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Jane Austen
Jane Austen defined an entire literary genre with her social observations and wit.Her novels are funny, endearing, and questioned women’s roles within society. Austen had to hide her identity as the author of some of the most popular novels of her day and it wasn’t until her death that her brother, Henry, revealed to the public that she was the real author. Her literary influence remains and the themes and lessons from her novels still hold up today. -
Susan B. Anthony
was a pioneer in the women’s suffrage movement in the United States and president of the National Woman Suffrage Association, which she founded with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Anthony’s work helped pave the way for the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the right to vote.The amendment was known as the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment” to honor her work on behalf of women’s rights, and on July 2, 1979, she became the first woman to be featured on a circulating coin from the U.S. mint. -
Marie Curie
Marie Curie was a Polish and French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She is remembered for the discovery of radium and polonium and also for her contributions to finding treatment for cancer. She was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize award and in total won two Nobel Prize awards in her lifetime. Her efforts put into the Physics, Chemistry and even Medicinal field were not left unnoticed and today, she is seen as the woman who changed Science. -
Grazia Deledda
First Italian woman to be awarded with the Noble prize for literature, she was also the second woman to win it. Her formal education ended after the fourth grade and she was mainly a self-taught kind of intellectual. In Rome she found success as a writer; her books translated into many languages and adapted for the screen. Regarded as a representative of the verismo;her writing was deeply autobiographical and focused on important concepts like love, sin, death and pain. -
Helen Adams Keller
Was an American disability rights advocate,political activist. At 19 months old, she lost her ability to see and hear after getting a high fever. Despite those challenges, she never gave up and proceeded to learn how to sign and talk. Her perseverance have inspired many people. She played a huge role in advocating for equal rights for people with disabilities, giving speeches around the world. In 1915, She founded an organization dedicated to preventing blindness and helping those who are blind. -
Rita levi Montalcini
Rita Levi-Montalcini began her scientific career in danger, as a Jew in Fascist Italy. She ended it in triumph, as the neuroembryologist who co-discovered nerve growth factor, a prominent figure in Italian politics, and an active researcher and mentor until her death at the age of 103. In 1954 she discovered the Nerve Growth Factor (NGF), a protein involved in the development of the nervous system. For this discovery in 1986 Montalcini will receive the Nobel Prize. -
Rosa Parks
In 1955, Alabama was still governed by segregation laws and had a policy for municipal buses where white citizens only were allowed to sit in the front, and black men and women had to sit in the back. On December 1st, there were no more seats left in the white section, so the bus conductor told the four black riders to stand and give the white man a seat . Three obeyed, Parks did not. Parks, a black seamstress, refused and in doing so sparked an entire civil rights movement in America. -
Katharine Graham
Katherine Graham was the chairman of the board of The Washington Post Co. for 20 years, which she led to be one of the top newspapers in the United States, most notably when it published The Pentagon Papers and reported on the Watergate scandal. She was the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 Company and was also one of the first female publishers of U.S. newspapers. In 1998, She won a Pulitzer Prize for her autobiography, Personal History. -
Margherita Hack
Known as the “Lady of the Stars”, Margherita Hack, the most famous Italian astrophysicist, was the first woman to lead an astronomical observatory in Italy. Committed atheist, feminist, and vegetarian, Margherita publicly advocated for laws in favour of abortion, euthanasia and homosexual couples' civil rights. Her researches provided remarkable contributions in the field of stellar variability and stellar atmospheres. -
Anne Frank
The Diary of Anne Frank is one of the most honest, powerful and poignant accounts of World War II and was written by a German teenage girl. The Diary of Anne Frank has been translated into almost 70 languages and is an intimate portrayal of one of the most inhumane moments in history and is able to educate us on the universal human qualities of emotion, passion, love, hope, desire, fear and strength.