list 50 women little girls should admire instead of symbols of stupidity and weakness

Rosemary Brown was elected to the provincial legislature of British Columbia in 1972, becoming the first black woman in Canadian history to be a member of a Canadian parliamentary body. A busy mother of three as well as an active member of the New Democratic Party, she ran for leadership of the federal NDP in 1975 but lost on a fourth ballot to Ed Broadbent. Rosemary served in the B.C. legislature until 1986, when she became a professor in women’s studies at Simon Fraser University.

Born in Jamaica, Rosemary grew up on the tropical island. After emigrating to Canada in 1951 she studied at McGill University and the University of British Columbia, then pursued a career in social worker. A determined feminist, Ms. Brown worked throughout her life to promote equality and human rights. Her campaigns includes efforts to eliminate sexism in textbooks, increase female representation on boards and prohibit discrimination based on sex or marital status. Rosemary’s dedicated community service won her a multitude of honours, including honorary degreees from many universities and selection as an officer of the Order of Canada.

Salvation Army Founder, General William Booth stated: “My best men are women!” On March 8, International Women’s Day, we celebrate women’s contribution to society. It is the government’s firm belief that increasing women’s participation and access to leadership roles and opportunities helps women and girls thrive, reach their full potential, fulfill their dreams, and help build a more prosperous Canada.

General Booth was deeply influenced by his wife Catherine Booth, who believed that women were equal to men and it was only inadequate education and social custom that made them men’s intellectual inferiors. She was an inspiring speaker and helped to promote the idea of women preachers. The Salvation Army gave women equal responsibility with men for preaching and welfare work.

Over many years the role of women in The Salvation Army has developed, and now every position for both ordained ministers of The Salvation Army and lay members is equal opportunity.

Lt-Colonel Jean Moulton holds a senior position within Salvation Army administration. “The Salvation Army gives women opportunity for many varied roles,” says Lt-Colonel Moulton. “I’ve had opportunity to build on my experience through varied tasks and was supported by mentors and leaders who believed in the importance of the role of women within the organization.”

As an ordained minister of The Salvation Army, Lt-Colonel Moulton has felt fulfilled through her various roles in leadership. They include pastoral leadership of a church congregation, working with offenders and victims of crime, and administrative roles within Salvation Army Social Services and Personnel Services.

Her current position, Secretary for Personnel, is a varied role as it relates to officer/pastor personnel. “Having opportunity builds confidence,” says Lt-Colonel Moulton. “The Salvation Army has given me lots of opportunities to grow, to learn and to take on greater responsibility.”

12. Lieutenant Valentina Tereshkova

1963: Soviets launch first woman into space

A former textile worker from the Soviet Union has become the first woman in space. Lieutenant Valentina Tereshkova, 26, was the fifth Russian cosmonaut to go into the Earth’s orbit when her spaceship Vostok VI was launched at 1230 Moscow time.

Moscow Television broadcast the first pictures of the elated blonde – code-named Seagull – ninety minutes later. One of the main purposes of her mission is to attempt the first docking manoeuvre with another spaceship.

Colonel Valery Bykovsky was completing his 32nd orbit in the Vostok V – launched two days ago – when Lt Tereshkova hurtled into space from the secret Russian launch pad in Baikonur, central Asia.

At one time the two spacecrafts – which were in radio contact with each other as well as the ground – were only three miles apart, but they are reported to be drifting further apart.

Khrushchev’s acclaim

Russian Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev had a radio conversation with the female cosmonaut. He congratulated her on her achievement and spoke of his “fatherly pride” for her.

By 2000 BST Ms Tereshkova had completed 23 circuits of the globe – one more than the longest-flying US spaceman, Gordon Cooper – at a distance of between 114 miles (183km) and 145 miles (232km) with an average 88.3 minutes for each orbit.

Thousands of jubilant women gathered in Red Square, Moscow, to celebrate the occasion.

A special issue of Soviet newspaper Pravda said Ms Tereshkova had dreamed of going into space as soon as she heard about the first man in space, Colonel Yuri Gagarin, in April 1961. Ms Tereshkova – an amateur parachutist – joined the space programme last March. Col Gagarin said she was popular with the other cosmonauts and their wives and described her “kind eyes and good-natured smile”. Russian scientists also hope to analyse the comparative effects of space travel on a man and a woman.

