r/GreatestWomen

Qiu Jin was born in Fuzhou, China in 1875 but she grew up in the place of her ancestors Shaoxing, Zhejiang. This was a province that allowed girls to be educated and was quite famous for it. Her father, a government official, supported her interests. Western influence began to creep into Japan. Which meant a change in scientific, technological, philosophical, political and aesthetic ideas. It was a new era and Chinese people began sending elites to Japan to study. Qiu Jin was one of those elites and she used her influence to make progressive changes towards Republicanism and feminism.

Qiu Jin wanted to overthrow the current Qing government and allow girls to become independent and educated. The only reason she could do that was because of her father's position. She wanted it for everyone. And changing the government was a big step towards that goal. The freer the people the more female rights.

And this is how dedicated she was to her revolution. During a meeting where her fellow students were debating whether to continue fighting she declared after thrusting a dagger into the podium, “If I return to the motherland, surrender to the Manchu barbarians, and deceive the Han people, stab me with this dagger!"

Qiu Jin wanted an end to sexism. Foot binding, arranged marriage and a change to journalism and media to reflect it. She left her own arranged marriage that her father set up and joined a revolutionary organization and learned military combat skills.

In 1907, a fellow revolutionary called Xu Xilin attempted an uprising in Anqing. She failed. Qing troops surrounded the Datong School in Shaoxing, where Qiu was working as a principal. She helped her comrades hide the school's weapons and escape but she stayed behind. And the troops captured her. Several hundred soldiers were involved in the operation. They did not want her to succeed. She was interrogated and tortured. She refused to confess to the revolutionary conspiracy or provide the authorities with the confession they wanted. The authorities used writings and other evidence found at the school to establish her involvement.

Two days after they took her, she was publicly beheaded at Xuantingkou in Shaoxing. She was about 31 years old. Her final written words were beautiful. “Autumn wind, autumn rain - they make one die of sorrow.”

Conner was the first woman in the United States ever appointed to the Supreme Court. She was nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1981 and she served until her retirement in 2006. She was often a swing vote in the court where her decision would be the deciding factor. She was born in 1930 in El Paso, Texas.

Julia Carolyn Child brought French cuisine to American TV in the 60s. She was a famous TV personality and chef. She got many books published teaching people how to cook French food.

During the second world war Child joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the American intelligence organisation that became one of the foundations of the CIA. She tried to become a female soldier but she was 6’2” and they told her she was too tall. At first she worked in Washington, D.C., in the OSS's Secret Intelligence division. One of her jobs was keeping a list of files full of names and information for intelligence officers.

At one point the OSS was trying to prevent sharks from attacking downed airmen and sailors, as well as stop them from accidentally triggering explosives that were being used against German U-boats. Julia became an executive assistant to the scientists involved and helped with the development and testing of rescue equipment. They created shark repellent that was eventually used by the military.

After the war Child became friends with this lady called Avis DeVoto. She was also a chef and she would review books and edit culinary videos. The two of them exchanged many letters that you can find in a book titled ‘As Always, Julia’.

She married a man called Paul Child. Before he met her he had been a teacher, artist, photographer, poet and a serious student of languages and food. He had a fourth-degree black belt in judo. He met Child during WW2 when he joined the OSS in 1944. They got married 2 years later. Paul supported her culinary career. He was the reason she got so far.

Merian studied insects closely when most people wouldn't have bothered. People in England and many Europeans used to believe that insects could just spring out from the mud randomly or from dead animals. They had no idea how caterpillars became butterflies. Merian raised caterpillars in her rooms or in her garden and watched them transform. Then she wrote about what she saw to teach people and she illustrated the entire process. She recorded the exact dates when a caterpillar changed into a pupa and then emerged as a moth or butterfly. This began around 1660 when she was 13 years old.

When she was young she learned how to paint and she spent a lot of time painting insects and wondering about metamorphosis and how it worked. She became a scientist like all scientists do, by asking a question.

