Mother Teresa devoted her life to helping the poor in the worst slums of Calcutta.
This dedicated woman knew this was the path she wanted her life to take early on. As a girl of twelve, Mother Teresa, a devout Catholic, had already decided to minister to those who most needed care.
She went to Calcutta, started teaching, and soon founded a new order, The Missionaries of Charity.
Her name and image have become synonymous with compassion and activism.
Captain Kathryn Janeway, played by actress Kate Mulgrew, is the female captain of television’s USS Voyager.
Tough as nails, yet compassionate and approachable, she leads her 24th century crew through the unexplored “Delta Quadrant” in search of home (which, by the way, is many, many light-years away).
Janeway is a veritable management role model as she holds together a crew made up of one-time foes.
She is able to navigate the Voyager through plasma storms, deal with hostile aliens, and still take time to attend to the personal problems of her staff.
Margaret Sanger fought most of her life for women’s rights to control their own fertility.
This pioneering activist was inspired by a personal tragedy. Her mother, who gave birth eighteen times (eleven children lived) died at the young age of forty-nine. Margaret believed her untimely death was due at least in part to the physical strain of the pregnancies.
Margaret herself endured a difficult first pregnancy and after giving birth to a son went into a sanitarium.
Despite a horrible prognosis (she was told she would be an invalid), Margaret left the sanitarium, regained her health, and began writing about women’s reproductive rights.
She saw clearly that women’s economic and social equality were tied to their ability to control their own bodies.
In 1916, Margaret opened the first birth control clinic in the US, and was promptly thrown in jail. Eventually, after nine trips to jail and more than fifty years of tireless work (including gathering funds for initial work on the birth control pill), her efforts were successful.
Today American women have the freedom to decide whether and when to become pregnant.
Miss Fury, a.k.a. socialite Marla Drake, was a heroine of the comics in the 1940s and 1950s.
Clad in black tights and a cat-eared cowl, she bravely fought espionage and crime.
Her superpowers? None.
Miss Fury simply drew upon her extreme courage and admirable athletic skills.
Her creator, Ms. Tarpe Mills, was the first woman to develop, write, and draw a female superheroine.
Marie Curie you’ve probably heard of. She and her husband Pierre shared the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of radioactivity.
(For Marie, it was a special honor as she was the first woman EVER to win a Nobel Prize in Physics.) Marie was the first to determine that radioactivity (a term she coined) begins inside the atom.
Her daughter, Irene, was no slouch either.
Irene, a physical chemist, studied at the College Sevigne, and went on to work as her mother’s assistant at the Institut du Radium in Paris.
She and her mother devoted themselves to the development of X-ray technology and even started a mobile X-ray service that treated more than a million patients.
Irene met her future husband, Frederic Joliot, at the College Sevigne, and the couple discovered artificial radioactivity in 1934, a discovery that contributed to the development of nuclear energy.
In 1935, Irene and HER husband shared a Nobel Prize, making her mother, Marie, the first woman ever to win a Nobel herself and see her daughter win one.
More than 11,000 American women were SPARs — Semper Paratus/ Always Ready — freeing up men for World War II military duty.
The SPAR division was created in 1942 when the Coast Guard, like other military branches, found itself in need of more men at sea and on foreign soil.
Women were assigned to shore positions such as clerks, parachute riggers, and storekeepers.
Though the SPARs disbanded six months after World War II ended, many said its existence helped pave the way for women to join the military as equals with men. In September 2000, the Coast Guard launched a 225-foot cutter in the port of Marinette, Wisconsin, in honor of these remarkable women.
Dian Fossey, an occupational therapist, was interested in animals from childhood.
In 1963, fulfilling a long-standing dream to visit Africa, she took out a personal loan to pay her way and headed to the southern hemisphere, meeting paleontologists Mary and Louis S. B. Leakey on the way.
The two encouraged Dian to live her dream: working with mountain gorillas.
Dian began actually living among the mountain gorillas in the Republic of the Congo (now Zaire). Her close contact with the gorillas proved that the animals were peaceful vegetarians in danger of extinction from poaching and the depletion of their habitats.
Dian lived among 51 gorillas until civil war forced her to leave the area for Rwanda, where she was known by the Rwandans as Nyiramachabelli, or “the old lady who lives in the forest without a man.”
Her best-selling book, Gorillas in the Mist, established her as the world’s leading authority on the physiology and behavior of mountain gorillas and raised awareness of how these “gentle giants” with individual personalities and strong family bonds were dying out.
Sadly, her brave stand in defense of the mountain gorillas (via the media and by destroying poachers’ traps) angered poachers and government officials who wanted to convert gorilla habitats to farmland.
Dian was found brutally murdered on Christmas Eve, 1985. Her murder was never solved.
Belle Starr, born Myra Belle Shirley in Missouri, grew up to become a cattle rustler and bandit.
But her bad rap was partly the fault of an unfair situation. Belle was originally a guerrilla fighter in the Civil War.
But after the war, guerrilla troops on the Rebel side were posted as outlaws and not allowed to surrender as soldiers of a defeated army. So, on the lam and already unrespectable, she took to a life of crime: stealing horses and participating in hold-ups.
In 1880, she married Sam Starr, a Cherokee renegade, and their Arkansas farm, which was on an Indian reservation, became a hideout for Jesse James and other fugitives.
In 1889, she was shot in the back. Some say the killer was her own son.
Elena Haas was well known to the Gestapo during World War II.
In 1944, armed with a submachine gun, she led a raid that destroyed a vital and heavily guarded bridge.
In several other raids, she destroyed Nazi supplies and ammunition and killed many Nazis.
Unfortunately, this modern woman warrior was killed in a guerrilla raid against an airfield in January 1945.
According to accounts by those in her unit who survived, she continued to fire her gun at the enemy even as she collapsed from her wound.
Mathilda “Ma” Hunkel, a.k.a. The Red Tornado, was one of the first female superheroes and the very first female to become a member of the famous “Justice Society of America.”
Appearing in “All-American Comics” in 1939, Ma was the mother of Scribbly, a boy cartoonist who appeared in a humorous series by Sheldon Mayer. In issue 20 of the All-American, Ma stole the spotlight from her son when, inspired by his hero-worship of the male superhero Green Lantern, she donned a pair of red longjohns, a cape, and a saucepan to become “Red Tornado.”
As Red Tornado, she successfully fought a criminal protection racket that was plaguing the neighborhood.
Unfortunately, when the male superheros first met to form the famous “Justice Society of America,” Red Tornado wasn’t invited. She crashed the meeting anyway, entering through a window.
Ma Hunkel never participated in a Justice Society case, but her presence at the meeting was enough to earn her membership in the JSA and make her the first female JSA member. The second female member was the more-famous Wonder Woman.