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RACHEL CARSON LIVED: 27 May 1907 – 14 April 1964

BORN IN: Springdale, Pennsylvania (USA)

WORKED IN: USA

Rachel grew up on a large farm, where she learned about nature and animals. The ocean

was a particular topic of interest for her, and she ended up studying biology, and later specialising in marine biology when she went to university. After graduating she got a job writing environmental literature for the US Bureau of Fisheries. Rachel

wrote several books about the ocean and the environment. Her most famous book, Silent Spring, is about the harmful effects of pesticides on the natural world. She became very involved in nature conservation, and she testified before a government committee about the dangers of pesticides.

DOROTHY HODGKIN LIVED: 12 May 1910 – 29 July 1994

BORN IN: Cairo (Egypt)

WORKED IN: UK

Dorothy’s father was an archaeologist, so she was born in Cairo, in Egypt, and spent much

of her childhood travelling around different places in the Middle East. She did well at school, and then went to university to study chemistry. After graduating, she worked at Cambridge and then at Oxford Universities. Her work was on protein crystallography which is a technique that uses X-rays to look at the atoms of proteins. Dorothy found crystallography absolutely fascinating, and through her dedication to the work she identified the structure of penicillin, insulin and the vitamin B12.

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TIRUNESH DIBABABORN: 1 June 1985

BORN IN: Bekoji (Ethiopia)

SPORT: Long-distance runner

Tirunesh grew up with her family on their farm in Ethiopia. As a girl, she would run with buckets of

water that she fetched from the river for her mum. She thinks this early training helped her be successful. She began running for sport when she moved to the capital city, Addis Ababa, at the age of 14. When she was 18 years old, Tirunesh became the youngest woman to win an individual gold medal in the 5,000 m at the 2003 World Championships. In 2005 she became the first woman to win both the 5,000 m and 10,000 m races in the World Championships. In 2007 she became the only woman to ever win back-to-back 10,000 m titles, when she managed to defend her title despite falling during the race. Because of her young age, she gained the nickname ‘the Baby-Faced Destroyer’. Tirunesh has six Olympic medals, and has also won a total of ten gold medals from the World Championships, World Cross Country Championships and African Championships. Her 5,000 m record still stands as the world’s fastest.

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IBTIHAJ MUHAMMADBORN: 4 December 1985

BORN IN: Maplewood, New Jersey (USA)

SPORT: Fencing

Ibtihaj is the first American woman to ever wear a hijab (a headscarf that usually covers the head and chest) at the Olympics. She began fencing at

the age of 13, choosing the sport partly because she was frustrated by having to alter the uniforms she wore for other sports to cover her arms and legs, in line with her religious beliefs about dressing modestly. The fencing uniform is designed to cover most of the body, to protect it against the jabbing end of the foil (sword). At the 2016 Rio Olympics Ibtihaj won bronze in the team fencing competition, and became one of the first two Muslim-American woman to ever win an Olympic medal. Dalilah Muhammad was the other, winning a gold medal in the 400 m hurdles at the same Olympic Games, but she received far less attention in the press because she didn’t wear a hijab. Ibtihaj runs a clothing line for Muslim women who want to dress modestly but fashionably, and she works to promote sports and education for girls in the USA and other countries.

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QIU JINLIVED: 8 November 1875 – 15 July 1907

BORN IN: Shaoxing (China)

WORKED IN: China

Qiu Jin was born to a reasonably well-off family in China. She had an arranged marriage to a man named Wang

Tingjun, but their relationship was not a happy one, as her husband had no time for Qiu Jin’s feminist ideas. In 1904 she left her husband and two children to study in Japan, where she set up a feminist group calling for women’s rights, particularly freedom to marry who they wish, freedom of education, and an end to the tradtition of foot-binding, which she herself had suffered. Foot-binding was a traditional Chinese custom where the bones in a girl’s feet were deliberately broken, and the toes curled under the feet and tightly bound to make the foot smaller. Small feet were seen to be beautiful. It was very painful and often resulted in infection and disability. Qiu Jin planned with some other revolutionaries to overthrow the Chinese ruling regime. However, her plans were discovered and she was beheaded. She is now a symbol of women’s independence in China.

