ProSuzy-ProSisters

09/12/2026

08/25/2026

She grew up the second oldest of five children in Commack, New York, in a house that went quiet in the wrong way when she was ten years old. Her mother Roseann died of breast cancer in 1973. She was thirty-nine. Rosie was in fifth grade. Her father Edward, a surveillance engineer, struggled in the aftermath, and the five children largely raised each other in the years that followed — learning, among other things, that humor could hold a family together when grief threatened to break it.

Roseanne O'Donnell was born on March 21, 1962. She became Rosie to everyone who knew her. She spent her adolescence watching television with the intensity of someone who understood instinctively that what was on that screen was where she was going — studying the timing of the comedians on The Tonight Show, memorizing the rhythms of stand-up performance, practicing in her bedroom in Commack until the craft felt like something she owned.

By her late teens, she was performing stand-up at comedy clubs in the New York area. She was brash, fast, specific, and genuinely funny — the kind of comedian who made audiences feel like they were talking to someone they already knew. She spent years working the club circuit and appearing on television talent shows, building the particular kind of confident public presence that can only come from standing alone in front of a room full of strangers a thousand times.

In 1992, director Penny Marshall cast her in A League of Their Own as Doris Murphy, a third baseman with a quick temper and an even quicker wit. The film starred Tom Hanks, Geena Davis, and Madonna, and it became a cultural touchstone — one of the most beloved American sports films ever made. Rosie held her own in every frame she occupied. The movie introduced her to an audience far larger than any comedy club could reach.

What followed was a run of films that established her as a reliable and warm screen presence: Sleepless in Seattle in 1993, The Flintstones in 1994, Now and Then in 1995, Harriet the Spy in 1996. She was funny and grounded and likeable, and Hollywood used her accordingly — supporting roles built around those qualities, consistently, in film after film.

Then, in June 1996, The Rosie O'Donnell Show premiered on daytime television.

It ran for six seasons and became one of the most watched daytime talk shows in American history. Rosie interviewed celebrities, played games with her audience, sang show tunes with Broadway performers, and brought an energy to the format that felt genuinely unscripted — enthusiastic, impulsive, warm, occasionally chaotic, always entertaining. She was called the Queen of Nice, which she found both flattering and slightly reductive, but the label captured something real about the warmth that animated the show at its best. She won multiple Daytime Emmy Awards. At its peak, the show reached over five million viewers daily.

She had also, during these years, become a passionate advocate for adoption and foster care — a cause she embraced publicly and personally, having adopted four children: Parker, Chelsea, Blake, and Vivienne. She was open about the profound centrality of motherhood to her life in a way that television audiences responded to immediately.

In 2002, she came out publicly as a le***an — something she had known about herself for years and had chosen to disclose on her own terms and timeline. She described her identity and her advocacy for LGBTQ rights as inseparable from each other, and used her platform to speak directly about marriage equality, adoption rights for same-sex couples, and the realities of LGBTQ family life at a time when the cultural conversation around these issues was still forming.

She married Kelli Carpenter in February 2004, during the brief window when San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was authorizing same-sex marriages at City Hall. That marriage was later invalidated by California courts. She and Kelli had a daughter together, Vivienne, before separating in 2007.

From 2006 to 2007, she joined The View as a co-host, bringing to the panel discussion format the same directness that had always defined her. Her tenure generated significant television moments — a famously pointed exchange with Donald Trump that made national news, outspoken commentary on the Iraq War, unfiltered opinions on political and cultural figures. She left after one season, citing disagreements with the show's direction. She returned for a second stint in 2014, departing again in 2015.

She married Michelle Rounds in 2012. They had a daughter, Dakota, before separating in 2015. Michelle Rounds died in 2017.

Through the years, Rosie has spoken with increasing candor about her own mental health — about depression, about the unresolved grief of losing her mother at ten, about the anxiety that ran beneath the energy of her public performances. She has described her childhood loss as something she carried into adulthood without adequate tools to process it, and has spoken about therapy and medication as essential parts of her life. She has been public about a heart attack she suffered in 2012, which she initially did not recognize as cardiac symptoms and delayed seeking treatment for — an experience she subsequently used to raise awareness about how heart attacks present differently in women.

In 2024, she spoke publicly about her daughter Chelsea's decision to seek emancipation from her, a painful family rupture that played out in tabloid coverage she had no control over and addressed with characteristic directness: she said she hoped Chelsea would eventually find her way back.

She is in her early sixties now, still performing, still advocating, still finding ways to be publicly herself in the complicated way that being publicly yourself requires. The girl who lost her mother in fifth grade and learned to make rooms laugh has built a career on the particular kind of honesty that audiences recognize as real — the kind that doesn't look away from the difficult parts, that treats laughter and grief as two sides of the same human coin.

She has said that her mother's death made her a performer. That the loss created a need to connect with people, to fill rooms with something warm, to make strangers feel less alone.

She has been doing exactly that for four decades.

08/22/2026

Susan Stewart has made history as Rehoboth Beach, Delaware’s first openly gay mayor and its first woman mayor in decades.

Stewart won the August 8 election with 61% of the vote. A longtime resident with experience in city planning and financial services, she says her priorities include infrastructure, housing, transportation, development, and preserving the character of the popular beach town.

