WOMEN I admire

It took the love of an ex­tra­or­di­nary woman for me to start be­com­ing aware. Aware of the huge con­tin­u­ous strug­gle and achieve­ments of women in a world that makes it all so much harder than it usu­ally is for men.

The #MeToo move­ment was a badly needed poke in the eye for plenty of men, and I would in­clude my­self in that de­mo­graphic of ig­no­rance. I had the gen­eral opin­ion that my half of the species had evolved to be largely re­spect­ful and kind to­wards the other half, but it’s now as clear as the glass ceil­ing that I had over­es­ti­mated male be­hav­iour.

Dur­ing Women’s His­tory Month in March, I also started to think specif­i­cally about which in­di­vid­ual women I have a strong ad­mi­ra­tion for or those that have in­spired me. In the news very re­cently, there has been the New Zealand Prime Min­is­ter Jacinda Ardern, teenage cli­mate-cri­sis ac­tivist Greta Thun­berg, Scot­tish First Min­is­ter Nicola Stur­geon, as well as the youngest ever fe­male US Con­gress­woman, Alexan­dria Oca­sio-Cortez. They all have in com­mon an en­ergy, inner strength and bril­liance that has been truly re­mark­able. These women offer great hope for the fu­ture in so many ways.

A bit fur­ther back in his­tory, there were un­der­rated fig­ures, such as Mo Mowlam, who, work­ing with a deadly brain tu­mour, was the UK gov­ern­ment min­is­ter fi­nally able to se­cure peace in North­ern Ire­land. (Her then Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair re­cently com­pletely ne­glected to in­clude her vital role when he gave a pub­lic speech com­mem­o­rat­ing the 20th an­niver­sary of these peace agree­ments.)

In the same area of study as the in­tel­lec­tual pi­o­neer Ada Lovelace, there are many oth­ers who should be more well-known. Patri, an ac­quain­tance of mine told me the other day about just one of these ge­niuses: Emmy Noe­ther, a Jew­ish math­e­mati­cian from the first part of the 20th cen­tury. Patri be­lieves that in fact “most of what is done in the fields of mod­ern physics and a huge branch of math­e­mat­ics is based on some­thing Noe­ther came up with.” African-Amer­i­can Shirley Ann Jack­son is an­other ground­break­ing physi­cist who few out­side the US would have heard of.

Closer to my own per­sonal in­ter­ests, I have been greatly touched by the work of writ­ers such as Vir­ginia Woolf, Helen Keller, Sylvia Plath, Joni Mitchell, Siri Hustvedt, Slavenka Drakulic and Joanna Bourke. Be­cause of the qual­ity of their work, these last three also de­serve much wider recog­ni­tion.

I also have a great re­spect for a black woman named An­tonella Bundu (who has a Sene­galese im­mi­grant fa­ther) and is now run­ning to be may­oress of Flo­rence in the local elec­tions at the end of this month. In an in­creas­ingly vi­o­lent, right-wing part of Eu­rope this kind of brav­ery and heart is both rare and won­der­ful.

But I don’t just ad­mire women who are pub­lic fig­ures. What about all the count­less moth­ers, grand­moth­ers, nurses, car­ers, teach­ers and women in the broader world of work who do what they do – and do it well – every day?

Sadly though, some are un­able to ful­fill their lives’ great po­ten­tial and I can­not ig­nore this awful truth. Not long ago, a (male) friend sent me a poignant ar­ti­cle that listed just eight young women aged be­tween 16 and 27 who were killed by fa­nat­i­cal, ex­treme re­li­gious fam­ily mem­bers, all in parts of west­ern Eu­rope and the US. The rea­sons for their mur­ders ranged from re­fus­ing an arranged mar­riage, to not cov­er­ing their heads, to lis­ten­ing to Amer­i­can music, to get­ting a job. Here were true in­di­vid­u­als. All died purely be­cause they in­sisted on being them­selves and to me, that too mer­its huge re­spect.

I would also ac­knowl­edge the life and re­cent pass­ing of Neus Català, who will be well-known to many read­ers. Fi­nally, I want to ded­i­cate this ar­ti­cle to all the vic­tims of do­mes­tic vi­o­lence across the globe.