Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani Children’s Activist and Women’s Rights Activist. She is the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate. Yousafzai became an advocate for the education of girls as a child after the Taliban took control and tried to ban girls from education, going so far as to attack girls’ schools in Swat. She began speaking …
Helen Keller was an American author, political activist and campaigner for deaf and blind charities. Keller became deaf and blind at 19 months old after an illness, thought to be scarlet fever or meningitis. Keller’s inability to communicate lead to the belief that she was badly behaved. When she was 7 she was sent to …
Rosa Parks was an African-American Civil Rights activist. She became the catalyst for the Civil Rights movement when she refused to move from her seat on the segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks was brought up in a family that bore the scars of slavery, her grandparents were former slaves and advocates for racial equality. …
Claudette Colvin was a pioneer of the Civil Rights movement. She was the first to refuse to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Nine months before Rosa Parks. Colvin was 15 years old when riding the bus home from school when the conductor ordered her to give …
Irena Sendler (or Irena Sendlerowa in Poland) was a Polish nurse and social worker. She served in the Polish underground (Polish resistance movement) during WWII and was head of the children’s section of Żegota, a clandestine Polish rescue organisation. Sendler was influenced by her father, who was one of the first Polish socialists. He was …
Sylvia Rivera was an American drag queen (a term she later claimed to hate, rejecting all labels), gay liberation and transgender activist. Along with Marsha P Johnson she was one of the first to resist the police during the Stonewall Riots. Rivera reportedly shouted, “I’m not missing a minute of this, it’s the revolution!” as …
Marsha “Pay No Mind” Johnson was an activist, performer, model, sex worker (for which she was frequently arrested), and mother figure to many young trans women in New York during her lifetime. She was such a well known face that she posed for Andy Warhol, which she felt was a clear indication of her fame. …
Emmeline Pankhurst was a political activist and the leader of the British suffragette movement. She fought for the rights of women and used militant tactics never before associated with women to bring attention to women’s suffrage. Pankhurst fought for the vote for women with the belief that if women were able to vote they would …