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SockPuppet

SockPuppet

I'm lost
July 2006

MAY 05, 2008 04:47 PM

Phantasy said:
I'd also like to mention:

the kick ass women who home school girls under Taliban rule, fully knowing the repercussions of being caught.



And especially because they were doing it in 2001. Before 9/11. When nobody with any influence gave a shit.

Bill_the_Cat

Bill_the_Cat

Vanier, ON
May 2005

MAY 05, 2008 05:15 PM

Harriet Tubman
Escaped slave, emancipator, Union spy, suffragette and a lifelong sufferer of disabling seizures, headaches, and powerful visionary and dream activity, and spells of hypersomnia as a result of a traumatic head injury early in life.

vambot5

vambot5

Norman, OK
June 2003

MAY 05, 2008 05:37 PM

Emmy Noether. Yeah, I know, I would. But seriously.

SockPuppet

SockPuppet

I'm lost
July 2006

MAY 05, 2008 05:43 PM

SockPuppet

SockPuppet

I'm lost
July 2006

MAY 05, 2008 05:44 PM

same as it ever was

Madeleine

Madeleine

SUICIDEGIRL

Canada
Phantasy

Phantasy

Australia
October 2005

MAY 12, 2008 05:25 PM

Bill_the_Cat said:
Harriet Tubman
Escaped slave, emancipator, Union spy, suffragette and a lifelong sufferer of disabling seizures, headaches, and powerful visionary and dream activity, and spells of hypersomnia as a result of a traumatic head injury early in life.



Her story is just amazing!!

SaraJ

SaraJ

I'm lost
April 2008

MAY 12, 2008 05:29 PM

Cleopatra...she was amazing.

joker_

joker_

Minneapolis, MN
October 2005

MAY 12, 2008 06:07 PM

Stiles

Stiles

Oakland, CA
November 2002

MAY 12, 2008 06:47 PM

Jackie Cochran, pioneering pilot and multiple world record holder






She was the first woman to break the sound barrier (with Chuck Yeager right on her wing), the first woman to fly a jet across the ocean, and the first woman to fly a bomber across the Atlantic. She won five Harmon Trophies as the outstanding woman pilot in the world. Sometimes called the "Speed Queen," at the time of her death, no pilot, man or woman, held more speed, distance or altitude records in aviation history, than Jackie Cochran.[6]




Following America's entry into the War, in 1942 she was made director of women's flight training for the United States.[8] As head of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) she supervised the training of more than one thousand women pilots at the former Avenger Field in Sweetwater, Texas. For her war efforts, she received the Distinguished Service Medal[9][10] and the Distinguished Flying Cross.

At war's end, she was hired by a magazine to report on global postwar events. In this role, she witnessed Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita's surrender in the Philippines, then was the first (non-Japanese) woman to enter Japan after the War and attended the Nuremberg Trials in Germany.

Postwar, she began flying the new jet engine aircraft, going on to set numerous records, most conspiciously, she became the first woman pilot to "go supersonic."

Encouraged by then-Major Chuck Yeager, with whom she shared a lifelong friendship, on May 18, 1953, at Rogers Dry Lake, California, Cochran flew a Canadair F-86 Sabre jet borrowed from the Royal Canadian Air Force at an average speed of 652.337 mph, becoming the first woman to break the sound barrier.[11]

She was also the first woman to land and take off from an aircraft carrier, the first woman to reach Mach 2, the first woman to pilot a bomber across the North Atlantic (in 1941), the first woman enshrined in the Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio, the first pilot to make blind (instrument) landing, the ONLY woman to ever be President of the Federation Aeronautique lnt'l (1958-1961), the first woman to fly a fixed-wing, jet aircraft across the Atlantic, the first pilot to fly above 20,000 feet with an oxygen mask and the first woman to enter the Bendix Trans-continental Race. She still holds more distance and speed records than any pilot living or dead, male or female.



That's a helluva woman.

Subrosa

Subrosa

San Francisco, CA
July 2004

MAY 12, 2008 06:59 PM

Shirley Chisholm, First African American woman elected to the House of Representatives, run for president. All-around legislative badass.
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Subrosa

Subrosa

San Francisco, CA
July 2004

MAY 12, 2008 07:12 PM

Clara S. Foltz, Esq. I ♥ her like woah. First female lawyer on the West Coast.

