Valentina Tereshkova is a Russian cosmonaut and the first woman to have flown in space. Tereshkova was born in Maslennikovo, a small town in the Yaroslavl Region. She began school late, when she was eight years old and had to leave at 17 to help to support her family. She continued her education while working …
Benazir Bhutto was a Pakistani politician who became the first woman leader of a Muslim nation in modern history. She was assassinated in 2007. Bhutto was born in Karachi, Pakistan former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was from Sindhi Rajput ethnicity and Begum Nusrat Ispahani, of Iranian Kurdish descent. Bhutto’s mother’s Kurdish culture played …
Madam C.J Walker was a civil rights activist, philanthropist and entrepreneur. She was named “the first black woman millionaire in America” for her successful line of hair care products. Walker was the first free child born to her parents Owen and Minerva Anderson Breedlove (her birth name is Sarah Breedlove). She was born on a …
Annie Kenney was an English working class suffragette who became a leading figure in the Women’s Social and Political Union. Kenney started work at the age of 10 in a local cotton mill in Yorkshire. She was a cotton frame tenter and her duties were to crawl on her hands and knees under the machine …
Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American suffragist, social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women’s rights movement. Cady Stanton was introduced to the abolitionist, temperance, and women’s rights movements through her cousin, the reformer Gerrit Smith. In 1840 she married the reformer Henry B. Stanton, she insisted that ‘obey’ be dropped from the …
Amelia Boynton Robinson was an American activist who was a leader of the American Civil Rights Movement in Selma, Alabama and a key figure in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches. She was also the first black woman to run for Congress in Alabama. Robinson began her interest in activism at nine years old when …
Gloria Steinem is is a writer, lecturer, political activist, and feminist organiser who became nationally recognised as a leader and spokeswoman for the feminist movement in the late 1960s and early 70s. Steinem was given her first serious assignment as a freelance writer by Esquire magazine features editor Clay Felker. Her first draft on the …
Barbara Jordan was the first black woman elected to the Texas state senate and the first black Texan in Congress. Jordan had been inspired to become an attorney by a talk by Edith Sampson, a black lawyer who gave a talk at Phyllis Wheatley High School, which was segregated. Jordan was a member of the …