Her Defiance Helped Change Race Relations Across The World

Joan of Arc, 1412 – 1431.
Joan of Arc was a teenage girl who became one of the most famous figures in French history.
She was born around 1412 in a small village in France, and lived during a long and bloody conflict known as the Hundred Years’ War.
Joan believed she was chosen by God to save France.
At the time, much of northern France was controlled by the English, and the French royal family was weak and divided.
She said she heard voices from saints telling her to help the rightful French king, Charles VII, take back his country.
She fought to defend:
The French people and their land, the claim of Charles VII to be king, and the idea of a united, independent France.
Joan did not see herself as a conqueror.
She believed she was fighting a holy mission to drive the English out of France.
Her enemies were:
The English armies occupying French territory, and their French allies, especially the Burgundians.
She attacked them because she believed they had no right to rule French lands and that God wanted her to restore the French monarchy.
Joan wore armour and carried a banner into battle.
She helped inspire French soldiers and led them to important victories, especially at the Siege of Orléans.
These victories helped turn the tide of the war in favour of France.
She was later captured by the Burgundians and handed over to the English.
After a long church trial, she was accused of heresy and burned at the stake in 1431.
She was only 19 years old.
Joan of Arc became a symbol of courage, faith, and resistance.
Although she was killed, her actions helped secure Charles VII’s position as king and changed the course of French history.
Today, she is remembered as a national heroine of France and a saint of the Catholic Church.

Rosa Parks, 1913 – 2005.
It was 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, and Rosa, a 42 year-old African-American, was on the number 2857 bus home.
She was in an area reserved for black people but the bus filled up and custom meant she was expected to give up her seat as white passengers were having to stand.
She refused.
Rosa was arrested and convicted but her defiance helped change race relations across the world and she became a leading civil rights activist.
She died in 2005 at the age of 92.
( Beth Neil )

Elizabeth Bathory, 1560 – 1614.
There were no laws in medieval Hungary that could touch a noble countess, and depraved murderer Elizabeth Bathory abused her power and position for all it was worth.
Luring the prettiest local village girls to her huge castle with promises of paid work, the vain, capricious woman would torture and kill in some of the sickest, most sadistic ways.
There was also often a sexual element to her murders and she would sometimes force young women to lick the blood of other victims off her nude body.
Bathory’s obsession with blood, she even enjoyed bathing in the fresh blood of her young victims straight after a murder, believing it would help keep her youthful and improve her complexion, led to her being dubbed “The Blood Countess”.
Torturing and killing with impunity for decades, the evil countess managed to wipe out most of the peasant girls in her area and later moved on to those of higher birth.
She was finally arrested by special royal decree and accused of the murder of more than 650 girls and young women, making her history’s most prolific female serial killer by a distance.
However, she was neither tried nor convicted.
In 1610, she was sealed into her private apartment (with small slots left open for air and food) in Csejte Castle, now in Slovakia.
She died four years later.

Benazir Bhutto, 1953 – 2007.
The twice prime minister of Pakistan had followed her dad into politics, and, like him, lost her life because of it.
She vehemently denied allegations of corruption but relocated to Dubai before returning in 2007 after being granted amnesty from the charges.
She became leader of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party but was shot at a political rally in December 2007 before a suicide bomb went off moments later.
Benazir was 54.
( Beth Neil )

Grace Darling, 1815 – 1842.
A Victorian heroine, Grace Darling lived in a lighthouse on the Farne Islands, off the Northumberland coast, with her father.
In the autumn of 1838, looking out of her window she spotted the wreck and survivors of the SS Forfarshire on a nearby rocky island.
Despite the terrible weather, she and her father rowed out and rescued 13 survivors.
That part of the North Sea can be incredibly rough and stormy, and you have to admire the courage of this brave young woman.
Tragically, she died of tuberculosis just a few years later at 27. In a way, she was the first ‘common woman’ to achieve fame for a great deed.
The courage she displayed was a very visible display of female capabilities, which arguably helped change the way women were perceived in the 19th century.

