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EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN
I'd like people to share about the extraordinary women through out history, any facts, anecdotes; so we can all get to know a little more about them and maybe inspire and motivate the extraordinary women yet to come.
Topics:
history leadership women
Closing Statement from Helena Ripoll Hazell
Thank you to you all for your contributions to this conversation. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading about all the extraordinary women who have come forward.
I look forward to enganging with you all in future conversations.
Best wishes,
Helena
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
174. Kseniya Simonova
175. Sylvia Plath
176. Razia Sultana
177. Jahanara Begum Sahib
178. Shabana Azmi
179. Rani Lakshmibai
180. Carmen de Lavallade
181. Margaret Bourke-White
182. Julia Margaret Cameron
183. Dorothea Lange
184. Alice Walker
185. Bapsi Sidhwa
186. Anne Sexton
187. Gwendolyn Brooks
188. Lillian Hellman
189. Tracy Chapman
190. Carol Gilligan
191. Andrea Grazzini Walstrom
192. Brigitte Kwan
193. Margaret Walker
194. Margaret Wright
195. Patricia Robinson
196. Dorothy Dix
197. Helen Lynd
198. Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson
199. Mary King
200. Amelia Boynton Robinson
201. Gloria Richardson
202. Mrs Rosa Parks
All mothers and all the anonymous women who have been mentioned as well.
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Best known as the leader of the Cambridge Movement, a civil rights struggle in Cambridge, Maryland in the 1960s. The movement made significant strides against institutionalized racial discrimination in Cambridge by bringing attention to social injustices such as inadequate wages, poor housing, and poor health care.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_Richardson
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
She came to prominence in the 1960s as a leader of the American Civil Rights Movement in Selma, Alabama. A key figure in the 1965 march that became known as Bloody Sunday, she later became vice-president of the Schiller Institute affiliated with Lyndon LaRouche. She was awarded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Freedom Medal in 1990.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelia_Boynton_Robinson
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University for Peace. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_King_(political_scientist)
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
She worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
Like many young Black Americans of her generation, became convinced that change was possible. When Ruby Smith entered Spelman College in 1959, she quickly became involved in the Atlanta student movement after being inspired by the Greensboro North Carolina lunch counter sit-in, which prevented blacks from eating in the same lunch counter as white people did during her sophomore year. She participated in many sit-in's and was arrested a few times after getting involved in Atlanta student movement. She regularly picketed and protested with her colleagues in a bid to integrate Atlanta.
When a delegation of SNCC staff was preparing to board a plane for Africa in the fall of 1964 to observe the successfulness of the nonviolence technique, an airline representative told them the plane was overbooked and asked if they would wait and take a later flight. This angered Ruby Smith-Robinson so much that without consulting the rest of the group she went and sat down in the jetway and refused to move. They were given seats on that flight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Doris_Smith-Robinson
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
American sociologist and social philosopher. Author of Shame and the Search for Identity and co-author of Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture with husband Robert Staughton Lynd.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Lynd
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
America's highest paid and most widely read female journalist at the time of her death.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy_Dix
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Trinidadian economist and public servant. Wife of former President and Prime Minister A. N. R. Robinson, she served as the First Lady of Trinidad and Tobago during his administrations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Robinson
In July 1990, members of the Jamaat al Muslimeen stormed The Red House in Port of Spain during an attempted coup. Several prominent members of the government were taken hostage during the coup attempt, including A. N. R. Robinson, who was the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago at the time. At the height of the hostage crisis, a member of Jamaat al Muslimeen handed Prime Minister Robinson a note, from Patricia Robinson, that simply read "I love you." No one knows how Robinson was able to get the note to her husband during the Red House siege.
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Was a third-party candidate for President of the United States and a community activist in Los Angeles, California.
She once said she was not fighting for equality with men if it meant equality in the world of killing, the world of competition. "I don't want to compete on no damned exploitative level. I don't want to exploit nobody....I want the right to be black and me..."
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
African-American poet and writer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Walker
...'Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth, let a people loving freedom come to growth, let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. let a race of men now rise and take control!'
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks
A seamstress who refused to obey the Montgomery law providing for segregation on city buses, she decided to sit down in the "white" section of the bus. She explained why saying:
'Well, in the first place, I had been working all day on the job. I was quite tired after spending a full day working. I handle and work on clothing that white people wear. That didn't come into mind but this is what I wanted to know:
When and how would we ever determine our rights as humans beings?...It just happened that the driver made a demand and I just didn't feel like obeying his demand. He called a policeman and i was arrested and placed in jail'...
Salim Solaiman 50+
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigitte_Kwan
Please ignore if Birdia has already mentioned it here and if it's already in your list, Helena.
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
No, unfortunately Birdia Tak Wai Chan ( you are misspelling her name and I know, from my own experience, she will forgive you but would appreciate it if you corrected it) has not appeared in this conversation yet. I wish she did because her comments and contributions are always so refreshing and interesting.
