other well-known social reformers at Hull House. The women at Hull House actively campaigned to persuade Congress to pass legislation to protect children. In 1893 Lathrop was appointed as the first woman member of the Illinois State Board of Charities. Lathrop helped found the country’s first juvenile court in 1899, and in 1904 she helped organize and then became the president of the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson sent Lathrop and Grace Abbott to represent the United States at an international conference on child welfare. After her retirement from the Children’s Bureau in 1922, Lathrop became president of the Illinois League of Women Voters. She also helped form the National Committee of Mental Illness.

Eva Lau was a member of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers’ council for art) in Berlin.

Marie Laurencin (1883–1956) was a painter, printmaker, and member of early-twentieth-century avant-garde circles in Paris. Although her work is heavily influenced by Cubism, Laurencin developed her own distinctive style, in which she strove for a feminine aesthetic that would push the boundaries of Cubism and challenge its masculinist tendencies. She spent much of her youth in a run-down apartment called “Le Bateau-Lavoir,” which served as a hangout and atelier for progressive, impoverished artists. As Laurencin’s work progressed, she adopted the pale colors and clean lines that have come to characterize her paintings, many of which feature groups of women and explore the female form. In addition to her paintings, Laurencin was also quite accomplished in the applied arts: she printed illustrated books, designed sets and costumes for the Russian Ballet, and became involved in interior design. Some of her paintings were exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show.

Frieda Lawrence (1879–1956), born Frieda Freiin von Richthofen, was a German literary figure. Starting in 1899 she began to translate German literature and fairy tales into English and took considerable pride in their publication in book form. Four years after her second husband, D.H. Lawrence’s death, Lawrence published her memoirs of him in Not I, But the Wind (1934). Her autobiography And the Fullness Thereof was published posthumously in 1964 as Frieda Lawrence: The Memoirs and Correspondence.

Gwenlodyn Knight Lawrence (1913-2005) was an American artist, born in the West Indies. She grew up in New York City during the Harlem Renaissance, developing her interest in the arts from a young age. She studied painting for two years at Howard University but her studies were cut short by the Depression. She returned to Harlem and found a mentor in Augusta Savage, a sculptor who ran the Harlem Community Arts Center, funded by the Works Progress Administration. During the 1930’s, Lawrence went to work at the Works Progress Administration’s Fine Arts Project while also pursuing her own painting practice. She did not begin regularly exhibiting her work until the 1960’s however, and her first solo show was at the Seattle Art Museum in 1976. A retrospective of her work
was exhibited at the Tacoma Art Museum in 2003.

Mary Lawrence (1868–1945) was an American sculptor who designed the Christopher Columbus sculpture at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893. Lawrence had studied at the Art Students League for five years before being recommended for the commission by a faculty member. Following the exhibition she worked as an apprentice in Chicago and studied at the Académie Julian in Paris. After returning to New York, Lawrence contributed sculptures to the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo in 1901 as well as to the cornice of Cass Gilbert’s U.S. Customs House. Lawrence was also one of the founders of the Cosmopolitan Club. She later formed an artists’ colony in her hometown of Palisades, New York.

Eva Le Gallienne (1899–1991) was born in London, where she made her theatrical debut at age fifteen. Shortly thereafter, she traveled to the United States, performing in New York, Arizona, and California. Despite a difficult start, Gallienne was starring on Broadway by the early 1920s. Known as “Miss Le G.” in the theatrical community, she quit acting in 1926 to concentrate on founding the Civic Repertory Theater, the closest thing to a permanent repertory theater—in the tradition of the Old Vic or Comédie Francaise—the United States had ever seen. W ith the help of one of her lovers, Alice DeLamar, Miss Le G. staged such classics as Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. Among her friends and theatrical cir cle, Gallienne was openly gay and involved with artists and writers including Mer cedes de Acosta, Alla Nazimova, and longtime love Marion Evensen. In 1946, she co-founded the American Repertory Theater, and continued working as an actress well into her seventies. To honor her fifty years in theater, Miss Le G. was given a Tony award in 1964. She received a National Medal of Arts in 1986.

