To celebrate the release of RADIOACTIVE, the incredible true story of pioneering scientist Marie Curie on 27th July, we will examine 9 remarkable women who have changed the course of history in various fields from science to law, medicine, and civil rights.
RUTH BADER GINSBURG
In the words of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court Justice and co-founder of the Women’s Rights Project in 1972 at the ACLU, “Women’s rights are an essential part of the overall human rights agenda, trained on the equal dignity and ability to live in freedom all people should enjoy.” She is the second woman ever appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court and has helped push through landscape-changing court decisions in the twenty-first century, including United States v. Virginia (1996), which struck down the exclusion of women students from the Virginia Military Institute. Where she has not agreed with the final decision of the Court, she is known for penning extremely eloquent, powerful and pointed dissents, often providing rallying points for activists in the aftermath of decisions.
QUEEN ELIZABETH I
Crowned queen of England at the age of twenty-five, Elizabeth I (1533–1603) had one of the longest reigns in British history. She never married, earning the nickname the Virgin Queen, and she brought great unity and prosperity to an England and Ireland divided after the bloody reign of her father, Henry VIII. With her progressive perspective on religion, and the peace that followed her defeat of the Spanish Armada, her reign became known ‘the Golden Age’ – a new age of prosperity ushering the dawn of the English Renaissance, with a cultural revival of arts and literature that included writers such as William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.
MARSHA P JOHNSON
Born in New Jersey in 1945, Marsha was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front, and a central figure in the 1969 Stonewall Riots, paving the way for much LGBTQ+ activism today. She led the protests in the wake of the police brutality against the gay community at the Stonewall Inn in June 1969, a month after which the first openly gay march took place in New York – a pivotal moment for the gay and trans community everywhere. Marsha was a prominent figure in New York, and even modelled for Andy Warhol. She continued to be an advocate for people living with AIDS until her untimely death in 1992.
AMELIA EARHART
Few trailblazers capture the imagination like Amelia Earhart (1897–1937), a world-famous pilot who broke records weekly and led a group of revolutionary female aviators. She was the sixteenth woman to be issued a pilot’s license, and a year after her first lesson, she set her first record for highest women’s altitude flight in her first plane, the Canary. She would go on to set many more records, including first solo female transatlantic flight in 1932. She vanished during another world record attempt flying around the world in 1937 – to this day, the exact circumstances of her death are unknown.
ROSA PARKS
Born and raised in segregated Alabama, Rosa Parks (1913–2005) started a movement when she refused to move to the back of the bus, even though she wasn’t the first to do so. She was arrested, and the night after, the seminal event of the civil rights movement was born: the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955.
Over the next 381 days, instead of taking the bus, forty thousand African-Americans in Alabama carpooled, taxied, and walked to work and school. As a result of the boycott, a civil suit finally ruled Alabama’s bus segregation laws unconstitutional. Parks became a national hero and the face of the civil rights movement, as the boycott gave impetus to the formation of a new civil rights organization, the Montgomery Improvement Association, who elected a young and unknown minister as its president—Martin Luther King, Jr. The rest is history.
THE NIGHT WITCHES
The little known all-female pilot squadron was a major asset to the Soviet war effort against the Nazis in World War II. The squadron was the brainchild of Marina Raskova, known as the “Soviet Amelia Earhart”—famous not only as the first female navigator in the Soviet Air Force but also for her many long-distance flight records. They flew under the cover of darkness in bare-bones plywood biplanes, which could not be detected on radars – the Germans nicknamed them ‘Night Witches’ as the whooshing sound their planes made, resembling that of a sweeping broom, was the only warning they had when the planes approached. In total, the pioneering all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment dropped more than 23,000 tons of bombs on Nazi targets.
ALEXA CANADY
Dr. Alexa Canady became the first Black woman neurosurgeon in the U.S. in 1981, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Canady specialized in paediatric neurosurgery and was the chief of neurosurgery at the Children’s Hospital in Michigan from 1987 until her partial retirement in 2001. In addition to surgery, she also conducted research and was a professor of neurosurgery at Wayne State University. She helped save thousands of lives — mostly children, according to Changing the Face of Medicine — during her 20-year career.
MARY SEACOLE
Mary Seacole was a daring adventurer of the 19th century. A Jamaican woman of mixed race, she was awarded the Order of Merit posthumously by the government of Jamaica. She travelled the world and is known for setting up the “British Hotel” behind the lines during the Crimean War. She became a celebrated ‘doctress’ and herbalist in the Caribbean, and hoping to assist with nursing the wounded on the outbreak of the Crimean War, she applied to the War Office to be included among the nursing contingent but was refused on racist grounds – so she travelled independently and set up her hotel and tended to the battlefield wounded, where she became extremely popular among service personnel, who raised money for her when she faced destitution after the war.
In 1857 a Fundraising Gala took place in honour of Mary Seacole, on the banks of River Thames over four days. Crowds of around 80,000 people attended, which included veterans and their families, to Royalty. She is now recognised as a hugely important nursing pioneer, akin to Florence Nightingale.
MARIE SK?ODOWSKA CURIE
Played by Rosamund Pike is the new biopic of her life and career RADIOACTIVE, Marie Sk?odowska Curie (1867–1934) was a Polish physicist and chemist was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the first person to win it twice, in two different sciences. She made Paris her home after she was rejected for a post at Krakow University because she was a woman, and there she met fellow physicist Frenchman Pierre Curie, with whom she continued her work in radioactivity (a term she coined), and discovered two new elements: polonium and radium. During World War I, Marie established the first on-site radiology centers to help surgeons in the field, and after her husband’s death, she founded two Curie Institutes, in Paris and in Warsaw, which are still major medical research labs today.
RADIOACTIVE is out now on digital download and available on DVD from DVD 27 July.