Anne Frank, 1929 – 1945.
Anne’s family fled Nazi Germany and settled in Amsterdam but Hitler invaded the Netherlands in 1940.
The Franks began hiding in an annexe above her dad’s office and friends provided them with food and drink.
Teenager Anne recorded her feelings in her diary until August 1944, three days before Germans stormed the building.
She died aged 15 at the Bergen-Belsen death camp but her diary has become one of the most treasured books ever.
( Beth Neil )

Frances Buss, 1827 – 1894.
A pioneer of female education, Frances Buss helped change the way that women were taught.
Until her time, most girls were lucky to receive any schooling at all, and when they did they were usually only taught things like needlework.
The daughter of a painter and etcher, she just thought that it was a terrible waste.
When she became the first headmistress of the North London Collegiate School in 1850 (which had been founded by her mother five years earlier), Buss argued that the world would be a better place if women were educated, and under her headship it became a model school.
A lifelong suffragist (rather than suffragette), Buss helped kick-start a revolution in female education from which all women have benefited.

Emily Davison, 1872 – 1913.
One of the most prominent Suffragettes, Emily lived and died for the cause.
She was appalled at the way women were treated, particularly being denied the right to vote, and joined Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union in 1906.
Her protests would often lead to imprisonment but she would continue campaigning in jail and she went on hunger strike in Strangeways.
Emily was killed aged 40 in 1913 at the Epsom Derby after throwing herself in front of the King’s horse, Anmer.
Some believe that she had been planning to attach the WSPU flag to the animal.
( Beth Neil )

Eleanor Of Aquitaine, 1122 – 1204.
The mother of Richard the Lionheart and King John, she was the Queen of England (1154-1189) and much of France at a time when the British aristocracy was still largely Anglo-Norman in complexion.
A formidable personality, a vast inheritance, and a long life helped make Eleanor, who became Queen following her marriage to Henry of Anjou (later Henry 11), arguably the most powerful woman of her age.
And despite her Anglo-French blood, and the fact that she was buried in France, she always had a passion for England, and was in many ways English at heart.
As she put it: “I am, by the wrath of God, Queen of England”.
A lot of people were critical of her.
One commentator spuriously claimed that “her exceeding beauty injured all nations”, by that, meaning that the reason the medieval world was at one another’s throats was because of her looks.
But rather than be cowed by such criticism, she played on her reputation and wore scarlet-coloured dresses that made her stand out even more.
She was the first woman who really understood about brand management.

Lady Constance Lytton, 1869 – 1923.
Lady Constance Lytton was painfully shy, and educated for nothing but marriage.
She only ever had one love affair, a tepid attachment to an impecunious soldier, and when it fizzled out she became a full-time companion to her widowed mother, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria.
In 1908, her life underwent an extraordinary transformation.
Seeking a good cause on which to spend a legacy from her great-aunt, Constance was invited to help a charity that encouraged working-class girls to take up morris dancing.
There she met Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and her husband, Fred, supporters of the women’s suffrage movement, and heard the stories of women who had gone to prison for their activism.
Among the suffragettes she found an irresistible combination of excitement, martyrdom and friendship.
After publishing a pamphlet in support of the cause, she rapidly moved on to direct action.
Sentenced to a month in prison, her photograph all over the papers, she was shocked when her working-class comrades were confined in ordinary cells, while she and Emmeline were sent to the relative comfort of the prison hospital.
In a defiant act of self-mutilation, she began to scratch ‘Votes for Women’ into her flesh with a needle, threatening to incise the words into her face unless she was moved to the cells.
The authorities gave in.
Renaming herself ‘Jane Warton’, she cut and dyed her hair, put on a pair of pence-nez, a shapeless tweed coat and a hat so dowdy that small boys jeered at her in the street.
At a demonstration in Liverpool, ‘Jane’ got herself arrested, and when she refused food, her jaw was forced open with a steel gag, a rubber tube was pushed down her throat and a mixture of milk, gruel, eggs, brandy sugar and beef tea poured in.
When she vomited, the doctor slapped her.
The process was repeated six times before her identity was discovered and she was released.
The public scandal was tremendous.
Constance, almost 6ft tall, left prison weighing just 7st 7lb.
She gave a speech at a packed Queen’s Hall, where many in the audience wept to hear her description of being force-fed.
Calls were made for a public inquiry.
The Home Office refused, insisting that force-feeding was no more than mildly unpleasant, but behind the scenes the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, introduced a number of concessions, including medical examinations of all prisoners before they were force-fed.
‘She has indeed gained a victory over the Government’, wrote Christabel Pankhurst.
But the victory was hard won.
Constance’s health was broken, and two years later, in 1912, she suffered a stroke.
She died in 1923, five years before women were granted the vote on the same terms as men.
( Jane Shilling )