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Lt Tereshkova and Col Bykovsky landed safely by parachute two days later in Kazakhstan, several hundred miles from where they had taken off. Ms Tereshkova had completed 49 orbits of the Earth – 1,250,000 miles – in two days, 22 hours and fifty minutes.

Mr Bykovsky set a new record for time in space, completing 82 orbits – 2,060,000 miles – in four days, 23 hours and 54 minutes, 25 hours and 32 minutes longer than the previous record holder.

Ms Tereshkova was feted by the Soviet leadership and became active in the Communist Party. She never returned to space.

Founder of the Body Shop.

“I have never felt that beauty products are the body and blood of Jesus Christ,” she once said. “Nothing the Body Shop sells pretends to do anything other than it says. Moisturizers moisturize, fresheners freshen and cleansers cleanse. End of story.” Anita Roddick

``If you think you are too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito”(Elmer-Dewitt, 1). This quotation, which is displayed on the side of the Body Shop trucks in England, is one of Anita Roddick’s favorite quotes. To many people, Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop, may be the mosquito. People often say “One person cannot make a difference.” Roddick, however, not only did not believe that, she proved it.

Lois Wilson, the wife of the man who co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), stuck by her husband through his seventeen years of tormented and abusive alcoholic drinking, believing that her unconditional love could get him sober. But it could not. The daughter of well-to-do parents, this loving and determined women watched her husband, Bill Wilson, destroy his career, his relationships and his health, checking into and out of alcoholic sanatoriums as he neared the point of insanity and death. Finally, through a life-changing spiritual experience, Bill Wilson was led to another alcoholic named Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith, in Akron, Ohio and together in 1935 the fellowship of AA was born.

It was through her heart-rending, emotional struggle and her witnessing other spouses and children similarly impacted that Lois Wilson came to realize that alcoholism is a family disease and that the solution was a program for recovery, a family support group that came to be known as Al-Anon.

From her priviledged childhood in turn-of-the-century New York City, to her unexpected but exhilarating courtship with the dashing Bill Wilson, to her socialite status as a “Wall Street Wife” in the Roaring Twenties, to the couple’s audacious cross-country motorcycle excursions in the 1930s, Lois was every bit the adventure-seeker her legendary husband was. But nothing could have prepared her for the chaos, pain, and loss caused by her beloved Bill’s descent into the depths of alcoholism. In the end, however, her husband’s addiction proved not to be the tragic undoing of this brilliant, promising couple, but rather the beginning of one of the twentieth century’s most important social movements.

The “Twelve Step Programs” that Lois Wilson developed for Al-Anon and her husband, Bill, developed for Alcoholics Anonymous are among the most successful forces for good in the world today. They have saved millions of lives, restored millions of families and are the basis for more than 300 self-help groups growing around the world-from Narcotics Anonymous to Overeaters Anonymous.

Lois and Bill Wilson are heroes to recovering people worldwide and generations who credit AA and Al-Anon and the Twelve Steps with saving their lives. Like other influential heroes, they were far from perfect. The story of Lois Wilson is a poignant but not always pretty love story, and to his credit, Borchert tells this story with a straightforward candor that lets us appreciate the immense toll alcohol takes.

Lois devoted her own life to Bill and to AA/Al-Anon, working tirelessly and selflessly, so that she became not only a guiding light but also a symbol of the movement itself, its nurturing spirit, revered and beloved by all who knew her. Bill Wilson died in 1971. Lois Wilson died in 1988, at the age of 97.

Irène Joliot-Curie (12 September 1897 – 17 March 1956) was a French scientist, the daughter of Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Irène was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. This made the Curies the family with most Nobel laureates to date. Both children of the Joliot-Curies, Hélène and Pierre, are also esteemed scientists.

Marie Skłodowska–Curie (November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934) was a physicist and chemist of Polish upbringing and, subsequently, French citizenship. She was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity, the only person honored with Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, and the first female professor at the University of Paris.

In 1903, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Pierre Curie, Marie Curie, and Henri Becquerel the Nobel Prize in Physics, “in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel.”

Maria and Pierre were unable to go to Stockholm in person to receive the prize. They immediately, however, shared its financial proceeds with needy persons and acquaintances, including students.

Skłodowska–Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize. Eight years later, she would receive the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, “in recognition of her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element.”

