Caster Semenya

Caster Semenya is a South African middle-distance runner and gold medalist (800 metres, 2009 World Championships in Athletics). In the 2009 African Junior Championships Semenya won both the 800 m and 1500 m races with the times of 1:56.72 and 4:08.01 respectively. With that race she improved her 800 m personal best by seven seconds in less than nine months, including four seconds in that race alone.

Semenya attended Nthema Secondary School and now attends Pretoria University as a first-year sports science student.Semenya began running as a way to train for association football. Her dedication to constant self-improvement is what has made her a champion, and she has also shown that she is capable of grace under extreme fire.

_{image: i.telegraph.uk.co, link is to Wikipedia article}

Molly Craig

In 1931, the Australian government instituted a policy of removing Aboriginal children from their parents’ custody in order to train them as domestic servants. A. O. Neville, chief protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, is quoted as saying in 1937: “Are we going to have a population of 1 million blacks in the Commonwealth or are we going to merge them into our white community and eventually forget that there ever were any Aborigines in Australia?”

When Molly was 14, she and her younger sister and cousin were taken from their home in Jigalong, Western Australia, and transplanted to an internment camp on the Moore River, north of Perth. The three girls escaped the next day and began their walk home to Jigalong.

Molly decided that, since Jigalong was on the rabbit-proof fence that ran through Western Australia, if the three girls headed east from Moore River to the fence and then north, they couldn’t miss.

The girls crossed a flooded river, sand dunes, heathlands, wheatbelt, mallee country, gibber plains, red dust and mulga country, spinifex country, claypan and salt lake. They slept in dug-out rabbit burrows, caught and cooked rabbits, and ate bibijali, a kind of sweet potato, and karkula, a wild banana.

When their legs were weary, sore and infected by grass cuts, Molly piggy-backed Daisy, about eight, and Gracie, 11, in turn.

The journey of 1600 kilometres took nine weeks and ranks as one of the most remarkable feats of endurance and courage in Australian history, and dramatised a dark side of the Australian story.

_{Molly was taken back to the settlement a second time several years later, along with her two young daughters. She managed to escape a second time with her 18-month-old daughter, and had to leave her 4-year-old behind with other relatives. It was 21 years before she was reunited with her older daughter. Her younger daughter was taken from her two years after their escape, and she never saw her again, though they corresponded in the year before Molly died.}

Molly’s daughter has said: “Mum’s legacy is the calming influence and quiet dignity of the desert women, and the stolen generations story. She looked you straight in the eye.”

The story of Molly’s escape, along with the other two girls, is told in the movie Rabbit Proof Fence.

_{large image:smh.com.au (news story about Molly Craig on the event of her death), small image: library.cornell.edu (image from the movie)link is to article on the event of Molly Craig’s death}

Lisa Lyon

Lisa Lyon is a female bodybuilder from the United States. Her stats as taken on October 1980: She stands at 5’3” and weighs only 105 pounds, but she can dead-lift 225 pounds, bench-press 120 pounds, and squat 265 pounds; two and a half times her own weight.

Lyon entered and won the first IFBB Women’s World Pro Bodybuilding Championship in Los Angeles on June 16, 1979. This was the only bodybuilding competition of her career. Nevertheless, she became a media sensation, appearing in many magazines and on television talk shows. She also wrote a book on weight training for women titled Lisa Lyon’s Body Magic, which was published in 1981.

After winning the IFBB Women’s World Pro Bodybuilding Championships, Lyon immediately became a one-woman media-relations activist on behalf of the sport. She appeared in all the bodybuilding publications of the time and was featured in many magazines outside the world of fitness and muscle.Although Lyon briefly served as unofficial chairperson for women’s bodybuilding in its infancy, her fondest desire was to explore bodybuilding as an artistic medium.

Elevating bodybuilding to the level of fine art, Lyon was photographed by the likes of Helmut Newton and Robert Mapplethorpe, and was the first female bodybuilder to appear in Playboy (October 1980).

I’ve included Lisa Lyon here for showing that female physical strength is beautiful, and she did so at a time when this was a new and at times ridiculed concept.

_{image: ifbb.com}

_{link is to Wikipedia article.}

Malaak Compton-Rock

Malaak Compton-Rock started off in the field of public relations and special events in the entertainment industry. She began working with UNICEF, and began cultivating celebrity support for the organization, many of whom continue to support UNICEF today including Laurence Fishburne, Tea Leoni, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Claudia Schiffer. She herself continues to be an active supporter as well.

Ms. Compton-Rock incorporated styleWORKS, an organization that provided comprehensive grooming services, i.e., hair styling, make-up application, skincare services, clothing, accessories, and image consulting to women moving from welfare to work.

In 2008, as a way to encourage people to live a life of service and as an umbrella organization for the six main causes that she works on full-time, Ms. Compton-Rock founded The Angelrock Project, an online e-village that promotes volunteerism, social responsibility, and sustainable change. Among its many elements, The Angelrock Project includes valuable information on how to volunteer, advice on making monetary or in-kind donations, links to life-changing non-profit organizations, recommends fair trade companies whose products sustain third-world artisans, and includes a discussion forum and blog. The organization can be found at www.angelrockproject.com.