Salim Solaiman 50+
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Muhammad Aizat Zainal Alam 30+
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Muhammad Aizat Zainal Alam 30+
http://www.ted.com/conversations/4321/what_is_your_parental_advise_t.html
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Kate Blake 50+
Much thanks!
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Thank you for your interest and appreciation. I agree, this is great reference material. Everyone's contribution has been wonderful. I'm learning so much.
Thank you for your contribution so far.
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
ANDREA GRAZZINI WALSTROM
http://www.ted.com/conversations/4004/our_modern_societies_still_nee.html
Andrea,
Thank you for your contribution in this conversation so far and thank you for sharing your wisdom in many other conversations. I'm inspired.
Kate Blake 50+
The topic itself fried me earlier on but Andrea adds class and intelligence as well as the adjectives you used ... I am sincerely impressed!!! She is more than worthy to be on this list.
Debra Smith 200+
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Here's another extraordinary lady I just came across:
Lillian Hellman,
American playwright, linked throughout her life with many left-wing causes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lillian_Hellman
Hellman appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950. At the time, HUAC was well aware that Hellman's longtime lover Dashiell Hammett had been a Communist Party member. Asked to name names of acquaintances with communist affiliations, Hellman said she delivered a prepared statement, which read in part:
'To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group'.
'Since when do we have to agree with people to defend them from injustice? '
'Nobody outside of a baby carriage or a judge's chamber believes in an unprejudiced point of view.'
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwendolyn_Brooks
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
American poet, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature [and] the first female member of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Sexton
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein. Daughter of the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Pakistani author. She is perhaps best known for her collaborative work with filmmaker Deepa Mehta: Sidhwa wrote both the 1991 novel Ice Candy Man (Cracking India) which is the basis for Mehta's 1998 film Earth as well as the 2006 novel Water: A Novel which is based upon Mehta's 2005 film, Water.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bapsi_Sidhwa
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
African American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender. She is best-known for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Walker
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Dorothea Lange is heralded for being one of the first female commercial portrait photographers in the world. She is best known for her work during the Great Depression, when she photographed the breadlines, the waterfront strikes, and the sheer desperation people displayed on a daily basis. Her photos of impoverished migrant farm families looking for work still grace national museums. Lange is also well known for her work documenting people housed in Japanese-American relocation camps during World War II. Her images were so critical of the Japanese-American policies that the Army impounded them during the war. After the war Lange co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture. Experts describe Lange's work as "revolutionary" and credit her for being a premiere influence in the development of modern documentary photography.
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Julia Margaret Cameron was a British photographer who started her career at a time when photography was brand new. She is known for her unconventional portrait style, which included close cropping, soft focus and an emphasis on capturing the personality; skills that are still imitated today. Some of Cameron's famous subjects include: Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Ellen Terry and George Frederic Watts. Historians note that many of Cameron's portraits are significant because they are often the only existing photographs of historical figures
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Margaret Bourke-White was a leading American photojournalist, and the world's first female war correspondent. While working for Fortune and Life magazines, she traveled to combat zones in Germany, Africa and Italy during World War II. Bourke-White was also the only American photographer in Russia during the battle of Moscow. In addition, she photographed the drought victims of the Dust Bowl, the survivors at Buchenwald concentration camp, and Ghandi a few hours before his assassination. Bourke-White went on to make history with the publication of her haunting photos of the Depression in the book You Have Seen Their Faces. She is considered a pioneer in the field of photojournalism and her works are legendary around the world.
Lindsay Newland Bowker 50+
Carmen deLavallade
http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie/Carmen_Geoffrey/70115638?trkid=2361637
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Andrea Morisette Grazzini 30+
Another came to mind, I imagine you have her, but, just in case: Carol Gilligan. Author of "In Another Voice."
Andrea
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
She hadn't come up yet. Thank you for mentioning her. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Gilligan
I've just been reading about her in wikipedia and I'm impressed with her versatility; she played piano and pursued a career in modern dance during her graduate studies, received her B.A. summa cum laude in English literature from Swarthmore College, a master's degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe College, and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University.
Salim Solaiman 50+
Here is another one
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rani_Lakshmibai
Salim Solaiman 50+
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razia_Sultana
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jahanara_Begum_Sahib
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabana_Azmi
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Again great contributions, thank you.
Reading about Sylvia's young death made my heart turn, thinking about how much she must have been suffering to reach to that point.
Razia sounds like a real character; like someone I would've liked to get to meet. Something that stayed with me when reading about her is how she refused to be addressed as Sultana because it meant "wife or mistress of a sultan". She would answer only to the title "Sultan".
I like this extract from the inscription on the tomb of Jahanara:
'Let no one cover my grave except with greenery,
for this very grass suffices as a tomb cover for the poor'.
Shabana is such a beautiful lady and from what I read, so good natured too.
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Performance artist in sand animation and a philanthropist.
http://youtu.be/Cri7aQHRT7k
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kseniya_Simonova
Helena Ripoll Hazell 20+
Singer-songwriter, musician and activist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Chapman
http://youtu.be/7rZbvi6Tj6E