Taken from: http://womenshistory.about.com/od/warwwii/a/overview.htm

Women’s lives changed in many ways during World War II. As with most wars, many women found their roles and opportunities – and responsibilities – expanded. Husbands went to war or went to work in factories in other parts of the country, and the wives had to pick up their husbands’ responsibilities. With fewer men in the workforce, women filled more traditionally-male jobs. In the military, women were excluded from combat duty, so women were called on to fill some jobs that men had performed, to free men for combat duty. Some of those jobs took women near or into combat zones, and sometimes combat came to civilian areas, so some women died.

While many of the resources on the Internet, and on this site, address American women, they were by no means unique in being affected by and playing key roles in the war. Women in other Allied and Axis countries were also affected. Some ways in which women were affected were specific and unusual (the “comfort women” of China and Korea, Jewish women and the Holocaust, for example). In other ways, there were either somewhat similar or parallel experiences (British, Soviet, and American women pilots). In still other ways, experience crossed borders and characterized the experience in most parts of the war-affected world (dealing with rationing and shortages, for instance).

In 1928, the SUPREME COURT OF CANADA unanimously decided women were not “persons” who could hold public office as Canadian senators. The terms of the CONSTITUTION ACT, 1867, and the historical incapacity of women to hold office under common law barred the suit of Henrietta Muir EDWARDS and her companion Alberta suffragettes.

In 1929 the British Privy Council reversed the decision and called the exclusion of women from public office “a relic of days more barbarous than ours.” The Governor General’s Persons Award, for work on behalf of Canadian women, is named for the case.

Henrietta Louise Edwards, née Muir, women’s rights activist, reformer (b at Montréal 18 Dec 1849; d at Fort Macleod, Alta 10 Nov 1931). Of a wealthy family, Edwards early evinced feminist sympathies; in 1875 she founded the Working Girls’ Association to provide vocational training and edited a journal, Women’s Work in Canada. She helped Lady ABERDEEN found the National Council of Women (1893) and also helped found the VICTORIAN ORDER OF NURSES.

One of Alberta’s “Famous Five” in the PERSONS CASE and a supporter of divorce on equal grounds, prison reform and mother’s allowances, she aimed to expand women’s rights in the political and especially the legal sphere. She wrote The Legal Status of Women in Alberta (1921) and pressed for the 1917 Dower Act.

Agnes Campbell Macphail, politician, reformer (b at Proton Twp, Grey County, Ont 24 Mar 1890; d at Toronto 13 Feb 1954).

Macphail was the only woman elected to Canada’s Parliament in 1921, the first federal election in which women had the vote. She served until defeated in 1940. In 1943 she was elected to the Ontario legislature, one of the first 2 women there. She lost her seat in 1945 but was again in the legislature 1948-51.

She was also the first woman appointed member of a Canadian delegation to the LEAGUE OF NATIONS, where she insisted on serving on the Disarmament Committee. Macphail began as a country schoolteacher and was active in the Ontario agricultural CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT and the UNITED FARMERS OF ONTARIO. She entered politics to represent the farmers of her region; in office she came also to see herself as representing other women. As MP she first sat as a member of the PROGRESSIVE PARTY, with which the UFO was then affiliated. She later sat as an independent and finally as a representative of the CO-OPERATIVE COMMONWEALTH FEDERATION; as MPP she represented the CCF. Although involved in founding the CCF, she distrusted partisanship and did not acknowledge party discipline.

Though modern accounts have tended to deny it, in her own time Macphail was recognized as a feminist. Rural issues such as a protective tariff were always primary for her, but she gave major attention to so-called “women’s issues” such as prison reform.

She was the founder of the Elizabeth Fry Society of Canada and was largely responsible for the establishment in 1935 of the Archambault Commission to investigate Canada’s prisons. Her feminist antimilitarism included active participation in the WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM (but she reluctantly voted for Canada’s entry into WWII). She supported women’s acquisition of civil rights, although she was not an active suffragist. She was a friend of Nellie MCCLUNG and admired Thérèse CASGRAIN’s suffragist efforts in Québec, and she welcomed the decision in the PERSONS CASE. She was responsible for Ontario’s first equal pay legislation (1951). After her electoral defeat, she supported herself by journalism, public speaking and organizing for the Ontario CCF, but she suffered from lack of money and poor health. She died just before a Senate appointment was to be announced.