Irene Leache (1839–1900) was raised in Fauquier County, Virginia. After working as a governess and teacher in West Virginia during her twenties, she moved to Norfolk with her former student Anna Wood. In 1871 Leache and Wood founded the Leache-Wood Female Seminary, a pioneering institution for both its education of young women and its lasting impact on the artistic culture of the Norfolk area. They ran the school for over two decades before their retirement to Europe and Leache’s death in 1900. Subsequently, Wood established the Irene Leache Library in Norfolk, while seminary alums founded the Irene Leache Memorial Foundation. Both organizations continue to promote arts and culture in the region, most notably through exhibitions and artist grants in Southeast Virginia.

Georgette Leblanc (1869–1941) was a French operatic soprano, actress, and author. She was an admired interpreter of the title role in Bizet’s Carmen. Maurice Maeterlinck wrote several parts for her within his stage plays. She portrayed the role of Ariane in Ariane et Barbe-bleue, both in the original 1899 stage play by Maeterlinck and in the 1907 opera adaptation by Paul Dukas. In 1911 she acted in Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird. Leblanc also appeared in a several French films, most notably L’Inhumaine in 1924. In the last few decades of her life she turned to writing, producing two commercially successful autobiographies, Story of the Blue Bird (1939) and La Machine à Courage: Souvenirs (1947), and several children’s books and travelogues.

Doris Emrick Lee (1905–1983) was a painter and educator known for her whimsical scenes of rural American life during the Depression. She studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and later taught at Michigan State University and Colorado Springs Fine Art Center. Her 1935 painting Thanksgiving won the Logan Prize in the annual show at the Art Institute of Chicago and received national attention for its optimistic depiction of a comfortable family participating in the traditions of the holiday. Lee regularly produced commissions for Life magazine and was asked to complete murals for the United States Treasury Department, and post offices in Washington, D.C., and Summerville, Georgia. Her work belongs to the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and other prominent institutions.

Lotte Lenya (1898–1981) was an Austrian singer and actress based in the United States. She was best known as a singer in the German-speaking and classical music world, and as an actress in the United States, where she was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961). Her breakthrough role was her role as Jenny in the first performance of The Threepenny Opera in Berlin in 1928, solidifying a busy career during the last years of the Weimar Republic. She moved with her husband, Kurt Weill, to New York in 1935 and spent the summer of 1936 working with the Group Theatre in nearby Connecticut. Throughout World War II Lenya performed on stage and radio, including for the Voice of America. After a poorly received performance in 1945, she withdrew from the stage, but was persuaded to return in 1950. She went on to win the only Tony Award ever bestowed on an Off-Broadway performance for her reprise of the role of Jenny in The Threepenny Opera. In her later years, Lenya originated the role of Fraulein Schneider in the original Broadway cast of Cabaret. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame shortly before her death in 1981.

Helen Lessore (1907–1994) was a director of the Beaux Arts Gallery in London and modernist visual artist. Lessore studied at the Slade School of Art and soon after found employment as the secretary for the Beaux Arts Gallery. Over the next twenty years, she took on an increasing amount of responsibility at the gallery and assumed full directorship after the founder’s death in 1951. The gallery was known for championing figurative painting, especially that of the “angry young men” of the Kitchen Sink School. As an artist herself, Lessore was able to position herself on the side of the artists rather than profits, and the gallery became known as an incubator for young talent. She ran the gallery until it closed in 1965. Lessore’s paintings were given a retrospective at the Fine Art Society in London in 1987, and they can be found in collections throughout the United Kingdom, including at the Tate in London.

Dora Lewis (1862–unknown) was an American suffragist and one of the founders of the National Woman’s Party. She was a part of the Silent Sentinels who protested in front of the White House in 1917; she was arrested, thrown in jail at the Occoquan Workhouse, and severely beaten by guards. Lewis later went on hunger strike while at Occoquan. She was released, along with fellow suffragists Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and Alison Turnbull Hopkins, among others, after newspapers carried stories of their treatment and there was a public outcry. Lewis was arrested several times, including for her involvement as primary speaker at a protest held in memory of Inez Milholland in Washington, D.C., as well as for setting copies of Woodrow Wilson’s speeches on fire during a demonstration in New York City.