Indira Gandhi, 1917 – 1984.
India’s only female prime minister remains a highly-revered stateswoman 35 years after she was assassinated.
She became involved with the Indian Independence movement before she led her country for the first time in 1966.
She was at the helm during the victorious war with Pakistan in 1971 that resulted in the liberation of Bangladesh.
She lost the 1977 election but regained power in 1980.
She was 66 and serving her fourth term when she was killed in 1984.

The First Woman To Be Awarded The Military Cross.
Michelle Norris showed outstanding bravery in Iraq in 2006 when she saved the life of a colleague who had been shot in the mouth.
Aged 19, the then private, from Stourbridge, West Midlands, leapt out of her patrol vehicle and dodged sniper fire to give treatment for three minutes before helping drag him to safety.
One bullet hit her rucksack.
( Beth Neil )

Amelia Dyer, 1838 – 1896.
In 1896, two bargemen were sailing slowly up the Thames when they noticed a brown paper parcel floating on the water’s surface.
The men hauled it aboard and made a shocking discovery.
Wrapped inside was the body of a child strangled with a tape which was still around its neck.
The parcel had been weighted with a brick.
The gruesome discovery was actually nothing new, in the previous six months the bodies of no fewer than 40 strangled children wrapped in parcels had been fished from the river.
But this one yielded a vital clue: a name and address written inside the brown paper.
It eventually led detectives to Amelia Dyer, a hugely overweight woman of 56, who would convince young mothers with babies born out of wedlock to let her look after their children for a fee.
Instead, she would strangle them and dump the bodies.
Advertising in upmarket newspapers, she called herself Mrs Harding, Mrs Thomas or Mrs Stanfield, and would move town to avoid suspicion.
Above her door was written the Bible verse: “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven”.
To her own young daughter, she called herself “the angel-maker”, explaining she was sending babies to Jesus because he wanted them far more than their mothers did.
Her crimes continued for decades, even as she was twice committed to insane asylums.
She is suspected of killing as many as 400 infants during her life.
Dyer told police the babies they found strangled with white tape was “how you could tell it was one of mine”.
Tried at the Old Bailey in London, a jury took just six minutes to find Amelia Dyer guilty of killing seven infants whose corpses could be directly linked to her.
She was hanged at Newgate Prison on June 10, 1896.

Boudicca, 30AD – 61AD. 
Boudicca (also spelled Boadicea) was the first British woman we know of with real attitude.
Boudicca was the queen of the ancient British Iceni tribe, whose kingdom covered East Anglia, and famously led a rebellion against the Romans in 61AD.
In a bid to explain how this women came so close to defeating them they created this mythic, flame-haired uber-woman.
She must have looked a breathtaking sight when she rode into battle on her chariot.
A genuine British heroine, she embodied a very British sense of freedom.
The exact circumstances of Boudicca’s death are unknown.
The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that she poisoned herself to avoid capture, while Cassius Dio claimed she died of illness after the battle.
Her burial place remains a mystery.
A prominent bronze statue of her in her war chariot stands near Westminster Bridge in London, commissioned by Prince Albert during the Victorian era.

Jane Austen, 1775 – 1817.
Standing head and shoulders above other female writers, Jane Austen is the nearest thing to a female Dickens.
Despite her relatively short life, her output was prolific, writing a string of classics including Sense And Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, and most famously, Pride And Prejudice.
She was spot-on in every observation she made about both men and women, observations that still hold true today.
While her writing (even though we now know that her grammar and spelling left much to be desired) was amazingly perceptive, it still stands the test of time, 200 years later.
Austen helped revolutionise the novel as a form, and still speaks to us today.
Ironically, though, she was very much under-appreciated during her own lifetime and it was only after her death that she achieved her present stature.
A role model for women ever since, she has inspired countless female writers to follow in her footsteps.
The undisputed queen of English literature.