Sabiha Gökçen, born Ćorović (1913 - 2001) was a Turkish aviator. During her career, she flew around 8,000 hours and participated in 32 different military operations. She became the world's first female fighter pilot at age 23. Sabiha was an orphan and one of the nine children adopted by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Her surname was given to her by Atatürk and it means "belonging to the sky". In fact, it's no exaggeration to say that Atatürk single handedly made her the first female aviator in an era when there were barely any female pilots, let alone fighter pilots. Amelia Earhart was much older when she disappeared around the same time that Sabiha became a combat pilot

Atatürk thought aviation was extremely important and oversaw the founding of the Turkish Aeronautical Association in 1925. He took Sabiha along with him to the opening ceremony of Türkkuşu Flight School. She was very excited during the airshow and when Atatürk asked her whether she wanted to become a skydiver, she said that she was ready right away.

Atatürk then asked the head of the school to enroll her as the first female trainee. She was intended to become a skydiver, but was much more interested in flying so she went on to earn her pilot's licence.

Together with seven male students, Sabiha was sent to Crimea for an advanced course in glider and powered aircraft piloting. While in Moscow, she learned that her sister Zehra had died, so she returned to Turkey and detached from social activities for a while.

Later at Atatürk's insistence, she got back to her training. She received special flight training and began flying motorized aircraft in 1936 at Eskişehir Aviation School. Atatürk was very happy and said he hoped she would be the first woman military pilot in the world from modern Turkey.

After receiving her flight diploma in 1937, she trained to become a war pilot at the 1st Airplane Regiment in Eskişehir for six months. She carried out several military sorties and air raids until 1938 and then went on to serve as a flight instructor until 1954 and trained four more Turkish female aviators, and continued flying around the world until 1964.

She died in the military academy hospital exactly on her 88th birthday. The Sabiha Gökçen International Airport in Istanbul is named after her and it opened two months before she died. The Guinness Book of World Records lists her as the first ever female combat pilot.

Albina Mali-Hočevar was born in Slovenia in 1925, and is a great example of resilience, strength and sheer courage at a very young age. At age 9 she started working to support her family. She then joined the resistance movement when she was just 16 years old.

The resistance group was led by Josip Broz Tito and fought against the Axis forces occupying Yugoslavia. Initially she was put on a nursing job but this was too boring for her, so she got into frontline action. She was brave from the start - by age 17, she had already been wounded twice in battle.

Right after turning 18, she sustained major injury that took out an eye and left her face permanently scarred when a mine exploded very close to her. Yet despite her injuries, she just kept on fighting. The given photo is a colourised version of her original black and white photo soon after the mine injury.

Later she became a nurse again, helping wounded soldiers while the war went on. Her case is representative of sacrifices that many made for freedom. Albina survived the war and lived to be 75, dying in 2001. Her legacy lives on as a symbol of bravery and resilience.

Lady Montagu was the wife of the Turkish ambassador. She traveled to the Ottoman empire from 1716 to 1718 and wrote extensively about what life was like there. She was particularly interested in the lives of the women and wrote about their customs, clothing, social lives and medical knowledge. She was the first white woman to write an eyewitness account of the everyday lives of Ottoman women.

When Lady Montagu was young, she taught herself how to read Latin. A skill that they reserved for men and she used to write poetry. By the time she was 15 she had written two albums full of poems. Her father Evelyn Pierrepont, 5th Earl of Kingston-upon-Hul was very pleased. (Yes, Evelyn was a masculine name. I was confused when I couldn't find her fathers name on the but then realized that I did.) And Lady Montagu loved to read.

Her father pressured her to marry a man called Clotworthy Skeffington, the heir to the Irish Viscount Massereene. He offered £500 a year as 'pin-money’ and £1,200 a year and that was a lot of money at the time. Of course Lady Montagu rejected him and found a man called Edward Wortley Montagu. They spend the first years of their married life eloped in England. They had two children.

