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

“Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door & just visit now and then.”

A rebel. A woman whose sensuality was intricately entwined with her independence. And, of course, a phenomenal actress.

Here’s what MSN Movies said about her in “Top 10 Film Fashion Moments”

When it comes to Katharine Hepburn’s style, it’s almost hard to pinpoint a specific movie—she was so defiantly individual. So revolutionary was Kate, that as the story goes, when RKO heads forced her to wear a skirt, she strolled around the studio lot in her underwear until they returned her beloved slacks (“Stockings are the invention of the devil,” Hepburn once stated). As the dizzy, madcap rich girl ensnaring Cary Grant in the classic screwball “Bringing Up Baby,” Kate almost sneaks her pants into the film via a nifty pantsuit while discussing her new leopard. It was perhaps “safer” for her to flaunt more feminine togs in this manner, but the image is one indelibly linked to the screen legend and an early look at her then scandalous affinity for menswear. As Calvin Klein said of Kate in 1986, she “prompted generations of fashion designers to capture her vitality and spirit.” We can’t give her anything but love, baby.

Lynn Hill (born 1961) is a United States climber, known as a top sport climber of the 1980s and famous for making the first free ascent of the Nose Route on Yosemite’s El Capitan.

In 1979, Lynn Hill completed one of many impressive landmarks in her career by becoming the first woman to establish a 5.12+/5.13, Ophir Broke in Ophir, Colorado. In 1984 at the Gunks she performed one of her most impressive leads, the onsight first ascent of Yellow Crack 5.12R/X. From 1986 to 1992 Lynn Hill was one of the world’s top sport climbers, winning over 30 international titles, including five victories at the Arco Rock Master. In 1991, she set another landmark by becoming the first woman to redpoint a consensus 5.14, Masse Critique in Cimai, France.

After ending her career as a professional competitive climber, Hill went back to traditional rock climbing. In 1993, together with her partner Brooke Sandahl, she became the first person, male or female, to free climb The Nose, a famous route on El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. In 1994 she upped the ante, by becoming the first to free climb the entire route in a single 24 hour period. Lynn Hill’s original climbing grade for the “Free Nose” was 5.13b. The Free Nose and the Free Nose in a day remained unrepeated over 10 years after Hill’s first ascents – despite numerous attempts by some of the best big wall climbers in the world. This has prompted some to suggest a grade of at least 5.14a may be more accurate, and cements the Free Nose ascents as two of the most impressive achievements in climbing history.

Lynn Hill’s impressive list of achievements span decades, age groups, climbing styles and gender, establishing Hill as one of history’s foremost free climbers.

On April 14th 2003, Lynn and partner Brad Lynch gave birth to a son, Owen.

Hill is currently a sponsored athlete for the Patagonia gear and clothing company.

In 2005 Lynn started offering climbing camps in 5 locations in the United States, with plans for more.

_{She was great on SNL and developed 30 Rock. Brains, wit, beauty, & apparently boundless energy . . .}

In 2007, Tina Fey was chosen as one of the 100 People Who Shape Our World by Time magazine. She placed seventh on that year’s Hot 100 List on AfterEllen.com, a website for queer (LGBT) women. She was ranked #80 on the Maxim Hot 100 Women of 2002.

Fey guest-starred on the August 13, 2007 Sesame Street episode, “The Bookaneers.”

Tina Fey appeared as a guest judge on the November 25 2007 episode of the Food Network program Iron Chef America.

Fey has appeared in Disney campaign “Year of a Million Dreams” as Tinker Bell, along with Mikhail Baryshnikov as Peter Pan and Gisele Bündchen as Wendy Darling.

Fey is married to Jeff Richmond, a composer on SNL. They met at Chicago’s Second City and dated for seven years before marrying in a Greek Orthodox ceremony on June 3, 2001. They have a daughter, Alice Zenobia Richmond, who was born on September 10, 2005 in New York. Her daughter has appeared with her in the commercial and printed advertisement for American Express. Alice’s image is also the logo of Fey’s production company, Little Stranger, Inc.

Fey is known as a committed environmentalist and has noted that, apart from recycling, she also drives a Lexus hybrid.

Benazir Bhutto is the first woman to be elected to leadership of a post-colonial Muslim nation—and she’s done it twice. Though this former prime minister of Pakistan has also been twice removed on charges of corruption, that doesn’t make her less influential or impressive. She has headed the secular, liberal Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) from exile for years, but returned to Pakistan in 2007 to run for prime minister a third time. Her policies typically stand in direct opposition to those of conservative President Pervez Musharraf, of whom she is an outspoken critic. She survived an assassination attempt in October and continues to persevere in dangerous political times. Bhutto is a walking example of the bumper-sticker motto, “Well-behaved women rarely make history.”