A historic win for LGBTQ+ representation in one of America’s best-known gay beach destinations. 🌈❤️

08/15/2026

On her second day at the new job, a man walked up to her and told her that if she knew what was good for her, she'd go home where she belonged.

She did not go home. She stayed for years, endured almost unimaginable treatment — and wrote down every single thing they did to her.

That notebook would end up changing the law for every working woman in America...

Her name is Lois Jenson, and in March of 1975, she was a single mother on the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota, in urgent need of a job that could support a family.

The iron mine in Eveleth had, for the first time in its history, begun hiring women — the result of a new federal order requiring steel companies to open their doors to women and minorities. The work was hard and the environment was rough, but the pay was real: $5.50 an hour, with insurance. For a mother trying to keep a household afloat, it was life-changing money. Lois applied, and she got one of the jobs, becoming one of the very first women ever hired at the mine.

And almost immediately, the men made it clear she was not welcome.

That second-day warning was only the beginning. What followed, for Lois and the small handful of other women who'd been hired, was not occasional rudeness. It was systematic, relentless, day-after-day harassment. Women were grabbed and touched without consent. They were followed and stalked between shifts. They found threatening notes. Obscene graffiti fouled the common areas. Some women were physically cornered.

And when they looked for help, there was none. The union did nothing. Supervisors looked the other way. Management shrugged. The women were entirely on their own.

So every day, Lois and her coworkers made the same brutal calculation: endure the abuse, or quit the only kind of job in the region that could support a family. Over and over, they chose to endure, because they had children to feed and no other options.

Lois endured it. But she also did something the men never noticed.

She started writing it all down. Names. Dates. What was said. What was done. Who saw it. Patiently, for years, she kept a record — building, without quite knowing it yet, the case that would eventually make history.

It took her nearly a decade to reach her limit. On October 5th, 1984, Lois mailed a formal complaint to the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, laying out the abuse in the meticulous detail only someone who'd documented everything could provide.

One week later, she walked out to the parking lot and found the tires on her car slashed.

She kept writing things down.

In 1987, the state reviewed her complaint and asked the mine's part-owner to pay her eleven thousand dollars in damages and to adopt a formal sexual harassment policy. The company agreed to the policy — and flatly refused to pay her a cent.

By now, the pressure on Lois was coming from every direction. Some of her own female coworkers, terrified of losing their own jobs, had begun speaking out against her. Eveleth was a small town, and Lois was becoming the woman people crossed the street to avoid. She was isolated, exhausted, and increasingly alone.

She kept writing things down.

Then, on August 15th, 1988, her attorney did something no lawyer in the United States had ever done. Paul Sprenger, working with co-counsel Jean Boler, filed the first class-action sexual harassment lawsuit in American history — Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co. — on behalf of Lois and two of her coworkers, Patricia Kosmach and Kathleen Anderson.

There was no roadmap for this. No precedent. No prior case to point to. The legal framework that would let a group of women sue an employer as a class for a hostile work environment did not yet exist — Sprenger and Boler were building it as they went.

The mine's lawyers fought back with a strategy that legal observers would later describe with contempt as "nuts and s***s." Rather than dispute what had happened, they set out to destroy the personal credibility of every woman involved. The women's private medical records were subpoenaed. Their romantic histories were dragged into evidence. Their most private pain was read aloud in open court. They were cross-examined about their past relationships and their mental health in exhaustive, deliberately humiliating detail — as if they, and not the mine, were the ones on trial.

Lois sat through all of it.

The years ground on — depositions, appeals, reversals, retrials. An early award for the women was overturned, and the whole thing was sent back to be fought again. It was punishing beyond words. And it cost some of them everything they had.

In 1994, Patricia Kosmach — one of the three original plaintiffs, Lois's coworker and fellow fighter — died, before the case was ever resolved. She never got to see what she had helped set in motion.

Lois herself was, by now, seriously unwell. The years of abuse followed by the grinding years of litigation had broken her health; she was left with post-traumatic stress and had to leave the mine altogether. She had every reason in the world to walk away.

She did not withdraw.

Finally, on December 30th, 1998 — after more than ten years of litigation — the mine agreed to settle rather than face a jury one more time. Fifteen women shared a combined settlement of $3.5 million. It was a modest sum for what they'd endured, and the company had spent far more fighting them than it ever paid out. For many of the women, worn down and ill, it felt less like triumph than survival.

But here is the thing that could never be taken back.

Across those ten years of court battles, ruling by ruling, a legal foundation had been built that would not be dismantled. Because of Lois Jenson and the women who stood with her, hostile-work-environment sexual harassment became a proven, enforceable claim in United States federal courts. Corporate America now knew — not as a nice idea on paper, but as something tested in real courtrooms and upheld on appeal — that women had the right to a workplace free of that kind of abuse.

In 2002, their story became a book, Class Action. In 2005, it became the film North Country, with Charlize Theron in a role based on Lois, and it was seen by millions of people around the world.

Lois Jenson never set out to change history. She said, in essence, that she'd never wanted a fight or special treatment — she'd only wanted to go to work without dreading what the day would bring, and for the harassment to stop.

She was a single mother from northern Minnesota who needed five dollars and fifty cents an hour. And because she refused to accept the unacceptable — and because she never stopped writing things down — she changed the law of the land for every woman who would come after her.

Had you heard of Lois Jenson before, or seen North Country? Tell us below. And here's one for today: who's someone you've known who stood their ground against something wrong, long after most people would have given up?