Her name is Georgia Totto O’Keefe and she was a modernist painter. The Mother of American Modernism. She did painting, sculpting and photography. She worked with charcoal for a period and also watercolour. She used to do oil paintings of flowers that took up the whole page. People wondered if there was a sexual motivation behind the flowers. Keefe rejected the idea that the flowers were meant to be vaginas. One of her most celebrated paintings is called Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 (1932). Keefe used to design and make her own clothing and she had a lovely garden. Her parents Francis and Ida were dairy farmers in Wisconsin.

Keefe worked as a commercial artist for a time and a teacher. She learned about the innovative ideas of Arthur Wesley Dow and began experimenting with abstract ideas.

Sewell was a Quaker and she was born in Norfolk, England but grew up in London. Her father had been a farmer for years until he gave up when Sewell was 12 and moved to Great Yarmouth where he worked for a shipping business partner. Her father was a good man. One time a group of people were traveling on a steam boat he owned and the boat caught fire. He paid them compensation even though it really made him sink financially and he didn't have to. Her mother was also lovely. She and her daughter were involved in a lot of charitable work. Mostly helping people who were poor or sick in the community.

The family needed money so Sewell began writing to help out. She wrote Walks with Mamma (or Stories in Words One Syllable.) This was a picture book that taught kids about nature and a message against cruelty to animals. Something Sewell cared strongly about for the rest of her life.

In her last years Sewell spent time working on a novel called Black Beauty. A novel written from the perspective of a horse that focused on animal cruelty. Sewell loved horses. She had observed a lot of cruelty towards working horses and that made her desperate to write the book. It was the last book she was able to write before she died of hepatitis (which is an inflammation of the liver.)

Menchik was born in Moscow in 1906 but she spent most of her life in England. She was the first and longest reigning Women's World Chess Champion from 1927 to 1944. Her parents worked for estate owners who were Russian nobility. Her mother Olga, was a governess who acted as a tutor and her father Frantisek, was the manager of the estates. Her father was Czech and her mother was English. Her father taught her to play chess when she was nine and when she was 14 years old she got second place in her first chess tournament.

I'm going to split this into two sections.

Her life

She was named Lorretta Pleasant and she was born in 1920 in Roanoke, Virginia. She and her whole family were Christian. Her family says they're unsure how her name changed but she was nicknamed Hennie at some point. Her mother died when she was only 4 and her father struggled to raise her so he moved the family to a place called Clover where the children could be seen by many different relatives. They lived in a poor black neighborhood and could barely afford healthcare. Like many members of her family Henrietta worked as a tobacco farmer from an early age. She fed animals, tended the garden and had to go to a black school two miles from the farm until she had to drop out of school to support her family more.

She married a man called David Day Lacks in 1935 and a cousin of hers convinced the two to move to a new place where her husband could work at a Bethlehem Steel in Maryland. They had five children together.

Henrietta was a lively, social person who loved spending time with family. She enjoyed dancing, dressing up and going out to the town. Her daughter Deborah and other family members remembered her as someone who liked looking good and had good fashion sense. She grew up surrounded by a lovely African American community in Virginia.

Four months after Henrietta gave birth to her last child at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1950 she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. This last son of hers was called Joseph but later became known as Zakariyya Bari Abdul Rahman after converting to Islam. He said that his birth was a miracle because he had to fight off the cancer cells growing around him.

Doctors said that Henrietta had a malignant epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix. They later corrected themselves in 1970, she actually had an adenocarcinoma but the treatment was the same. During her cancer treatment two samples were taken from her cervix without her knowledge. One sample of healthy tissue and another cancerous one. The cells from the cancerous sample became known as the HeLa immortal cell line. And these cells are extraordinary.

In 1951 Henrietta went to the hospital for a routine treatment session because of severe abdominal pain. They tried to help. Henrietta received blood transfusions but sadly died in the hospital two months later. The cancer had spread to her entire body. They had failed to stop it. She was put in an unmarked grave. Her family raised money for a headstone and this is her epitaph:

Henrietta Lacks, August 1, 1920 – October 4, 1951

“In loving memory of a phenomenal woman, wife and mother who touched the lives of many. Here lies Henrietta Lacks (HeLa). Her immortal cells will continue to help mankind forever. Eternal Love and Admiration, From Your Family”

The immortal HeLa cells

So let's talk about those extraordinary cells. It's important for me to mention that these cancerous cells that were taken out of her cervix were not taken with permission and neither her or her family were ever compensated for what happened next.

