Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese opposition politican. Photo credit: Htoo Tay Zar

Happy International Women’s Day! Today countries around the world celebrate the contributions of women past and present. A Mighty Girl has chosen to mark the day with this blog post featuring eight amazing women from around the world. Some of them will be familiar, but some of them will be new to you; all of them have left their mark on the world.

We have included reading recommendations for children and youth about each of the featured women. To view our complete selection of over 350 inspiring biographies of remarkable girls and women, visit our biographies collection.

Alia Muhammad Baker (b. 1953)

Baker was the chief librarian of Al Basrah Central Library in 2003 when the war in Iraq began. When she was denied permission to move the books, even after government offices moved into the library, she started smuggling books home; and when the officials fled the British advance and looters started to enter the library, she convinced the owner of the restaurant next door to allow her -- and eventually neighbors who joined her mission -- to store books safely in the dining room. Thanks to her efforts, 30,000 books were saved and became the core of a rebuilt library in 2004.

You can read more about Baker in The Librarian of Basra: A True Story from Iraq (ages 5 to 9) or in Alia’s Mission: Saving the Books of Iraq (ages 8 to 12). Continue reading → Continue reading

Today in Mighty Girl history, we mark the birthday of American athlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Considered by many to be the best all-around female athlete in the world and voted by Sports Illustrated for Women as the Greatest Female Athlete of the 20th century, Ms. Joyner-Kersee’s story is one of determination and drive in pursuit of excellence.

Born Jacqueline Joyner in 1962 in East St. Louis, Illinois, to a family of limited means and resources, her path to fame and success was not always a given. However, named after then-First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Joyner family lore says that a grandmother predicted, “Some day this girl will be the first lady of something.”

Forbidden to date until the age of 18, Jackie and her brother, Al (a star athlete in his own right), focused their time and energy on sports at the local community center, and then high school. In addition to academics, she excelled at track, basketball, and volleyball, and ended up receiving a full basketball scholarship to the University of California, Los Angeles. Before long, however, with strong encouragement from assistant coach (and future spouse) Bob Kersee, she switched her athletic focus to training for the Olympics, and specifically for the heptathlon. Continue reading → Continue reading

By Jennifer de Beer, A Mighty Girl Senior Research Intern

Around the world, Women’s History Month is a time to recognize the achievements of women over the course of history. In the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom, the celebration occurs in March, to coincide with International Women’s Day on March 8. In Canada, it corresponds with Persons Day on October 18.

Here at A Mighty Girl, we take pride in highlighting women, girls, and their remarkable accomplishments year-round and feature over 350 youth-oriented biographies of girls and women on our site. This month’s special focus, however, provides us with an opportunity to share their stories with gusto and Mighty Girl flair.

In that spirit, we are pleased to announce "Mighty Girl Heroes: Inspiring the Next Generation of History Makers" -- our month-long campaign to showcase the stories of female trailblazers from around the world and to provide you with resources to share this important history with the children and young people in your lives.

Children, girls and boys both, need to grow up with an intrinsic understanding of what is possible for women. They need to see examples, in real life as well as in their history books, of positive role models demonstrating a wide variety of skills and abilities. Continue reading → Continue reading

By Lili Sandler, A Mighty Girl Senior Research Intern

On this day in Mighty Girl history, acclaimed singer and civil rights pioneer Marian Anderson was born in Philadelphia in 1897. Her musical talent was evident from a young age, and her parents did everything they could to encourage her musical pursuits. Anderson was only 6 when she began performing with the Union Baptist Church, where she was often referred to as “baby contralto”.

Her family was unable to afford piano lessons, so little Marian taught herself to play starting at the age of 8. Dedicated to her church choir, she would rehearse all of the parts to the every song, performing them for her family until they were just right. Her community was so impressed with her commitment that they raised enough money to pay for private lessons with a well-known vocal instructor. Continue reading → Continue reading

Today in A Mighty Girl history, Irena Sendler, one of the great, unsung heroes of the WWII who led a secret operation to successfully smuggle 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, was born in 1910.

Sendler was a Polish Catholic nurse and social worker who began aiding Jews as early as 1939 after the Germans invaded Poland. At first, she helped to create false documents for over 3,000 Jewish families and later joined the Zegota, the underground Polish resistance organization created to aid the country's Jewish population.

In 1943, Sendler became head of Zegota's children's division and used her special access to the Warsaw Ghetto, granted to Social Welfare Department employees to conduct inspections for typhus, to set up a smuggling operation. She and her colleagues began secretly transporting babies and children out of the Ghetto by hiding them in an ambulance with a false bottom or in baskets, coffins, and even potato sacks. Continue reading → Continue reading

By Lili Sandler, A Mighty Girl Senior Research Intern

On this day in Mighty Girl history, Susan B. Anthony, one of the most well-known women in the battle for women’s suffrage in the U.S., was born in 1820. Although she did not live long enough to enjoy the right to vote, she was tireless in her dedication to the cause for over fifty years.

