Bay Curious Unsung Heroines: Rebel Girls of the Bay Area
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Mar 23, 2026 Rae Alexandra, arts and culture reporter at KQED and author of Unsung Heroines, digs up overlooked women who shaped the Bay Area. She explains her research methods and surprising finds. Stories include Tianfu (Tien) Wu’s rescue work and Charlotte Brown’s 1863 streetcar lawsuit. Illustrated challenges and the book’s chronological approach round out the conversation.
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City Honors Favored Men Over Women
- San Francisco long celebrated men in public spaces while women were largely absent from statues, street names, parks, and public art.
- Rae Alexandra started a Women's History Month project after finding only 12% of public honors recognized women, which grew into a series and then a book.
Researching Hidden Women Through Obsessive Digging
- Rae hunted for forgotten women by combing book indexes and newspaper archives and following tiny plaques on buildings for leads.
- Her process involved many dead ends but grew obsessive and joyful when she found substantive stories to tell.
Personal Stories Reframe Bay Area History
- Organizing the women chronologically in the book produced a new narrative of Bay Area history reflecting social and cultural events through individual lives.
- Looking at events like the 1906 earthquake from working-class women's perspectives revealed different experiences than traditional histories.
