Tuesday, 9 January 2007

Women from the TIME's 100

I just thought I'd revist the issue of women in history, unlike some people would think , women are not cowards or helpless. BUT I am also not blind enough to say that they didn't need a hand from time to time. If you want to scroll down, I have listed a bunch of women who manage to get their name down in history. READ slowy HIS_STORY. not HER-Story. So these women have managed to do something to be noticed by the more dominant powerful men to be included in their story. Don't worry I am not some bra burning lunatic. I am just a simple lunatic.

My immediate concern is for the Maldivian women. Coz that is what I am, atleast for now. We might like to think that, women and men are equal in the maldives, that they are given equal status. What a load of crap! In the political arena they are either used as eye candy or used for attention grabbing statement. and yeah don't forget, as nice coloured, and scented "bubbles" that can be popped anytime and anyway desired. You think I am deluded? Ask any women that have joined the work force. Ask them about the sexual innuedos, the dirty jokes, the not so subtle comments targeted at the pretty secretaries and assistants. Oooh yeah now you gonna say that they deserved it. Yeah right! Don't get me started here. Just how many offices / departments/organisations and ministries have a policy on sexual harrasment? or even a policy on employee rights? call me crazeeeeeeeeeeee and name a few, just to show me up.

anyway gotta go to work, perhaps I should limit my ramblings. Here is the list that was promised earlier on. They are all linked to their original articles.

Eleanor Roosevelt (First lady)

Eleanor shattered the ceremonial mold in which the role of the First Lady had traditionally been fashioned, and reshaped it around her own skills and her deep commitment to social reform. She gave a voice to people who did not have access to power. She was the first woman to speak in front of a national convention, to write a syndicated column, to earn money as a lecturer, to be a radio commentator and to hold regular press conferences...

Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister)

She was the catalyst who set in motion a series of interconnected events that gave a revolutionary twist to the century's last two decades and helped mankind end the millennium on a note of hope and confidence. The triumph of capitalism, the almost universal acceptance of the market as indispensable to prosperity, the collapse of Soviet imperialism, the downsizing of the state on nearly every continent and in almost every country in the world — Margaret Thatcher played a part in all those transformations, and it is not easy to see how any would have occurred without her.

Margaret Sanger

Her crusade to legalize birth control spurred the movement for women's liberation.She taught us, first, to look at the world as if women mattered. Born into an Irish working-class family, Margaret witnessed her mother's slow death, worn out after 18 pregnancies and 11 live births. While working as a practical nurse and midwife in the poorest neighborhoods of New York City in the years before World War I, she saw women deprived of their health, sexuality and ability to care for children already born. Contraceptive information was so suppressed by clergy-influenced, physician-accepted laws that it was a criminal offense to send it through the mail. Yet the educated had access to such information and could use subterfuge to buy "French" products, which were really condoms and other barrier methods, and "feminine hygiene" products, which were really spermicides.

Aretha Franklin (The Queen of Soul)

Her reign has been long. Born in 1942 in Memphis, Tenn., she started recording when she was just 14. Since then, she has had 20 No. 1 R. and B. hits and won 17 Grammys. Her breakthrough album, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967), was a Top 40 smash. Three decades later, after Motown, after disco, after the Macarena, after innumerable musical trendlets and one-hit wonders, Franklin's newest album, her critically acclaimed A Rose Is Still a Rose (1998), is another Top 40 smash. Although her output has sometimes been tagged (unfairly, for the most part) as erratic, she has had a major album in every decade of her career, including Amazing Grace (1972) and Who's Zoomin' Who? (1985).
Her reign has been storied. She sang at Martin Luther King's funeral and at William Jefferson Clinton's Inaugural gala. She has worked with Carole King and Puff Daddy. The Michigan legislature once declared her voice to be one of the state's natural resources.

