Women who made history!

Amelia Earhart:

Amelia Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas in 1898. In 1920,

she took her first airplane ride. She loved flying and began taking flying lessons. At that time, women pilots were very unusual. When Amelia earned her pilot’s license in 1923 she became the 16th woman in the U.S. to have her license to fly. In 1928, Amelia was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. She flew with another pilot, Wilmer Stultz. Amelia became very famous for this flight. When she came back to America, she was honored with parades and met President Coolidge. In 1932, Amelia flew across the Atlantic again, this time by herself. She was the first woman to fly alone, or solo, across the Atlantic. For this, Amelia received the  Distinguished Flying Cross from Congress, the first woman to receive this honor.

Rosalind Franklin:
Rosalind Franklin was born in Notting Hill, London in 1920. She grew up in an affluent and influential family and started studying chemistry at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1938. In her early years she researched many chemical structures including that of coal. in 1951 Franklin started working at King's College London where she studied and started to apply her knowledge of X-ray techniques to the structure of DNA. While working with a student named Raymond Gosling she took X-ray pictures and drew scientific conclusions about the structure of DNA which would later be used by Francis Crick and James D. Watson to declare the structure of DNA to be in the form of a double helix. In 1962, Watson and Crick won the Nobel Prize for their studies and Rosalind Franklin's research helped them acheive that honor.

Eleanor Roosevelt:
Eleanor Roosevelt was born in 1884. She was a writer and a humanitarian, a person who works to help the poor and disadvantaged. She spoke out for human rights, equality for all, and children’s causes. She worked to promote racial equality, and in a famous incident, resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution when the black singer Marian Anderson was denied the use of their facilities.To help women gain equal rights in a time when they had few, President John F. Kennedy made her the leader of a special group called the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women. As a leader of human rights, she strove to further women's causes, as well as the causes of black, poor and unemployed people.


Diana, Princess of Wales:
Diana was born Diana Frances Spencer in England. From 1979 until 1981 Diana worked as a kindergarten teacher in London. She married Prince Charles, in 1981. The couple had two sons: Prince William, and Prince Henry. By the late 1980s arrived their marital problems were widely known and in December 1992 they separated. Diana had, by then, already adopted charity work as her royal duty. Despite focus on her divorce from Prince Charles, she  continued to volunteer her time to many charities related to homeless and deprived children, drug abuse, and victims of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). Diana shocked many people when she shook the hand of an AIDS patient, showing that she was not afraid of those suffering from the illness. She was the vice president of the British Red Cross. Her work for various causes and charities and her own personal strength in adversity made her an idol for many.


Queen Elizabeth II:
 Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, was born daughter of King George VI, in London. In 1944 she served as a councilor of state while her father was on the Italian war front. She married Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh, in 1947. She had 4 kids, Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward. Elizabeth succeeded to the throne upon the death of her father in 1952. She is also Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Commander-in-Chief of the UK Armed Forces, and Head of the Commonwealth. She has held these positions since 1952, the year of the death of her father,. She is the longest serving current Head of State in Europe, Australasia and the Americas. Also in 1992, the Queen and Prince Charles agreed to pay income taxes on their personal income, the first time the monarchy has done so.

Rosa Parks:
In 1955 Rosa Parks made history by refusing to give up her seat to a white person on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. The bus incident led to the formation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, led by the young pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The association called for a boycott of the Montgomery city-owned bus company which lasted 382 days and brought. Rosa's refusal to move further back on the bus in order to accommodate white riders helped start not only the Montgomery bus boycott, but the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. She has since been a strong advocate for human rights issues, a huge civil right activist. Upon her death in 2005, she was the first civilian to lie in state in the Rotunda of the Capital Building in Washington, D.C.