Edith Lewis (1882–1972) was a writer, publisher, and participant in feminist campaigns in her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. Lewis’s biography is often narrated in relation to Willa Cather, who was her life-partner, professional work colleague, and friend. Lewis met Cather through the Sarah B. Harris, outspoken suffragist and publisher of the Courier, a local Nebraska newspaper to which Lewis contributed over a dozen essays and short stories. Lewis’s, Cather’s, and Harris’s writing in the Courier showed their speculation of traditional gender and marriage roles as well as their fascination with female artists living unconventionally. Their writing also revealed the high value that they placed on female self-sufficiency and independence. By 1907 Lewis had left Nebraska to pursue a career as an editor at McClure’s Magazine in New York. Although she was a highly skilled writer and editor, Lewis left publishing in order to work on accounts for an advertising firm. Lewis regularly advised Cather on the making and marketing of her books, assuming the role of her unofficial editor and primary literary agent. Even after Cather’s death, Lewis maintained an oversight of Cather’s public image, publishing her memoirs, Willa Cather Living: A Personal Record in 1953.

Mary Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907) was an African-American and Native-American sculptor who gained international acclaim and worked primarily in Rome. In her work she used the Neoclassical style to present themes of black and Native-American life. She studied at Oberlin College, one of the only higher learning institutions to admit women or African Americans at the time, even before the abolition of slavery in the United States. By 1864, Lewis moved to Boston to pursue her career as a sculptor. She began sculpting busts of abolitionists who inspired her, earning the attention of writers in New York and Boston. The popularity of her work supported a trip to Europe, where she would eventually settle in Rome, supported by patrons such as actress Charlotte Cushman and anti-slavery activist Maria Weston Chapman. Her practice in Rome was unique; while most sculptors employed Italian workmen to translate plaster sculptures into their marble products, Lewis completed most of the work herself. Her studio became a tourist destination, and she participated in major exhibitions in both Chicago and Rome. One of her major works, The Death of Cleopatra, was displayed at the Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia and was eventually acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1994.

Adele Rosenwald Levy (1892–1960) was a Jewish philanthropist and art collector. She used her affluence to promote public-spirited philanthropy and Jewish causes. She sat on the board of trustees of Brandeis University and on the executive committees of the New York State Youth Commission and the New York City Youth Board. She also served on the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern Art, where she donated a portion of her collection of thirty-one paintings including those by prominent Impressionist artists. Active in numerous charitable, youth-oriented, artistic, and community organizations, she was named Outstanding Jewish Woman of 1946 by the National Council of Jewish Women. Levy’s most significant efforts came after the war when she helped to direct the United Jewish Appeal in a time of frantic fund-raising to aid the survivors of the Holocaust. In 1947, Levy faced the problem of asking American Jews to contribute $170 million, more than the group had asked of its member communities during the war. Levy told the committee that they confronted a situation “which not even the most pessimistic of outstanding governmental authorities had foreseen.” Levy never failed her principle that those of good fortune should assume “the obligations that come with wealth.”

Lillie Lewisohn Vogel was an art collector, philanthropist, and socialite from New York City. In girlhood, Lillie shuttled between New York, London, and Paris. Her family’s wealth supported institutions such as Lewisohn Stadium, a nucleus of the Metropolitan Museum’s costume wing, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and the Henry Street Settlement. Lewisohn herself started a home for “wayward girls” and a restaurant in the New York factory district for working girls. In London, she and her friends ran a charity flower shop. Lewishohn later operated an antiques shop in New York to fund gardens along the East River, which was “where tenement children might first glimpse their first growing plant.” Her philanthropy extended to a practice called “home hospitality”: dinner guests ranged from ambassadors to taxi drivers. She was a lender to the 1913 Armory Show. Her birth and death dates are unknown; in a 1972 article, which estimated Lillie to be over 94, she was said to have forgotten her age. “Don’t ask me. I can’t remember and I’m sure if I did, I’d be so old, I’d have to bury me.”

Frances Crane Lillie (1869–1958) was a copper heiress and socialist from Chicago. While studying at Northwestern Women’s Medical College, she wrote extensive journals that reflected on gender dynamics she saw around her. She conducted her postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago, despite her family’s unwillingness to pay for a women’s education. In adulthood, Frances and her family managed the Crane Fund for Widows and Children, and the Childerley Home for Widows and Children. During World War I, Lillie turned to radical politics and developed a long association with Ellen Gates Starr, co-founder of Hull House. In 1915 Lillie was arrested for intervening in the arrest of striking garment workers on the northwest side of Chicago. On her experience with the arrest, she remarked, “I am now a socialist. The occurrences of yesterday have made me one. I am willing to do all in my power to abolish the wrongs practiced against the working people. If our society can only be preserved by the connivance, corruption, and wrongs practiced against the people, then we had better abolish it.” During the later years of Gates and Lillie’s lives, their shared interest in social justice developed into devotion to Roman Catholicism.

