who are PROPER female role models

[Porcupine]

for your dds? not farking JOran please

Madonna

NO one mentioned Xenia so far ?

Ingrid Betancourt

Plus lots already mentioned.

Though I really have to take issue with Marina on Ségolène Royal.

Ooh Anna, how do you do the little accents?

I've got a French AZERTY keyboard

Isn't Baroness Greenfield merely a mediocre scientist with good legs and an outstanding talent for self-publicity? I'm more than willing to be proved wrong if people have any evidence to the contrary.

Peaches, along the same lines, I'd say Emma Thompson. Brainy, hard-working, talented, happily married and a devoted mother.

I love Emma T! A friend once got her autograph for me and she was so surprised that she had a fan, she wrote this lovely personal note and I still have it in my wallet. What a sad git, eh??

Re Madonna I refer you to this as to why she should not be a role model.

"Isn't Baroness Greenfield merely a mediocre scientist with good legs and an outstanding talent for self-publicity? I'm more than willing to be proved wrong if people have any evidence to the contrary."

If being an Oxford University Professor of Pharmacology, Winner of the Royal Society's Faraday Medal and the French Legion d'Honneur is indicative of mediocrity, then yes.

I'd say Susan Greenfield is a good science communicator, more than anything. her legs aren't bad, but she does have a dodgy taste in leather jackets..

Emma Thompson - massive luvvie though

god I hate everyone

for me, Dolly Parton! The work she does for children is amazing, getting free books out all across the world. She always seems so posative, I don't really watch alot of TV or whatever to see alot of people, but she has always really stuck out in my mind as someone to admire.

Showing my age but Vera Britten and Shirley Williams, esp latter. Such a change from the groomed, cloned, spun to the point of blandness female politicians of today.

oh yes

shirley williams

she made my mum cry

also she sent her kids to private school while insisting everyone else go to comps

great

Ayaan Hirsi Ali - author of Infidel

oh gosh Linda Smith, she was absolutely lovely. always smile when I hear her voice.

The chemist Dorothy Hodgkin was a Nobel Laureate

and check out Virginia Apgar's glasses

Enid - Feel awful now. How did she make your mum cry?

Pearl Cornioley.

Michelle Norris.

Look them up and you'll understand why.

bundle - yes, agree on Dorothy Hodgkin. She was also Chancellor of the University of Bristol during which time she set up fellowships to aid students from Third World countries (in the early 70s). And she was the first British woman to win the Nobel prize for her work on the structure of Vitamin B-12.

Everyones different and see different people as role models. I guess you would want the person to look up to as being successful, ambitious, have money etc. Well those people could range from Madonna to Maggy Thatcher, Most of the people we look up to all have the same qualitys, it's what they do and mistakes they make we judge them upon.

I think anyone who would look to either of those as a role model worships greed and envy, cos that's what they personify - same with most celebs with no talent for anything except self promotion. Thatch was a politician, but her policies were all about individual greed.

But isn't that what most celebs are about? Greed and self-promotion?

In my mind as much as i like her music Madonna isn't a role model mum. I know she is very strict with kids by only allowing 2 hours tv per week etc and although its maybe a bit too strict ,it is good that she does that. But career STILL comes first over the kids. I remember in that documentry she did in 2005 and Lourdes was saying that she wished she could see her mum more and she doesn't know that much about her mums life. I think Madonna shelters the kids too much and as for the adoption...