Born to a Quaker family in Massachusetts, Anthony was the second of seven children. All seven were raised to value equality and justice, and Anthony was no exception. She encountered many injustices as a young social activist, all of which paved the way for her work on women’s rights.

As a young adult, she worked as a teacher, earning one-quarter what her male counterparts were earning. Like most Quakers, Anthony and her family were against slavery and worked diligently against it. With the end of the Civil War and slavery, her dedication to women’s rights became her central focus. Continue reading → Continue reading

Image Credit: U.S. Postal Service

On this day in Mighty Girl history, we remember Rosa Parks who was commemorated on this stamp released today on what would have been her 100th birthday. Dubbed “the first lady of Civil Rights” and “the mother of the freedom movement” by the United States Congress, Parks is most often remembered for her refusal to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama in December of 1955. This act of courage and defiance sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, one of the pivotal events in the US Civil Rights Movement.

This was not her first, nor would it be her last, contribution to the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, she had been a member and the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP for 12 years prior to the bus boycott. She also attended the Highlander Folk School, a social justice leadership training school, the summer before refusing to give up her bus seat.

Parks and her husband moved to Michigan shortly after the bus boycott as a result of losing their jobs. There, Parks was hired as receptionist for U.S. Representative John Conyers Detroit office, where she worked until she retired in 1988. Rosa Parks received many awards and accolades in her life, most notably the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Continue reading → Continue reading

Today in Mighty Girl History, Bessie Coleman, the first African-American female pilot, was born in 1892. After hearing stories from pilots returning WWI, Coleman decided that she wanted to learn to fly but no American flight schools would accept her due to her race and gender.

To pursue her dream, Coleman studied French and traveled to France in 1920 to enroll in a French flight school. There, she earned her international pilot license, becoming the first African-American to do so. After returning to the US, she specialized in stunt flying and quickly became a media sensation and a popular draw at airshows, earning the nickname “Queen Bess.”

Though Coleman was tragically killed in a plane crash at the age of 33, her legacy lived on. Following her death in 1926, Bessie Coleman Aero Clubs for African-American aviators appeared across the US. In his book “Black Wings,” Lieutenant William Powell described how Coleman served as an inspiration to many African-American aviators: “Because of Bessie Coleman, we have overcome that which was worse than racial barriers. We have overcome the barriers within ourselves and dared to dream." Continue reading → Continue reading

By Carolyn Danckaert, A Mighty Girl Co-Founder

Today in Mighty Girl history, Alice Stokes Paul, an American suffragist and women’s rights activist, was born in 1885. Paul, along with her friend Lucy Burns, was a driving force behind the passage of the 19th Amendment, which won the right for women to vote.

Paul, who was famously depicted by Hilary Swank in the film Iron Jawed Angels, was raised as a Quaker, a religious sect in which gender equality is a central tenant. As Paul said, “one of their principles was and is equality of the sexes. So I never had any other idea...the principle was always there." This uncompromising core supported her through the long fight to resurrect the suffrage movement, which had been stalled for many years.

Paul organized protests and rallies, including in January of 1917, the first political protest to ever picket the White House. In July 1917, Paul and many other protesters were arrested for "obstructing traffic" and incarcerated at the Occoquan Workhouse. To protest the poor conditions of the women held there, Paul led a hunger strike which resulted in her being force-fed. Press coverage of these abuses, along with on-going protests, strongly influenced the Wilson Administration who declared, in January 1918, that women's suffrage was urgently needed as a "war measure" and asked Congress to act. Continue reading → Continue reading

Today in Mighty Girl History, we remember the contributions of Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist Rita Levi-Montalcini who died today at the age of 103. Born into a Jewish-Italian family in Turin in 1909, Levi-Montalcini's years in medical school coincided with the rise of fascism in Italy and the imposition of anti-Semitic laws which limited her career prospects.

Once WWII broke out, she and her family decided to stay in Italy rather than flee overseas and she built a laboratory in her bedroom to continue her research work. It was in this makeshift laboratory that she began studying the development of chicken embryos; research that laid the underpinning of her later Nobel Prize-winning work on the mechanism of cell growth regulation.

After the Nazi invasion of Italy in 1943, Levi-Montalcini and her family were forced underground and moved to Florence where she worked as a doctor in Allied war camps after the city was liberated. Following the war, in 1946, she moved to the U.S. for more than twenty years to conduct research at Washington University in St. Louis. It was there that she discovered nerve growth factor, a protein which regulates the growth of cells; this discovery was critical to better understanding tumor growth among other conditions. Continue reading → Continue reading