Compton-Rock recently coordinated Journey for Change: Empowering Youth Through Global Service, a program that took 30 at-risk youth from Brooklyn, New York to Johannesburg, South Africa for two weeks of global volunteer service in August, 2008. The participants, who attend The Bushwick Salvation Army Community Center, are now taking part in a one-year advocacy, education, and service program as Journey for Change Global Ambassadors.

Malaak Compton-Rock also created and manages the Champions for Children Committee, a prestigious group of well-known individuals committed to raising awareness about the signs and prevention of child abuse.

Along with her husband (Chris Rock), Compton-Rock partners with the South African NGO The Olive Leaf Foundation to provide assistance to orphaned and vulnerable children, granny-led households and people living with HIV/AIDS in Diepsloot and Soweto, two poverty-stricken shanty towns in Johannesburg, South Africa. The Angelrock Project Foundation offers educational assistance, food and nutritional support, and living allowances to orphans and grannies. Additionally, through a partnership with The Food Garden Foundation, The Angelrock Project is funding sustainable food gardens in Diepsloot for two support groups and at 6 schools in Soweto to feed the orphan population. Moreover, the organization is currently coordinating an income-generating project for granny’s who will sell new donated designer handbags for a 100% profit. The program includes a marketing, banking, and savings component.

The Rocks are also committed to The Bushwick Salvation Army Community Center in Bushwick, Brooklyn and were proud to open a new library and computer lab with the support of several companies. Additionally, Malaak Compton-Rock is a coordinating the development of a comprehensive art program at the Center which will include a teaching partnership with Pratt Institute and The Black Alumni of Pratt Institute that will begin in summer 2009.

_{image: buddytv.com}

_{link is to bio page at AngelRock.com}

Mildred Loving

Mildred Loving, along with her husband, Richard, had the courage to stand up against the State of Virginia, which, along with several other states in the nation, maintained laws on their books that declared that love should not cross color lines.

It seems especially appropriate to celebrate the Lovings when, 42 years later, states are still telling consenting adults who they can or cannot commit to in a loving marital relationship.

The Lovings, Mildred walking with their daughter

_{images:findingdulcinea.com, fredericksburg.com., bulletin.aarp.org}

_{links are to a Wikipedia article on the Lovings and an SF Chronicle article on Proposition 8 – 43Things format would not allow link to the Wiki article on Prop 8 to work.}

reading through several pages of posts here…pretty astounding! You don’t generally hear much about the non-traditional contributions of women (like inventing Kevlar!).

I like this goal.

Sinéad O’Connor

Mainly because I admire her courage in publicly speaking out against the blind eye the Catholic Church turned towards child abuse long before it became commonly accepted. Also because she did not allow the actions (and inactions) of a church to destroy her personal faith.

_{image: 121musicblog.co}

_{link is to Wikipedia bio}

Emma, and para-athletes like her…

Emma is Breyfart2’s daughter. She is an accomplished equestrian who experienced a tragic accident that put her in a wheelchair. In spite of that, she had the strength of character to get back in the saddle, literally and figuratively.

This is a post to honor Emma and ALL para-athletes who overcome incredible odds and obstacles to pursue their passions.

Check out the ParaOlympics website

Kazumi Izaki

44-year-old Japanese professional boxer and mom.

Aw, hell yes!

_{image: uk.eurosport.yahoo.com}

_{click the link for the Yahoo! Sports article.}

Dorothy Day
(November 8, 1897 – November 29, 1980) was an American journalist turned social activist and devout member of the Catholic Church. She became known for her social justice campaigns in defense of the poor, forsaken, hungry and homeless. Day, with Peter Maurin, founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, espousing nonviolence, and hospitality for the impoverished and downtrodden.

The Catholic Worker movement started with the Catholic Worker newspaper, created to stake out a neutral, pacifist, even anarchist position in the increasingly war-torn 1930s. This grew into a “house of hospitality” in the slums of New York City and then a series of farms for the poor to live together communally. The movement quickly spread to other cities in the United States, and to Canada and the United Kingdom; more than 30 independent but affiliated CW communities had been founded by 1941. Well over 100 communities exist today, including several in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, the Republic of Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, and Sweden.

By the 1960s Day was embraced by Catholics. Yet, although Day had written passionately about women’s rights, free love and birth control in the 1910s, she opposed the sexual revolution of the sixties, saying she had seen the ill effects of a similar sexual revolution in the 1920s, when she had her abortion. Day had a progressive attitude toward social and economic rights, alloyed with a very orthodox and traditional sense of Catholic morality and piety. She was also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World.[1]
In 1972 Day was awarded the Pacem in Terris Award. It was named after a 1963 encyclical letter by Pope John XXIII that calls upon all people of good will to secure peace among all nations. Pacem in Terris is Latin for ‘Peace on Earth.’

_{click on the link above to learn more at Wikipedia}

_{second image from medaloffreedom.com – Cesar Chavez, Coretta Scott King, and Dorothy Day attending services at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, 1973}