Rae Alexandra restores women’s place in Bay Area history
In 'Unsung Heroines,' an award-winning arts and culture journalist brings overlooked women back into the region’s story
By
Samantha Campos
February 26, 2026
History has a way of pretending certain people didn’t exist.
In a region that prides itself on progress, women who built institutions, changed laws, fought segregation, defended bodily autonomy and reshaped culture have largely vanished from the public record. Their names are missing from monuments, street signs, statues and textbooks. Their work survives, but their stories do not.
That erasure is what drove journalist Rae Alexandra to rage—and eventually to obsession.
Elizabeth Thorn Scott Flood opened Oakland’s first private school for African American children in 1857, paving the way for desegregated education in California. In 1913, Piedmont nurse Bertha Wright founded Children’s Hospital Oakland and established the state’s first public child daycare center. Frances Albrier became the first Black woman to run for Berkeley City Council in 1939 and the first Black female welder in the Richmond shipyards during World War II.
And that’s just the beginning.
San Francisco lab technician Pat Maginnis helped lead the fight for abortion rights in the 1960s. Del Martin and UC Berkeley graduate Phyllis Lyon co-founded the first lesbian rights organization in the U.S. in 1955—and later became the first same-sex couple legally married in San Francisco. Disability rights activist Judy Heumann co-founded Berkeley’s Center for Independent Living in the early 1970s, laying the groundwork for the Americans with Disabilities Act.
These women, and dozens more, are featured in Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area, Alexandra’s forthcoming book, illustrated by San Francisco artist Adrienne Simms and published by City Lights. The book is adapted from Alexandra’s long-running KQED series, Rebel Girls from Bay Area History, which launched in 2018.
“To be frank, I did not know what I was doing,” says Alexandra. “I was just very angry about women being written out of history.”
That anger was measurable. As Alexandra notes in the book’s introduction, only 13% of San Francisco’s street names, statues, parks and public artworks honor women. So she decided to respond the only way she knew how: by writing them back in.
Read more:
https://www.eastbaymag.com/rae-alexandra-restores-womens-place-in-bay-area-history/