Inspirational women in history - who's yours?

[HecateTrivia]

My son has to research and do a biography of an inspirational woman in history. I wondered who you feel inspired by?

Eleanor of Aquitaine - used her land and family power to show her husbands it wasn't acceptable to treat women like doormats.
Catherine de Medici - was a bit of a bitch to the protestants, but given how publicly her husband and his mistress were humiliating her all across France while she maintained a stoic silence, I think she'd have had all of you on her side over in the Relationships thread.

Violet Szabo

WW2 agent. Captured and tortured by the Gestapo.

Shot aged 24 leaving behind 1 daughter

Her code poem was:

The Life That I Have

The life that I have
Is all that I have
And the life that I have
Is yours

The love that I have
Of the life that I have
Is yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have
A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause
For the peace of my years
In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

Miep Gies

Elizabeth Garret Anderson ( for her work in medicine)
Elizabeth Fry (fpr her work in prisons)
Rosa Parks ( inspiring civil rights )
Marie Curie ( science and dedication to it)
Indira Gandhi ( leadership)
Sarojini Naidu (poetry and leadership)
Boadicea (bravery and leadership in battle)
Rani of Jhansi (for bravery and leadership in battle)
Florence Nightingale (because she changed practice so much and saved so many lives as a result)
Maitreyi (female philosopher of yore: dared to ask questions and debate)
Princess Anne (Not joking: she is very sensible and works hard at the head of lots of organisations and makes very sensible speeches)
Shami Chakrabarti

Forgot to add
Aun San Su Kyi
Maharani Gayatri devi
Ann Frank

Lots of Women colleagues ( I am a medic) especially the older ones. Inspirational and deserving many many medals.

I found Princess Di inspirational because she could have chosen to be like Posh Spice - all power and money and no charity. But she didn't choose that at all.

Yes, Rosa parks and Elizabeth Fry. Living woman I like Vanessa Redgrave.

Another for Violet Szabo here. An ordinary?? girl, worked in a shop in Brixton who stepped forward to make a difference. So brave and so young and so inspiring.

Mary Seacole The forgotten nurse at The Crimera
Elizabeth 1

Mary Seacole is inspirational, but she's not forgotten is she? I have read lots about her and watched a documentary on tv about her.

Sojourner Truth - she escaped slavery to become a powerful speaker against slavery and for women's rights.

Emily Wilding Davison, the suffragette who threw herself under the king's horse

Would definitely second Josephine Baker and Hypatia

Marie Stopes

Frieda Kahlo

Oprah Winfrey - (invested $40 million and some of her time establishing the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in Henley on Klip south of Johannesburg)
Mo Mowlam
Doreen Lawrence
Ann Frank
Rosa Parks
Katie Piper

Mary Wollstonecraft and Aphra Benn. Proto-feminists way before their time.

Also Isabella Bird for flying in the face of convention of the time and just travelling exactly where she wanted to.

Mary Jones

Margaret Thatcher

My DD's fave book is 'Women Who Changed The World'. Here are a few not mentioned already:

Coco Chanel
Madonna
Oprah Winfrey
Benazir Bhutto
Mother TeresaEleanor Roosevelt
Dian Fossey

I am not well read enough to know that many names but I do feel so grateful to all those women in our past who led the way and put their life at risk so that we women can now vote, speak out, earn a wage, drive, choose not to be in an abusive relationship, travel, walk the streets without a male chaperone wearing pretty much what clothes we choose, to plan a family if we want or not to, I feel so lucky especially when I think of women all over the world who don't have our rights and freedom!

Margaret Thatcher for me too. Not for what she did but for what she represented to me as a young girl growing up in the eighties (I am a socialist politically). She showed me that I as a woman could achieve ANYTHING if I was strong enough and that (inadvertently on her part no doubt) was a BIG message for me.

Pah at Margaret Thatcher. She just pulled the feminist drawbridge up after her.

Actually OP I have spent a bit of time thinking about this and to be honest i would say the most inspirational woman of the last century would be the average woman of the GB during the second world war. You worked the factories and aircraft building plants arriving with little industrial training yet quickly learning the skills to produce the munitions required and keeping the country and family life going all whilst being directly targeted from above with incredible stoicism.

Nancy Astor, the first woman voted to British Parliament.
Caroline Chisolm for the work she did with women in colonial Australia she used to be on the Australian 5 dollar bill.

Also: Marie Curie (radioactivity) and Rosalind Franklin (DNA) - scientist when it was hard for women to be recognised - Rosalind Franklin should have won the nobel prize along with Crick and Watson IMHO
Camilla Batmanghelidjh for helping and looking after dreadfully neglected kids in London and getting loads of important people to support/ fund the work
Marie Colvin, journalist killed in Homs, Syria for never giving up and getting important stories out to the world

Marie Curie.

Nancy Astor was the first to take her seat, not the first voted in.