Henrietta’s cells were the first cells to be grown continuously and reproduced indefinitely under laboratory conditions. Researchers suddenly had enormous numbers of genetically identical human cells on which they could repeat experiments. It was a miracle.

During the ‘50s, scientists needed huge quantities of human cells to test Jonas Salk's polio vaccine. HeLa cells could be infected with poliovirus and grown in enormous quantities so that there could be large-scale vaccine testing. This helped scientists evaluate the vaccine which helps end it forever.

They were then used extensively in cancer research. Scientists used them to investigate how cancer cells divide, how viruses can contribute to cancer, how chromosomes behave and how different drugs affect tumour cells. Scientists used Henrietta’s cells to test and develop treatments for diseases like leukemia, herpes, influenza, HIV/AIDS and Parkinson's disease.

They took Henrietta's cells and put them on a spacecraft to study how human cells would respond to zero gravity. They were also used in radiation exposure research.

Rebecca Skloot, an scientific journalist, has written a book called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks where she explores what has been done with Henrietta’s cells and the ethics of taking a part of a human’s body without permission. She also discusses the racism and class involved and includes discussions with Lack’s daughter.

She was often unable to use the training facilities due to segregation and also trained barefoot and used old equipment.

Alice Coachman became the first black woman from any country to win an Olympic Gold Medal when she competed at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London, UK. Born November 9, 1923, in Albany, Georgia, to Evelyn and Fred Coachman, Alice was the fifth of ten children. As an athletic child of the Jim Crow South, who was denied access to regular training facilities, Coachman trained by running on dirt roads and creating her own hurdles to practice jumping.

Even though Alice Coachman parents did not support her interest in athletics, she was encouraged by Cora Bailey, her fifth grade teacher at Monroe Street Elementary School, and her aunt, Carrie Spry, to develop her talents. After demonstrating her skills on the track at Madison High School, Tuskegee Institute offered sixteen-year-old Coachman a scholarship to attend its high school program. She competed on and against all-black teams throughout the segregated South.

In 1943, Coachman entered the Tuskegee Institute college division to study dressmaking. She played on the basketball team and ran track-and-field, where she won four national championships for events in sprinting and high jumping. Coachman completed a degree in dressmaking in 1946. In 1947, Coachman enrolled in Albany State College (now University) to continue her education. Coachman completed a B.S. degree in Home Economics with a minor in science at Albany State College in 1949 and became teacher and track-and-field instructor.

During World War II, the Olympic committee cancelled the 1940 and 1944 games. Alice Coachman’s first Olympic opportunity came in 1948 in London, when she was twenty-four. On August 8, 1948, Alice Coachman leapt 5 feet 6 1/8 inches to set a new Olympic record and win a gold medal for the high jump

Source: here

Strozzi was born in Venice in 1619, after her family survived a plague she grew up to become one of the most prolific singer and song writers in Venice. She created secular pieces that were not funded by the church. Her father is said to be Giulio Strozzi, a poet and librettist. He wrote poetry and operas and plays.

Between 1644 and all the way to 1664, Strozzi published eight collections of music, containing mostly vocal works. Which is amazing for a woman in 17th-century Italy. Her collections include madrigals, arias, cantatas and she published under her own female name rather than hiding behind a male relative or male alias.

We don't know much about her life but apparently she was the concubine of a nobleman called Giovanni Paolo Vidman and they had about 3 children together.

Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel The Age of Innocence, published in 1920. That same year, her travelogue In Morocco also premiered.

On her journey from Tangier to Rabat, she wrote: “…until one has known the wilderness one cannot begin to understand the cities.”

Read more of her thoughtful, romantic prose and travel adventure at Destinationality