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AMELIA TELFORDBORN: 1994

BORN IN: Tweed Heads (Australia)

WORKS IN: Australia

Bundjalung country, where Amelia Telford is from, is a part of Australia with a beautiful and

diverse landscape. There are beaches, rainforest and mountains, and it is an area where many indigenous Australian people live. Amelia loved the natural landscape of her home, but gradually realised how climate change was impacting both the environment, and the indigenous people who lived in the area. So she started working with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition to raise money to create the Seed Indigenous Youth Climate Network, an organisation dedicated to helping young indigenous people take action against climate change.

MANAL AL-SHARIF BORN: 25 April 1979

BORN IN: Mecca (Saudi Arabia)

WORKS IN: Saudi Arabia

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In Saudi Arabia the laws governing what women are allowed to do are very

restrictive. Women have not been allowed to drive cars, or travel without a male relative’s permission. After spending some time in the USA where she could drive freely, Manal returned to Saudi Arabia, and she decided enough was enough. She borrowed her brother’s car, and filmed herself driving, and put the video on YouTube. The video was watched 700,000 times in a single day. She started receiving death threats, and was arrested and put in prison for a week, but her act inspired other women to do the same. On 17 June 2011 over a hundred women got into their cars and drove, while police watched. Finally, in 2017 the law was changed so that women are allowed to drive.

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INDIRA NATH BORN: 14 January 1938

BORN IN: Andhra Pradesh (India)

WORKS IN: India

Indira knew when she was ten years old that she would

become a doctor. When she was old enough to go to university, Indira travelled to the UK to study for her medical degree, but she was committed to returning

to India after graduating so she could use her skills and knowledge to the benefit of her home country. India has the highest rates of leprosy in the world, and she was determined to make a breakthrough in the treatment and prevention of the disease. Indira identified a problem with sufferers’ immune systems, which was a big step forward in developing treatments and vaccines. Thanks in large part to her research, the number of people in India suffering from leprosy has dropped from 4.5 million people, to fewer than 1 million today, and better treatments mean that the worst disfigurements from leprosy are now rare.

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HARRIET POWERSLIVED: 29 October 1837 – 1 January 1910

BORN IN: Clarke County, Georgia (USA)

WORKED IN: USA

Talented quilt designer Harriet Powers was born into slavery in Georgia, USA. She learned

to sew, probably taught by her mother. She used traditional appliqué techniques, where shapes are cut out of coloured fabric and stitched onto a background, to create quilts showing scenes from stories. Her quilts told Bible stories, local legends and recorded astronomical events.

During her lifetime a newspaper article described Harriet as illiterate, assuming she learned her Bible stories from other people. However, Harriet could read and write, and may well have used her quilts as a teaching tool herself. Only two of her quilts survive, and they are now on display in museums as beautiful and historically important examples of African-American folk art.

GEORGIA O’KEEFFELIVED: 15 November 1887 – 6 March 1986

BORN IN: Sun Prairie, Wisconsin (USA)

WORKED IN: USA

By the age of ten Georgia had already decided she would be an artist and her family arranged for tuition

from a local watercolour artist for her and her sister. At art college she was top of her class, and she was very skilled at realistic painting. However, the realist style did not excite her, and she began experimenting with abstract styles

Georgia painted simplified images of natural things, such as flowers and rocks, as well as abstract and colourful pieces representing her feelings about music. Wherever she travelled, she created artworks that expressed a strong sense of the place and landscape. She became attached to the desert landscape of New Mexico, and she lived and worked there for many years.

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BARBARA HEPWORTHLIVED: 10 January 1903 – 20 May 1975

BORN IN: Wakefield (UK)

WORKED IN: UK

When Barbara was a girl, she would look at the shapes of the hills and fields as her family drove through the English countryside.

This fascination with the landscape stayed with her throughout her life. She studied art at college, then became a sculptor, creating abstract works of art from wood and stone. She wanted to create art that was calming and beautiful and preferred the method of working directly in the chosen material, rather than the more traditional process of making models from which someone else would produce the work.

Barbara moved from London to the seaside town of St Ives in Cornwall in 1939 and lived there for the rest of her life. Her love of the landscape continued to inspire her, and some of the large sculptures that she created were designed so that they could be used as a ‘frame’ for the landscape around and behind them. Audiences could look through the centre of her pieces to see the world in a different way. She was a very important figure in Modernism, an art movement that used simple, abstract shapes.

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