Martha Graham (Dancer)

Graham was far from the first dancer to rip off her toe shoes and break with the rigid conventions of 19th century ballet. America in the 1910s and '20s was full of young women (modern dance in the beginning was very much a women's movement) with similar notions. But it was her homegrown technique — the fierce pelvic contractions, the rugged "floor work" that startled those who took for granted that real dancers soared through the air — that caught on, becoming the cornerstone of postwar modern dance. Merce Cunningham, Paul Taylor, Twyla Tharp, Mark Morris — all are Graham's children and grandchildren. (Taylor and Cunningham even danced in her company, though they later repudiated her high-strung style.) Her methods are routinely taught today in studios the world over, but you need not have studied them or even have seen any of her dances to be influenced by them. They are part of the air every contemporary dancer breathes.

Oprah Winfrey (No introduction needed)

Lucille Ball (Coemdian)

Ball's dizzy redhead with the elastic face and saucer eyes was the model for scores of comic TV females to follow. She and her show, moreover, helped define a still nascent medium. Before I Love Lucy, TV was feeling its way, adapting forms from other media. Live TV drama was an outgrowth of Broadway theater; game shows were transplanted from radio; variety shows and early comedy stars like Milton Berle came out of vaudeville. I Love Lucy was unmistakably a television show, and Ball the perfect star for the small screen. "I look like everybody's idea of an actress," she once said, "but I feel like a housewife." Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason were big men with larger-than-life personas; Lucy was one of us.

Estée Lauder (buisness women )

, Josephine Esther Mentzer, daughter of immigrants, lived above her father's hardware store in Corona, a section of Queens in New York City. She started her enterprise by selling skin creams concocted by her uncle, a chemist, in beauty shops, beach clubs and resorts.
No doubt the potions were good — Estée Lauder was a quality fanatic — but the saleslady was better. Much better. And she simply outworked everyone else in the cosmetics industry. She stalked the bosses of New York City department stores until she got some counter space at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1948. And once in that space, she utilized a personal selling approach that proved as potent as the promise of her skin regimens and perfumes. A little business that sells in 118 countries and last year grew to be $3.6 billion big in sales. The Lauder family's shares are worth more than $6 billion

Rachel Carson

She was always a writer, and she always knew that. Like Faulkner, Fitzgerald, e.e. cummings, Millay and E.B. White, 10-year-old Rachel Louise Carson, born in 1907 in the Allegheny Valley town of Springdale, Pa., was first published in the St. Nicholas literary magazine for children. A reader and loner and devotee of birds, and indeed all nature, the slim, shy girl of plain face and dark curly hair continued writing throughout adolescence, chose an English major at Pennsylvania College for Women and continued to submit poetry to periodicals. Not until junior year, when a biology course reawakened the "sense of wonder" with which she had always encountered the natural world, did she switch her major to zoology, not yet aware that her literary and scientific passions might be complementary

Diana, Princess of Wales no intro necessary right?

Anne Frank

Along with everything else she came to represent, Anne Frank symbolized the power of a book. Because of the diary she kept between 1942 and 1944, in the secret upstairs annex of an Amsterdam warehouse where she and her family hid until the Nazis found them, she became the most memorable figure to emerge from World War II — besides Hitler, of course, who also proclaimed his life and his beliefs in a book. In a way, the Holocaust began with one book and ended with another. Yet it was Anne's that finally prevailed — a beneficent and complicated work outlasting a simple and evil one — and that secured to the world's embrace the second most famous child in history.

Helen Keller
She altered our perception of the disabled and remapped the boundaries of sight and sense

Marilyn Monroe
She sauntered through life as the most delectable sex symbol of the century and became its most enduring pop confection

Mother Teresa no Itro needed right?

Emmeline Pankhurst

The Victorian Englishwoman marshaled the suffragist movement, which won women the right to vote

Rosa Parks

We know the story. One December evening, a woman left work and boarded a bus for home. She was tired; her feet ached. But this was Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, and as the bus became crowded, the woman, a black woman, was ordered to give up her seat to a white passenger. When she remained seated, that simple decision eventually led to the disintegration of institutionalized segregation in the South, ushering in a new era of the civil rights movement.