With International Women’s Day coming to pass last Saturday, March 8, and March being official Women’s History Month, it’s a time to recognize women who have left their imprint on the world—especially women whose names may not be well known.
Malala Yousafzai – Pakistani activist
(July 12, 1997 – Living)
Born to an outspoken social activist and educator father, Malala Yousafzai grew up being taught to dream and fight for her education. In fact, her father established and administered the school she attended, Khushal Girls High School and College, in the city of Mingora, Pakistan.
In 2007, when Yousafzai was ten years old, the situation near her home in the Swat Valley rapidly began to decline as the Taliban took over and became the dominant force throughout much of northwestern Pakistan. Girls were soon banned from attending school or receiving an education, and by the end of 2008, more than 400 schools were destroyed. Many more restrictions were implemented, like owning a television, playing music, and dancing.
At just 11 years old, Yousafzai decided to take a stand against the Taliban and fight for women’s rights. She began to publish anonymous blogs for the British Broadcasting Corporation under the name Gul Makai in 2009, documenting her life under Taliban rule and how much she wanted to attend school.
All in the same year, Yousafzai made her first television appearance and was interviewed by Pakistani journalist and talk show host Hamid Mir on the Pakistani current events show “Capital Talk.”
She also worked with the New York Times reporter Adam Ellick to make a documentary, “Class Dismissed,” a 13-minute piece about the school shutdown. Ellick made a second film with her, titled “A Schoolgirl’s Odyssey.” The New York Times posted both films on their website in 2009.
That summer, she met with the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, and asked him to help with her effort to protect the education of girls in Pakistan.
By 2011, Yousafzai was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize and earned Pakistan’s National Youth Peace Prize.
Her rise in success made her not only a public figure but also a target. Weary of the rising tensions brought on by the Taliban and concerned for her safety, Yousafzai’s family fled the country. They only came home later, after things had died down.
On October 9, 2012, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai was riding the bus from school with her friends when members of the Taliban stopped them, asking, “Who is Malala?”
After discovering her identity, they shot Yousafzai in the head and left her to die.
She was airlifted to a Pakistani military hospital and then taken to an intensive care unit in England. Despite being put into a ten-day coma, she suffered no severe brain damage, but the left side of her face was paralyzed, and she would require many reparative surgeries and rehabilitation.
Months of medical treatments later, Yousafzai was able to return to her family, who were now living in England. There, she was finally allowed to attend school, but that didn’t stop her from continuing to fight for the girls still unable to receive an education.
For her efforts, Yousafzai received 12 awards, including a Nobel Peace Prize, which, at 17, made her the youngest person to win the award.
“This award is not just for me. It is for those forgotten children who want education. It is for those frightened children who want peace. It is for those voiceless children who want change,” Yousafzai said in her acceptance speech.
Now living in Birmingham, England, Yousafzai continues her education and works as an activist for girls’ education through the Malala Fund, a non-profit organization she co-founded.
Dorothy Lawrence – English journalist
(October 4, 1896 – August 29, 1964)
Dorothy was an inspiring English writer with hopes of becoming a war reporter. To chase her dreams and defy odds, being born a woman in the 1900s, Lawrence posed as a soldier in the British Army in the French countryside.
To blend into her surroundings, she bound her breasts and used cotton and sacks to make her shoulders look bulkier. Lawrence gave her pale skin a tan with watered-down furniture polish, cut her long hair short, and learned how to drill and march.
She forged military identity papers, calling herself Private Denis Smith of the 1st Battalion Leicestershire Regiment.
While she was there, Lawrence met Lancashire coal miner turned British Expeditionary Force (BEF) tunnel-digging sapper Tom Dunn, who offered to assist her by giving her room in his quarters and helping hide her identity from the officers.
Dorothy Lawrence worked for ten days as a sapper ( a soldier responsible for building and repairing roads and bridges, laying and clearing mines) before turning herself over to the British military, aware of the risk she posed both to herself and the people who had helped her along the way.
After learning that it was a woman who had fooled them for nearly a week and a half, the high command was embarrassed.
At Calais, a popular French port taken up by the British army, six generals and 20 other officers took turns interrogating her. They eventually concluded that she was a prostitute, merely a “camp follower,” or a spy who had snuck her way to the Front.
Lawrence was placed in a convent for two weeks while they decided what to do with her.
Despite Lawrence’s attempts to keep her position in the military, she was sent back to England with the promise of an affidavit ensuring that she would not tell anyone about her experience in the war.
Along with being unsure and disappointed that all of her efforts were for nothing, Lawrence arrived in London with no home and no job.
Her short time at war left her with more than a few scars. She caught septic poisoning from the dirty water and suffered from undiagnosed PTSD. Lawrence would later write letters about her “episodes,” which caused her to shake so bad that she could barely hold a pen.