Zainab Salbi was born and raised in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Surviving that nation’s wars taught her that the hardest-hit victims inevitably were the women and children—women who lost husbands, children who lost fathers, women who were used as tools of war through rape and torture.

Determined to change that, in 1993 she founded Women to Women International to help women survivors of war rebuild their lives through vocational training, providing seed capital for women to start their own businesses and helping women learn to read and write to become active citizens in their societies.

Since its inception, WFWI has raised $24 million and helped more than 55,000 women in wartorn countries including Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan and Rwanda. For its trailblazing humanitarian work, WFWI was awarded the 2006 the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize, which included a $1.5 million award to continue its work.

Despite threats from the Taliban during their time in power in Afghanistan against those who defied their orders to cease educating girls, Safiye Amajan spent many years running a school for girls out of her home. After that oppressive government was toppled, Amajan served as the provincial head of the country’s Ministry of Women’s Affairs until she was murdered in 2006. In that post, she was responsible for opening several schools and vocational training centers specifically with the purpose of educating women and girls who had not had that opportunity under the Taliban.

Even though she must have known her life was still in danger from the Taliban, Amajan continued her commitment to educating Afghan girls. According to Amnesty International, the group that took responsibility for her death claimed Amajan had been an American spy, using the country’s nascent women’s movement as a cover for her activities.

When Waris Dirie was 5 years old, she was subjected to the ritual female circumcision that was commonplace in her native Somalia. In that culture, female circumcision is performed to supposedly ensure a girl’s purity before her eventual marriage. But many times, as in Dirie’s case, it is performed under unsanitary conditions, without anesthesia, and can lead to death or lifelong pain.

At 13, Dirie managed to escape Somalia by agreeing to work in her uncle’s home during his tenure as Somalia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom. There, years later, Dirie was discovered by a fashion photographer, which led to her eventual career as a successful model.

To help prevent other girls and women from suffering her same fate, she created the Waris Dirie Foundation to shine a light on this cruel procedure. As a result of her work, she was named the United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for the Elimination of Female Genital Mutilation in 1997.

Recent stories about the deaths of anorexic fashion models have suggested that more should be done to convince clothing designers and producers of runway fashion shows to resist hiring models unless they meet a certain body mass index requirement. In other words: No more stick-figure models.

Plus-size supermodel Aronson—a spokeswoman for the National Eating Disorders Association, has championed that cause for many years. The outspoken advocate tries to convince girls to embrace the fact that we all come in different shapes and sizes, and that being healthy doesn’t mean being a size zero.

”We need to take collective responsibility for this cultural catastrophe and recognize our obligation to not only learn as much as we can about eating disorders but also how our actions influence young women and girls,” Aronson says. “It is imperative that we not just skim the surface, but dig deeper about unattainable ideals of beauty which can lead to life-threatening diseases with sometimes permanent consequences.”

_{We need more real women (and real men) to be willing to stand up & let young women know that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, and that “thin” doesn’t necessarily mean “fit.”}

An environmental and political activist, Wangari Maathai was the first African woman to receive the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize, which she was awarded in 2004 for her “contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.”

As founder of the Greenbelt Movement, Maathai was directly responsible for convincing Kenyans, mostly women, of the need to start a tree-planting campaign in their country, both to protect against soil erosion and to provide an ongoing source of firewood for cooking fires. That effort has led to planting more than 20 million trees in her nation.

In addition to her environmental activism, Maathai also was active in opposing the oppressive government of Daniel arap Moi. She was eventually elected to the Kenyan Parliament in 2002.

According to one news report, her former husband was said to have remarked at one time that they divorced because Maathai was “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control.”

_{LOL! I think “too hard to control” qualifies as grounds for divorce in several states in the U.S.}

Ranked No. 12 on Forbes magazine’s 2005 list of the 100 most powerful women, Dr. Julie Gerberding is not a name one hears on a daily basis.

Gerberding is the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Gerberding and her staff have spent years studying and preparing for an anticipated bird flu pandemic. In February 2007, she led a drill to test the country’s readiness in the event of a human outbreak of avian flu.

Gerberding allowed the media to monitor the trial run and report on how the CDC and other agencies involved would handle such a crisis. Some were surprised at the move, but Gerberding told the International Herald Tribune that, since a human pandemic could lead to millions of deaths worldwide, it was necessary to demonstrate to state and local governments the importance of focusing on bird flu preparedness.