She received criticism from all sides: her writing was too sentimental, her subject matter unimportant or too foreign, her literary output too prolific for a serious author. And yet, she saw the necessity in telling the stories of ordinary people whose lives often fell between the cracks and received little attention. Even so, as her literary career gained steam, other powerful figures outside of publishing began to take notice of the sway she had over her readers.

J. Edgar Hoover (founder and director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation) took notice of her cultural impact in society. Suspicious of her influence, he created a file on Pearl S. Buck's activities. Over years he compiled hundreds of pages detailing what he saw as her suspicious activities.

Most alarming to him were her connections to China and her outspoken support for African Americans' civil rights. He believed that she supported communism and that her beliefs on race made her a radical. Buck did not support communism. However, it was radical for a white woman to openly support and advocate for racial justice.

Hoover even wrote to Buck, complimenting her writing style and her ethics. He secretly believed she held communist sympathies and put her response to his original letter in her file. Eventually, his file on Pearl would reach nearly 300 pages. Despite her file being declassified, many parts of the file remain censored and unknown.

Explore the stories of other remarkable women who, like Pearl S. Buck, pushed the boundaries of their time and became dangerous.

The McLeod family, formerly enslaved people, were advocates in their community both for young mothers and for people harmed by the justice system. Mary McLeod Bethune continued this legacy, creating foundations, founding schools, publishing journals dedicated to Black women’s lives, and serving in multiple governmental advisory positions. She was the unofficial leader of President Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet" who kept him advised on issues of race in America. She picketed and protested businesses which refused to hire Black workers. Bethune also became a leading voice in the anti-lynching movement.

Her greatest accomplishment may be her contribution to Black women's education and the preservation of their history for posterity. Currenty, the Mary McLeod Bethune Council House also preserves the National Archives for Black Women’s History. It is the only archive of its kind whose primary mission is the care of Black women's history and heritage.

Alice Paul trained as an advocate for suffrage, or voting rights, with suffragettes in Europe. Suffragettes, unlike American suffragists, were militant and engaged in violence and sabotage in support of their cause. Paul learned these disruptive strategies and returned stateside to deploy them in support of women's suffrage.

Paul spearheaded the Silent Sentinel protest, the first political protest outside of the White House. Frustrated women made up the ranks. They stood outside of the White House holding banners and posters aloft, and refused to speak. The protest began with the start of President Woodrow Wilson’s term on January 10th, 1917 until the passage of the 19th Amendment on June 4th, 1919.

This protest brought considerable attention and even violence to the suffrage movement. But, despite arrests, police brutality, imprisonment, torture, and public ridicule, the Silent Sentinels continued their protest.

The violence facing these women escalated on November 14th, 1917 in an event known infamously as The Night of Terror. In the previous months, many of the Sentinels (including Alice Paul) were arrested and imprisoned. Conditions were unsafe; the women protested this treatment. Alice Paul demanded that the women be treated as political prisoners, not criminals.

In response, the superintendent of Occoquan Prison retaliated by ordering the guards to brutalize the suffragists. Paul undertook a hunger strike, but guards forced a feeding tube down her throat. Women were forced to consume raw eggs and milk. Other suffragists were chained, forced into solitary confinement, choked, beaten.

Dorothy Day, a leader of the movement and ally of Alice Paul, was treated terribly: "the two men holding her were twisting her arms above her head. Then suddenly they lifted her up and banged her down over the arm of an iron bench--twice."

The women, including Paul, were released later in November. Alice Paul had spent five weeks imprisoned. She and her supporters used their anger to drum up public support. After their release, the eyes of the country were on Alice Paul. The fight for women's suffrage would never be the same.

Abraham Lincoln called Harriet Beecher Stowe "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war." Her best known work, Uncle Tom's Cabin, opened the eyes of the nation to the horrors of slavery. This book became a catalyst for the Civil War and for the cause of abolition. Long before she published her magnus opus, however, Stowe was involved in the fight for freedom.

In her youth and young adulthood, Harriet Beecher Stowe experienced the ways in which slavery stirred controversy. At her father's school, for example, many students departed when debate about abolition was banned.

During her travels, Stowe visited a plantation where enslaved people toiled and suffered. Most heartbreaking for Stowe were the stories of mothers separated from their children. Spurred by this experience, she requested stories from family and friends and undertook extensive research on narratives from enslaved people. Stowe harbored a runaway enslaved person in her home while her husband assisted the Underground Railroad. Then, she began to write.

While abolitionists applauded Stowe's work, her writings were banned in the south. Printers selling her work faced censure or even violence for spreading her word. Still, Uncle Tom's Cabin became the best selling book of the century.

Few people have affected the fabric of American society as drastically as Pauli Murray. Pauli Murray's work underpins contemporary social justice, from segregation, feminism, law, to sexuality and religion.

Despite setbacks and discrimination, Murray eventually attended law school at Howard University with the aim of becoming a Civil Rights lawyer. During her/his time as a student, Murray became keenly aware of the ways in which differing parts of her/his identity (Black, queer, the perception of womanhood) intersected. Despite high grades, Murray was denied a prestigious fellowship to attend Harvard University due to sexism. Murray coined the term "Jane Crow" (a play on "Jim Crow") to describe the unique oppression that they faced.

Despite setbacks and discrimination, Murray continued the fight. They founded Civil Rights organizations, women's rights organizations, and continued to write, speak, and travel in support of social justice. Pauli Murray once said of their fight: "We were a tiny band of fighters trying to establish defensible positions from which to launch a massive attack upon the entire system of legally enforced segregation."

Having faced discrimination as a life-long battle, Pauli Murray used these struggles to fight for a better world. Murray's work with the ACLU highlighted gender equality, a first for the organization. She/he also published an edited volume, highly researched, detailing the history of racial discrimination and segregation in America. Murray even took her/his fight to the White House—writing FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt directly to speak about injustice. Eleanor Roosevelt later complimented Murray, calling her/him a "firebrand." Murray's outspoken dedication to equality eventually set the groundwork for future visionaries in law like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Murray lived fearlessly, at a time when gender non-conforming and queer people like them were forced to hide essential aspects of their identity. Throughout their life, Murray used differing pronouns and identified in different ways--sometimes as a woman, sometimes as a man, sometimes as neither. Today, we might understand this identity as gender fluidity. Regardless of how Murray identified or would identify today, queerness is essential to understanding their story.

As a young person, Murray adopted the name "Pauli", a more gender neutral and shortened version of their birthname, Pauline. They took to wearing short cropped hair and pants over feminine attire like dresses or skirts. Occasionally, Murray used male aliases as well. They also sought gender-affirming medical care and exploratory surgery, but were denied. Though Murray struggled with gender identity, her/his position as "in-between" identities and communities directly impacted their view of the world. It is likely that Murray's unique perspective and experiences were what allowed her/him to see complexicity and work towards a better future.

Murray tried to live authentically at a time when society was not prepared to understand her/him. Murray's intersecting and sometimes competing identities were the very bedrock on which the fight for equality and justice were built. This fight continues today.