Category Great Womens

Both the parents of Chandrika Kumaratunga served as prime ministers of Sri Lanka – her father Solomon Bandaranaike and her mother, Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Her husband, Vijaya Kumaratunga, with whom she had co-founded the Sri Lanka Mahajana Party, was assassinated. In August 1994, she became the Prime Minister. She took the presidency as well three months later in a separate election. She stood for the elections again in 1999. A suicide bomber made a bid on her life just days before the polling. Kumaratunga lost sight in one eye but won 51% of the vote to be elected for a second term. 

       Megawati means ‘Goddess of the cloud’. Her father Sukarno led Indonesia to independence, and was its first president. When Megawati was nineteen, Sukarno was overthrown by Suharto.

        Megawati joined the Indonesian Democratic Party at the age of forty. In the first free parliamentary elections held after Suharto’s resignation, her party won the most votes. She served as vice president. Megawati became president of Indonesia in 2001; the first woman to do so. However, Megawati lost power in the 2004 Presidential election.

      Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the first woman Prime Minister in the world, when she was chosen to head the government of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1960, following the assassination of her husband.

      Sirimavo Bandaranaike was born in 1916, to an aristocratic family. Married to Solomon Bandaranaike in 1940 when he was a minister in the government to Ceylon, then a British colony, Solomon Bandaranaike became the Prime Minister of Ceylon in 1956. In 1959, He was assassinated. Then, Sirimavo became the leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. And, in July 1960, she became the first woman Prime Minister in the world. Her party lost the 1965 elections.

      Sirimavo Bandaranaike was back as the Prime Minister in 1970 elections.

      Her second term was difficult, with a rebellion in 1971, as well as the establishment of a new republican constitution in 1972. She was deprived of her civil rights in 1980. In 1994, she was re-elected Prime Minister. Her daughter, Chandrika Kumaratunga, who was also briefly Prime Minister in 1994, later became the President.

Aung San Suu Kyi was the daughter of Aung San, the father of modern day Burma. She was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy of non violence. In 1988, she addressed a rally of half a million people in front of the famous Shwedagon Pagoda in Rangoon, and called for a democratic government. Aung San Suu Kyi founded the National League for Democracy in the same year. The military government put her under house arrest in July, 1989. She secured a landslide wins in the 1990 general election, while in jail. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. With the prize money of 1.3 million dollars, she set up a health and education trust for the Burmese people. She worked for democracy and freedom in Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi was freed from house arrest on November 13, 2010. 

      At 12.30 pm on the 16th of June 1963, Valentina Tereshkova was launched into space. She became the first woman to conquer space. She piloted the space craft Vostok VI, and orbited the Earth forty eight times.

       Valentina Tereshkova was born in the Volga River village of Masslennikovo. In 1959, she joined the Yaroslavl Air Sports Club, and became a skilled parachutist. Inspired by the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, Valentina volunteered for the Soviet space programme. The Russian space programme needed people with parachuting experience. She underwent eighteen months of hard training before becoming chief pilot of Vostok VI. Valentina’s flight proved that women could withstand the stresses of space. Valentina was decorated with the Order of Lenin and the Gold Star Medal, and toured the world as a goodwill ambassador. She married Colonel Andrian Nikolayev, who had orbited the Earth sixty four times in Vostok III. 

       Jane Goodall shattered the long standing belief that only man used tools. She saw a chimpanzee, sticking a blade of grass into a termite mound, and eating the termites clinging to the blade of grass. Goodall also discovered that, chimpanzees ate other animals occasionally, and that they were more intelligent and less fierce than previously thought. Jane Goodall was the first of Leakey’s angels. Louis Leakey raised funds for the research in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania.

       Goodall gave names such as Fifi and David Greybeard to the chimpanzees. She spent months gaining the trust of the chimpanzees, and became a part of their social system. Goodall earned a PhD from Cambridge, the only one to do so without getting an undergraduate degree. She won several prizes, including Woman of the Year Award and the Tyler prize for environmental achievement.