Women I admire from recent history

Germaine Greer

Irena Sendler

oodles

Eleanor Rathbone, suffragist, first woman councillor in Liverpool, MP who campaigned for refugees and was behind the introduction of Family allowance, and insisted it had to be paid to the mother to ensure that it was spent on the children

Thank you for this oodles. Her name has been familiar to me in my home city all my life but today I looked her up and wow, what a woman!

Princess Diana

Kitty Wilkinson, an Irish immigrant who lived in the Liverpool slums. She had the only boiler in the neighbourhood and encouraged others to use it.

Her public hygiene efforts helped curb the cholera outbreak of 1832 and eventually led to the opening of the first combined washhouse and public baths in the United Kingdom.

My oldest brother bought me a book about her life.

Another one that many women admire.

(I copied this from The Attagirls on Twitter)

^Woman of the Day Vera Atkins (1908-2000), Head of Special Operations Executive’s French Section during WW2. She recruited, trained and briefed 400 agents in minute detail, providing them with French clothing and mementos, ticket stubs & letters for their pockets. Vera stood on the runway to watch each and every one take off for France and wished them luck by briskly shouting a French expletive.

Survival rate was poor; one in four perished. After the war, Vera pushed to be assigned to investigate the 118 missing. “I could not just abandon their memory.” She spent almost a year combing records and questioning concentration camp officers. “I was probably the only person who could do this. You had to know every detail of the agents, names, code names, every hair on their heads, to spot their tracks.”

Vera traced 117, all dead, and brought their surviving killers to trial for war crimes. She was said to be the inspiration for Miss Moneypenny.^

My all time hero from history will always be Elizabeth I. A female ruler in a male dominated world. She lived much of her reign under threat from the pope stating that any Catholic who killed her would be forgiven, plus the other omnipresent threats from the super powers of the day.

She was highly intelligent, well educated and a consumate actress. How she managed to remain unmarried and child free in her position I dont know. She has my admiration and my reverence for that alone.

I also greatly admired Maggie Thatcher as a personality although not her politics.

Rosalind Franklin, who should have received a Nobel prize for her work on the discovery of DNA.
Diana Barnato Walker, representing the women of the ATA who delivered planes from factories to airfields during WWII.

My Mum,in the ATS during WW2, in the early 60’s volunteered to help at first family planning clinic in our town.

I copied this from The Attagirls.

Woman of the Day Mary Lily Walker (1863-1913) of Dundee. One of the first women to be educated with men at university, her focus was on the poor. Dundee then had the highest infant mortality rate in the UK; one in five babies died before their first birthday.

Mary used her own money to set up the first-ever Restaurant for Nursing Mothers. Mothers were supplied with nourishing meals and could feed their babies. Infant mortality plummeted by 300% and the initiative was adopted by the city’s Medical Officer.

She was the first to gather evidence on housing and the health of women working in Dundee's jute factories, laid the foundations for a health visiting service, created after-school clubs, and helped establish a women’s hospital. Her influential statement on housing in Dundee for the Royal Commission on Housing in Scotland led to a scheme providing cheap rents for the poor.

Mary died four days before her 50th birthday. Her funeral was “one of the largest seen in Dundee for a considerable time.”

All brave women of WW1 and 11. All the women of the Suffragette's too many to name. I have all ways voted because of what they did for us women, but I really dont know who I would vote for now if there was a General Election.

Eleanor Rathbone, Queen Elizabeth II and Esther Rantzen for reasons already mentioned. As I was writing this, it seemed strange that their initials are the same.
Barbara Castle, Margaret Thatcher and Bessie Braddock.
My top one, though not exactly recent is
Elizabeth Fry. She was a major driving force behind new legislation to improve the treatment of prisoners, especially female inmates,
She was instrumental in the 1823 Gaols Act which mandated sex-segregation of prisons and female warders for female inmates to protect them from sexual exploitation. Fry kept extensive diaries, in which the need to protect female prisoners from rape and sexual exploitation is explicit.

Sarina Wiegman. At this moment we don't know the outcome of the match, but, win or lose, she is a most inspiring woman and a great leader.

Baroness Mone? Just laughing.