Positive Feminist influences.....let's make a huge list.

[ThePosieParker]

So I'm needing a boost and thought this may be a good way to feel positive:
(individual or huge)
I'll start:

The massive reduction in FGM in areas of Ethiopia when amazing women educated the local women.

please take the first comment copy/paste and add your own.

I know It's 100 years ago but the suffagettes were amazing.

Ellen MacArthur
Hilary Clinton
Michelle Obama
Barbara Castle

The massive reduction in FGM in areas of Ethiopia when amazing women educated the local women.
I know It's 100 years ago but the suffagettes were amazing.
Ellen MacArthur
Hilary Clinton
Michelle Obama
Barbara Castle
The bridge project in the Congo.

In our house we have a feminist wall of fame with pictures of inspiring women. Currently up we have:
Tamar of Georgia - first woman to rule Georgia in her own right and an enormously successful monarch
Millicent Fawcett - suffragette
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson - first woman to qualify as a doctor in the UK
Marie Curie
Barbara Castle
Violet Hunt - author and suffragist
Christine de Pizan - medieval author of The Book of the City of Ladies
Sojourner Truth - former slave, abolitionist and women's rights activist
Ada Lovelace - writer and mathemetician

More recently I would definitely include Finn McKay and Helena Kennedy.

Nawal el Saadawi Egyptian feminist
Iceland banning lapdancing clubs
And Rwanda's 30% women MP quota and getting over 50%.

Naomi Klein, writer and political activist
Peggy Phelan (performance theorist)
Caryl Churchill (playwright)
Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese opposition politician and the General Secretary of the National League for Democracy

Good thread!

I can't believe I'm the first to post MN Feminists!

And I want to single out ChristinedePizan's amazing thread about rape and sexual assault. That is genuinely worthy of being up there with other inspirations mentioned here.

The Eaves charity, particularly the Poppy Project.
Fanny Deakin - a personal (local to me) heroine of mine.
Object.

Josephine Butler. Niece of Earl Grey, respectable society aristocrat, took up the cause of prostituted women and girls in Victorian England and really gave up her comfortable, respectable position in society because her peers were so horrified by the cause she undertook - she should have been doing something respectable like knitting coats for the poor or something uncontroversial. It's thanks to her that we have an age of consent, before that, rich men were free to rape 9 year old poor girls if they paid them and said it was for services rendered.