Category Great Womens

       Dr. Chien Shiung Wu was a physicist who performed a historic experiment, overturning what had been considered a fundamental law of nature. In her most famous experiment, announced in 1957, she and her colleagues overthrew a law of symmetry in physics called the principle of conservation of parity that had been considered unshakeable for 30 years.

       Chien-Shiung Wu was born in Shanghai, China, in 1912. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in China in 1934, and came to the United States in 1936. As a nuclear physicist, Dr. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. She became a professor of physics at Columbia, and later held honorary professorships at several Chinese Universities.

       She did receive numerous honours and awards, Including being the first woman elected president of the American Physical Society. She died in New York in February 1997.

            Rosa Parks is an example of how the actions of one person can start a chain reaction of events that have far-reaching results. Her refusal to give up her seat on a city bus inspired other African-Americans to demand better treatment in all areas of their lives.

            This is what happened to Rosa Parks. When she was asked to give up her seat for a white man, she refused. She was tired after a hard day’s work- and tired of the way her people were being treated.

           Her refusal became a key part of the modern movement for civil rights, and her actions sparked further action, and set an example for many.

        Dorothy Hodgkin studied chemistry at Somerville College, but moved to Cambridge University to work on the development of x-ray crystallography. In 1934, Hodgkin returned to Oxford and carried out research into the structure of penicillin. Hodgkin was eventually able to establish that penicillin consisted of a ring of three carbons and nitrogen. She then went on to determine the structure of the antibiotic cephalosporin C.

         Hodgkin became the first scientist in Britain, to use a computer to analyze the molecular structure of complex chemicals. This enabled her to produce three-dimensional models. In 1948, Hodgkin began her work on vitamin B12. Hodgkin and her team took eight years to determine its structure. Later, she carried out research into the structure of insulin.

        Dorothy won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964. She was also awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1987. She was a great chemist, and a tolerant lover of people. 

Born and educated in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir was among the first women permitted to complete a programme of study at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Through her lifelong friendship with Sartre, another philosopher, she contributed significantly to the development and expression of a philosophy known as existentialist philosophy.

Simone de Beauvoir is best known as the foremother of contemporary feminism. Born in 1908, she rejected religion and conformity in her teens, and then turned to philosophy, becoming a professor in 1929. Her landmark book ‘The Second Sex’, was published in 1949, and later translated into at least a dozen languages. By the time of her death in 1986, the book had sold more than a million copies in the US alone. Her works of fiction focus on women who take responsibility for themselves by making life-altering decisions. The many volumes of her own autobiography exhibit the application of similar principles. 

      Rachel Carson grew up on a small Pennsylvania farm, where she spent hours exploring the outdoors. She always loved books, and when she was young, thought she would be a writer. She went to the Pennsylvania College for Women. A required course in biology made her change assumptions about her career: she majored in zoology, and then went to Johns Hopkins for a master’s degree in genetics.

     While working as a scientist-bureaucrat for the government, Carson continued writing. In 1941, she published ‘Under the Sea-Wind’, her first book. She was a quiet, private person, fascinated with the workings of nature from a scientific and aesthetic point of view. Carson went on to write ‘The Sea Around Us’ and ‘The Edge of the Sea’, and finally, ‘Silent Spring’ in 1962. In the wake of Silent Spring, which described the dangers of pesticides such as DDT, she was attacked personally, and as a scientist by many. ‘Silent Spring’ became a runaway best seller, with international reverberations. Even today, it is still regarded as the cornerstone of new environmentalism.

The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo created striking, often shocking, images that reflected her turbulent life. She did not originally plan to become an artist. A polio survivor, at 15, Kahlo entered the premedical programme at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. However, this training ended three years later, when Kahlo was gravely hurt in a bus accident. During her convalescence, Kahlo had begun to paint with oils.

Her pictures, mostly self-portraits and still lives, were filled with the bright colours and flattened forms of the Mexican folk art she loved. At 21, Kahlo fell in love with the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and married him. The couple travelled to the United States and France, where Kahlo met luminaries from the worlds of art and politics. She had her first solo exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York City in 1938.

During her lifetime, Frida created some 200 paintings, drawings, and sketches related to her experiences in life, physical and emotional pain and her turbulent relationship with Diego. She produced 143 paintings, 55 of which are self-portraits.

Perhaps best known for these self-portraits, Kahlo’s work is remembered for its ‘pain and passion’, and its intense, vibrant colours. Mexican culture and Amerindian cultural tradition figure prominently in her work, which has sometimes been characterized as naive art, or folk art.