After her husband deserted her, she began studying law in the office of a local judge, and after being denied admission to Hastings College of the Law because of her gender, she sued, argued her own case, and won admission. She passed the bar exam in 1878, but California law at the time allowed only white males to become members of the bar. Foltz authored a state bill which replaced "white male" with "person," and in September 1878, she was the first woman admitted to the California bar. She later also became licensed to practice law in New York.

Not satisfied with becoming a hometown attorney, Foltz became a leader in the woman's voting rights movement. During a career that spanned 56 years, Clara almost single-handedly pushed a great deal of progressive legislation for women's rights in the voting and legal fields.

At the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, during a "congress" of the Board of Lady Managers, Foltz introduced her idea of the public defender, with a speech entitled "Rights of Persons Accused of Crime--Abuses Now Existing." Foltz's then-radical concept of providing assistance to indigent criminal defendants is used today throughout the United States. She also created a similar model for the California Parole System.

Her many other trail-blazing accomplishments included becoming the first female clerk for the State Judiciary Committee; the first woman appointed to the State Board of Corrections; the first female licensed Notary Public; the first woman named director of a major bank; and, in 1930, the first woman to run for Governor of California, at the age of eighty-one.


zoom image

Necia

Necia

San Francisco, CA
August 2005

MAY 12, 2008 08:58 PM

^^^ And checkout dem sleeves!

That's some sleeve badassery if'n I ever saw it.

gdarklighter

gdarklighter

San Diego, CA
August 2005

MAY 12, 2008 09:49 PM

How about a little love for Rachel Carson? Woman took on the chemical industry while she was dying from cancer. That's hardcore.

Ferretbite

Ferretbite

Mexico
September 2006

MAY 13, 2008 02:45 AM

Irena Sendler

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"I was taught that if you see a person drowning," she said, "you must jump into the water to save them, whether you can swim or not."

SPOILERS! (Click to view)


She and her friends smuggled the children out in boxes, suitcases, sacks and coffins, sedating babies to quiet their cries. Some were spirited away through a network of basements and secret passages. Operations were timed to the second. One of Sendler's children told of waiting by a gate in darkness as a German soldier patrolled nearby. When the soldier passed, the boy counted to 30, then made a mad dash to the middle of the street, where a manhole cover opened and he was taken down into the sewers and eventually to safety.

Most of the children who left with Sendler's group were taken into Roman Catholic convents, orphanages and homes and given non-Jewish aliases. Sendler recorded their true names on thin rolls of paper in the hope that she could reunite them with their families later. She preserved the precious scraps in jars and buried them in a friend's garden.

In 1943, she was captured by the Nazis and tortured but refused to tell her captors who her co-conspirators were or where the bottles were buried. She also resisted in other ways. According to Felt, when Sendler worked in the prison laundry, she and her co-workers made holes in the German soldiers' underwear. When the officers discovered what they had done, they lined up all the women and shot every other one. It was just one of many close calls for Sendler.

During one particularly brutal torture session, her captors broke her feet and legs, and she passed out. When she awoke, a Gestapo officer told her he had accepted a bribe from her comrades in the resistance to help her escape. The officer added her name to a list of executed prisoners. Sendler went into hiding but continued her rescue efforts.

Felt said that Sendler had begun her rescue operation before she joined the organized resistance and helped a number of adults escape, including the man she later married. "We think she saved about 500 people before she joined Zegota," Felt said, which would mean that Sendler ultimately helped rescue about 3,000 Polish Jews.

When the war ended, Sendler unearthed the jars and began trying to return the children to their families. For the vast majority, there was no family left. Many of the children were adopted by Polish families; others were sent to Israel.

In 1965, she was recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust authority, as a Righteous Gentile, an honor given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Nazi reign. In her own country, however, she was unsung, in part because Polish anti-Semitism remained strong after the war and many rescuers were persecuted.



Born in 1910, she died yesterday.

wheezy_e

wheezy_e

Boulder City, NV
April 2004

MAY 13, 2008 07:30 PM

^ wow ^

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