Vera G. List (1908–2002) was a spirited individualist and supporter of many significant artists of the late twentieth century, as well as a devoted philanthropist. She and her husband, Albert, founded the Vera List Art Project at Lincoln Center in 1962, MIT’s List Visual Arts Center in 1985, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School in 1992. With her deep conviction that art and learning are one, List established art programs and endowed professorships at a number of educational institutions, including Swarthmore College, Brown University, and Hamilton College. After attending Simmons College, she married Albert A. List in 1930, and began collecting art almost immediately. As her husband’s wealth grew, her art purchases and their philanthropy kept pace. The Lists’ beneficiaries included the Metropolitan Opera, Mount Sinai Hospital, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Jewish Museum, and the New School for Social Research. The Albert A. List Foundation, formed in the 1950s, donated money to the construction of Lincoln Center, and paid for much of the center's art collection, including the large Henry Moore sculpture in its courtyard. As an avid collector of modern and contemporary art, List owned works by artists from Giacometti to Joel Shapiro, and was on the boards of the Jewish Museum and the American Federation of Arts. She may be best known in the art world, however, for helping Marcia Tucker, a former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, establish the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Now in SoHo, it opened in 1977 in the Albert A. List Building at the New School on Fifth Avenue. Although List donated art to several New York museums, after her husband’s death in 1987, she sold much of her collection to better support social service programs.

Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler (1899–1940) was a German painter. She grew up during the interwar period and who was highly influenced by Dada and bohemian life in Dresden. Living in poverty for most of her life, Lohse- Wächtler suffered a nervous breakdown during the 1920s and recovered in a mental hospital where she painted portraits of her fellow patients. That body of work, the Friedrichsberger Portraits, earned her critical acclaim for her depictions of marginalized citizens. In 1928 she participated in some exhibitions of the Neue Sachlichkeit. 1932 she began living with her parents, who failed to accommodate her eccentric nature. Shortly thereafter, they had her committed to a mental institution and she was diagnosed as schizophrenic. After the Nazis claimed power in Germany, she was sterilized in accordance with their “Law of Congenital Health.” Labeled “degenerate,” nine of her works from the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Altonaer Museum were confiscated and presumably destroyed in 1937, as well as a large part of her paintings from Arnsdorf. In 1940 she was killed during Hitler’s program to annihilate mentally handicapped persons.

Amy Londoner (1878–1953) was a Missouri-born painter and teacher in New York City. Londoner exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, and she showed consistently at the Salons of America and the Society of Independent Artists throughout her career. Her associations included membership in the Art Students League of New York, the Society of Independent Artists, and the League of New York Artists. She later went on to teach art at the anarchist Modern School, also known as the Ferrer Center, in New York City.

Lydia Lopokova (1892–1981) was a famous Russian ballerina during the early twentieth century. She trained at the Imperial Ballet School and was a star pupil, but immigrated to the United States in 1910 for more opportunities as a prima ballerina. She remained there for six years, eventually joining the Russian troupe Ballets Russes. In 1921 she performed in a production of Sleeping Beauty in London, and she lived in England for the remainder of her life, closely involved in the early days of English ballet. Introduced by her husband, economist John Maynard Keynes, Lopokova became friends with many members of the cultural elite as well as the Bloomsbury Group. She danced her final role as Swanilda in Coppelia for the new Vic-Wells Ballet. She chose to end her career at age 41, lacking the encouragement from the newly established Royal Ballet that wished to depart from the legacy of Russian ballerinas.

Audre Lorde (1934–1992), born Audrey Geraldine Lorde was a Caribbean- American writer, radical feminist, lesbian, and civil rights activist. Lorde’s work, in particular with Afro-German women in the 1980s, gained wide acclaim and wide criticism, due to the elements of social liberalism and sexuality presented and her emphasis on revolution and change. Lorde confronted issues of racism in feminist thought, and maintained that a great deal of the scholarship of white feminists served to augment the oppression of black women. Lorde identified issues of class, race, age, gender, and even health as being fundamental to the female experience. She argued that although gender difference received most of the the focus, these other differences were also essential and must be recognized and addressed. In her 1984 essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” Lorde attacked the underlying racism within feminism, describing it as unrecognized dependence on the patriarchy. She argued that, by denying difference in the category of women, white feminists merely passed on old systems of oppression and that, in so doing, they were preventing any real, lasting change.

Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874–1925) was an American poet from Brookline, Massachusetts, who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926 for her collection What’s O’Clock. In 1887 she, with her mother and sister, wrote Dream Drops or Stories from Fairy Land by a Dreamer, printed privately in Boston. Her poem “Fixed Idea” was published in 1910 by the Atlantic Monthly, after which Lowell published individual poems in various journals. In 1912 her first collection, A Dome of Many Colored Glass, was released. Lowell campaigned for the success of Imagist poetry in America and embraced its principles in her own work. She acted as a publicity agent for the movement, editing and contributing to an anthology of Imagist poets in 1915. She pioneered the use of “polyphonic prose” in English, mixing formal verse and free forms. Later she was drawn to and influenced by Chinese and Japanese poetry. This interest led her to collaborate with translator Florence Ayscough on Fir-Flower Tablets in 1921.

Josephine Lowell (1843–1905) was a progressive reform leader in the United States, best known for creating the New York Consumers League in 1890. She was born to a family of Unitarian philanthropists and intellectuals in New England who eventually settled in Staten Island after spending time in Europe. Lowell lived in Virginia during the Civil War, tending to wounded soldiers on the battlefield with the American Red Cross, but returned to Staten Island after the war, where she became a businesswoman and reformer. She was active in the Anti-Imperialist League and became the vice president in 1901, advocating for Philippine independence. Throughout her lifetime, she founded many charitable organizations including the New York Charity Organization in 1882, the House of Refuge for Women (later known as the State Training School for Girls) in 1886, the Woman’s Municipal League in 1894, and the Civil Service Reform Association of New York State in 1895. Establishing the New York Consumers League was her most far-reaching venture, and the group worked to improve the wages and working conditions of women workers in New York City. The organization was adopted in many other cities, with chapters opening up across the country, eventually becoming the national umbrella organization as the National Consumers League.

Margaret Lowengrund (1902 - 1957) was an artist, illustrator, writer and educator who taught at the New School for Social Research and in self-operated printmaking workshops in New York City. Lowengrund opened The Contemporaries Graphic Art Centre in 1955 which later became The Pratt Graphics Center. She was an associate eidtor of Art Digest, and assistant director of the National Academy of Design School of Arts from 1950 to 1951. Lowengrund's work was exhibited widely in venues including the Kleemann-Thorman Galleries, the Philadelphia Print Club, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

Mina Loy (1882–1966) was a London-born artist, poet, and playwright who earned her popularity through modernist circles in Paris and New York. She studied painting in Munich and P aris, where she exhibited watercolors and became a regular at Gertrude Stein’s salon, along with avant-garde artists and writers. In 1907 Loy moved to Florence, where she became a part of the Futurist community, attending gatherings held by art patron Mabel Dodge. Frustrated with the sexism and fascism of the Futurist movement, she left for New York in 1916, where she published her poem “Feminist Manifesto.” Loy spent much of the rest of her life in Greenwich Village and the Bowery, performing in the Provincetown Players and maintaining an active role in the bohemian culture. Her New York circles included Jane Heap, Marianne Moore, and Peggy Guggenheim, who funded Loy’s business designing and constructing lampshades and other home goods. After 1936 Loy work ed primarily in collage, found art, and poetry, exhibiting her work until 1959.

Harriet Randall Lumis (1870–1953) was a Connecticut-born painter. Using the colors and techniques of French Impressionists, she began art studies in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1893. She studied at the New York Summer School in Cos Cob, Connecticut, and at the School of Art in East Gloucester, Massachusetts. In 1921, she joined the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors. In 1949 she invited other traditional artists to her studio; together, this group of realist painters stood firm against abstract painting, founding the Academic Artists Association. For the remainder of her career, she taught private art lessons and remained true to the plein air method of painting.

Gwen Lux (1908–1987) was a sculptor born in Chicago. She began her studies in art at the age of fourteen, taking pottery classes in Detroit. Later, she would study at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1933, and her commissions included sculptures for Radio City Music Hall, New York, and the General Motors Technical Center, Detroit. Her sculptures spanned abstraction and realism, and were constructed from concrete, resin, and metals. She was based in Detroit for much of her career, and spent her later years in Hawaii until her death.