Each year, the month of March celebrates women’s history, and the role women have played in shaping history. Although typically celebrated in the US, in this article we’re going to take a look at some inspirational females from across the world with varying heritages (from African-American, to south-Asian, to Middle-Eastern), but equally important contributions to society.
Born in West Virginia, U.S., Katherine Johnson’s (1918-2020) intense curiosity and mathematical brilliance saw her graduating from West Virginia State College with the highest honours in mathematics and French, aged only 18. She was chosen by state president, Dr. John W. Davis, to be among the first three black students offered integration places at West Virginia University. However, in 1952, a relative recommended a position at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) Langley laboratory. She spent the next 33 years analyzing data from flight tests, working on trajectory analyses, and authoring 26 research reports on topics such as orbital mechanics. In 1962, Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for: she was asked to run numbers through the equations controlling the trajectory of the capsule in John Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission by hand. “If she says they’re good,” Johnson recalls Glenn saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn subsequently made history, becoming the first U.S. astronaut to orbit Earth, marking a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space. Aged 97, Johnson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor, by President Barack Obama. And in 2016, NASA named a building, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, after her, whilst the book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race was published, allowing Johnson to receive the recognition she had long deserved.
Born in 1914, Noor Inayat Khan, a direct descendant of Tipu Sultan (the 18th-century Muslim ruler of Mysore, India), served as a British spy during World War Two. Khan studied child psychology at the Sorbonne, played and composed music for the harp and piano, and wrote children’s stories before she joined the war effort. She was the first female wireless operator to be sent into occupied France to aid the French Resistance, and picked up enemy messages for the 'Prosper' resistance network in Paris. Despite great risk to herself, Khan moved between safe houses, transmitting messages to London under the codename 'Madeleine'. But a double agent in the team which she was deployed with allowed the Gestapo to track down and arrest her. Despite hours of torture, Khan revealed nothing, and even attempted escape twice. On September 11th 1944, she was taken to a concentration camp and tragically shot dead. Posthumously, Khan was awarded the George Cross, the second highest award in the UK honours system for “acts of the greatest heroism in circumstance of extreme danger.”
Karimeh Abbud (1893-1940) was was one of the first professional Palestinian photographers in the Arab world. She first began to take an interest in photography in 1913, after receiving a camera from her father as a 17th birthday present, and was not only a photographer, but an entrepreneur too. She used her family network to open studios at several locations throughout Palestine, and photographed Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Haifa at a time when transportation was not easy, few roads were paved, and a solitary journey would have taken half a day. Whilst studying Arabic literature at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, Abbud encountered a common attitude in which Arabs were portrayed as backward and inferior in race and character to the British. When one of her teachers kept repeating that, “Arabs are primitive, they eat with their hands and are not capable of innovation,” Abbud went to the library and returned with an illustration of how English tribes had lived in earlier centuries to prove her point. The ‘Lady Photographer’ had to negotiate her role at the intersection of colonialism, Orientalism, nationalism, Zionism, feminism, and Protestantism - and to honour her contributions, on the 123rd anniversary of her birthday (18 November 2016), Google dedicated a Doodle to Karimeh Abbud’s work.
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