In 1925, Dorothy was admitted to Hanwell Lunatic Asylum. With no surviving family member to vouch for her sanity, there was nothing to stop them from incarcerating her for nearly 40 years.
Records show she had no visitors throughout the four-decade stay, and when she died, Lawrence was buried in an unmarked grave in north London.
Patsy Mink – Attorney and former United States Representative
(December 6, 1927 – September 28, 2002)
Patsy Mink is a woman with plenty of groundbreaking “firsts” under her belt. She attended Wilson College in Pennsylvania and the University of Nebraska but transferred after facing racial discrimination.
Moving back to Honolulu, Mink majored in Zoology and Chemistry from the University of Hawaii with hopes of later applying to medical schools to become a doctor.
She applied to several medical schools after graduating, but none of her applications were accepted. Instead, Mink decided to apply to law school and was accepted at the University of Chicago Law School.
After graduating from law school, Patsy Mink went back to Hawaii, where she then registered for the bar exam to be able to practice law in the territory. Even after she passed, Mink was unable to find a job because of her interracial marriage with her husband, John Mink.
Because of this, she decided to open her own practice. She became the first Japanese-American woman to practice law in her home state of Hawaii.
When Hawaii became a state in 1959, Mink immediately began campaigning for Congress. Although Mink’s first attempt was unsuccessful, she returned to politics in 1962 when she won a seat in the Hawaii State Senate.
She continued to campaign for a seat in the U.S. Congress even after the Democratic Party decided to support another candidate. In 1964, she ran again and won the seat.
Mink became the first woman of color elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and the first Asian-American woman to serve in Congress. She also served as Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs.
Mink sponsored bills such as Title IX, the Early Childhood Education Act, and the Women’s Educational Equity Act.
“What you endure is who you are,” Patsy Matsu Takemoto Mink once declared. “I can’t change the past. But I can certainly help somebody else in the future, so they don’t have to go through what I did.”
For over four decades, Mink championed the rights of immigrants, minorities, women, and children and worked to eradicate the kind of discrimination she had faced in her life. She was a strong environmental advocate and worked tirelessly on energy policy issues of regional, national, and global impact.
Claudette Colvin – American activist
(September 5, 1939 – Living)
Before Rosa Parks, there was Claudette Colvin. A small-town girl from segregated Birmingham, Ala.
Claudette Colvin was born Claudette Austin, the oldest of two daughters born to Mary Jane Gadson and C.P. Austin. Due to familial reasons, Colvin and her sister, Delpine, were sent to live with their aunt and uncle, Mary Anne and Q.P. Colvin, in Pine Level, Ala.
After some time, the sisters soon took up the last name Colvin. In her early childhood, the Colvin family moved to Montgomery, Ala.
In 1952, Colvin’s sister died from polio, just before Claudette’s first day of high school at Booker T. Washington, a school for African American children. At school, they often talked about the many forms of segregation they faced in their daily lives.
Colvin found inspiration in the biographies of African American women like Harriet Tubman, who escaped enslavement and led dozens of enslaved people to freedom along the Underground Railroad, and Sojourner Truth, who was freed from enslavement and became a leader in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.
At age 15, on March 2, 1955, while riding a bus, Colvin was told by the bus driver to give up her seat in the front to a white passenger. She refused.
Having just about learned about African American history and the U.S. Constitution at school, she stood her ground, saying that she had paid the same amount of money as everyone else and had the right to sit where she wanted.
Her action, however, went against the segregation laws of Montgomery, and two police officers dragged Colvin off the bus, put her in handcuffs, and took her to jail.
She had three charges against her: disturbing the peace, violating the city’s segregation laws, and assaulting the police officers. She pleaded not guilty to all of them.
Nonetheless, she was convicted on all three and was sentenced to indefinite probation, and declared a ward of the state. She appealed, and two charges were dropped, but the assault charge was upheld.
After hearing about what she had done, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) thought Colvin would be the perfect face for their organization and that her case could bring attention to the injustice of segregation.
Some NAACP members were concerned that Colvin was too young and her complexion too dark to be the right fit. Ultimately, this led to Rosa Parks becoming the symbol of the struggle after her part in the Montgomery bus boycott.
This, however, didn’t stop Colvin from continuing to fight for African American rights.
In 1956, she and four other African American women, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Jeanetta Reese, and Mary Louise Smith, participated in the class action lawsuit Browder v. Gayle, which reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Later that year, the Court ruled in favor of the women, making segregation on buses illegal.
Colvin later moved to New York City, where she worked in a nursing home for 35 years before retiring.
In 2021, Colvin petitioned to have her record expunged, and her request was soon granted, wiping her record clean.
These four women are a small portion of the inspirational role models throughout history. Women’s History Month is not only a time to celebrate the powerful women in history and in our lives, but it’s a chance to remember that women are strong and are capable of becoming whoever they want to be.
