In looking over our profiles and features, there seemed to be quite a few about women and so – with a nod in our headline to Sojourner Truth’s famous speech – we’ve collected some of our favorites as part of our review of Brew stories in 2013. (Previous posts: neighborhood struggles and crime and policing.)

Art aimed to shame: activist and street artist team up on vacants

Their decision to collaborate has stoked the imagination of this unlikely duo – the 45-year-old Pigtown mother of two and the 23-year-old artist whose work appears in galleries and in walls from Bushwick to Brazil.

“The first idea for this was super-hypothetical, like “oh this’d get to them, like, stab ’em in the eye,” Nether said, grinning, to two Brew reporters watching him and Ott at work. “But then we realized, we could do it.”

If the facts don’t, metaphorically, “stab ‘em in the eye,” [Carol] Ott’s occasional withering commentary may. “He’s a real piece of work,” she wrote of one of the Reisterstown Road property owners. “I think when you’ve been the defendant in over 500 lawsuits . . . something needs to give.”

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Kim Trueheart says she speaks truth to power

A middle-aged woman being dragged out the door of Baltimore City Hall by uniformed officers – that’s the image the public got last week of activist Kim Trueheart after she was, apparently, banned from the building and then arrested.

But another image of Trueheart originates from inside City Hall, where the 55-year-old is something of a fixture, and staffers, bureaucrats and elected officials regard her with affection, respect and more than a little wariness.

Most of them know that in her bag, along with snacks and a camera, are pertinent documents that she has probably read more closely than they have.

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Sun celebrates powerful women for their bios – and body-hugging ball gowns?

So what’s the message for young women aspiring to be “worth watching” Build up a great resume, but also a great figure? You’ll be judged for your accomplishments, but also how well you fill out a skin-tight sheath? Do good in the world, but also do well because you’re going to have to buy $2,600 ball gowns? Parents trying to protect their girls from society’s “princess” phenomenon will sigh about this spread.

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Plainspoken pusher for peace and free speech

Then came April 4, 2003, the day four city police officers on bicycles came and told the women on the sidewalk to move or be arrested.

“Why?” “Because I said so.” That’s how [lawyer and activist Betsy] Cunningham remembers the conversation going.

She remembers writing down the officer’s badge number and asking to talk to a supervisor. The officer went away and came back and told them they could stand on other corners: “Of course, those were much less visible to traffic.”

They didn’t want to go to jail, but they also didn’t think it was right, Cunningham recalled. “So we got on the phone that day and called the ACLU.”

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Lisa Harris Jones: A portrait of the mayor’s lobbyist friend

Lobbyist Lisa Harris Jones has been pooh-poohing the idea that she’s anything more than a practicing attorney ever since news broke that Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake officiated at her Las Vegas wedding to lobbying partner Sean Malone and then stayed at Jones’ Rehoboth Beach summer house immediately following the nuptials.

But it’s hard to think of the polished 45-year-old as anything but a power player given that she hobnobs with the governor’s brother in Vegas clubs, gets Facebook shout-outs from a who’s who of city and state officials and has nothing but love from many quarters.

“Why do you think you’re so good at this?” cooed WEAA radio host Anthony McCarthy on a June 5 show in the wake of the Vegas wedding story, adding, “Full disclosure, these are my friends!”

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Honoring suffragists’ march thorough Overlea 100 years ago

When they finally got to Washington, the group joined a parade of 5,000 people considered one of the most dramatic events in the suffrage campaign. “Women were jeered, tripped, grabbed, shoved, and many heard ‘indecent epithets’ and ‘barnyard conversation,’” according to this Library of Congress summary of news coverage of the 1913 event.

“Instead of protecting the parade, the police ‘seemed to enjoy all the ribald jokes and laughter, and part participated in them.’”