Category Personalities

      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. 

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston. Her father, Otto Plath was a professor of biology, who specialized in bees. Sylvia Plath was a brilliant student. She studied at the Smith College from 1950 to 1955. Later, she described this phase of her life in ‘The Bell Jar’, an autobiographical novel which is now considered a classic. As a young woman, Sylvia Plath suffered from spells of depression. She married the poet Ted Hughes. Sylvia Plath committed suicide at the age of 31. ‘Ariel’, a collection of Plath’s poems published after her death, astonished the writing world with its power. The poems were carefully crafted. Ariel became one of the best selling volumes of poetry, published in England and America in the twentieth century. Plath’s ‘Collected Poems’ which was assembled by Ted Hughes after Plath’s death, won a Pulitzer Prize. 

Corazon Aquino was the first women President of the Philippines. Her husband Senator Benigno Aquino Jr was a fierce critic of Ferdinand Marcos, then the President of the Philippines. He was assassinated. Corazon Aquino spearheaded the nationwide protest, called the People Power Revolution, against Ferdinand Marcos. She toppled Marcos from power, and became president in 1986. Corazon Aquino restored democracy in the Philippines. 

“I feel more comfortable with gorillas than with people”, said Dian Fossey. A study trip to Africa in1963 proved to be a turning point in her life. In Rwanda, she met Dr. Louis Leakey, who was studying fossils. She also saw gorillas for the first time, a sight that thrilled her to the core. Three years later, Leakey sent Fossey to study gorillas in the Congo. However, political violence forced her to flee to Rwanda. Here she set up the Karisoke Research Centre in the Virguna National Park. Fossey conducted path breaking research in this center. She lived alone with the gorillas for long periods, and won their trust. Fossey’s research won her name and fame. She fought the gorilla hunters and wrote a bestselling book, ‘Gorillas in the Mist’. Dian Fossey was murdered in her cabin at the research centre in December 1985. Her killers have never been identified.

Toni Morrison is the first black woman, to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. She was born in Ohio to Georg Wofford, a shipyard welder, in 1931. By day, she worked as an editor in a publishing house. She wrote in the night. She found writing to be exciting, and her characters took on a life of their own. Her first novel, ‘The Bluest Eye’ was about a girl who prayed for blue eyes. ‘Sula’, ‘Song of Solomon’, ‘Tar Baby’ and ‘Beloved’ are some of her major novels. In ‘Tar Baby’, she describes for the first time interactions between black and white characters ‘Beloved’, which tells the story of an escaped slave and her children, won Morrison the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. She received the Nobel Prize 1993.