Interesting Women

Baroness Valerie Amos, recently appointed the United Nations' Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, was the first black woman to sit in the British Cabinet. She was born in 1954 in Guyana....

Vera, Lady Terrington was one of the first women to enter parliament, but was also the first woman MP to sue a newspaper for the way in which it portrayed...

Nancy Astor was the first woman to take her seat in the UK parliament. She won her constituency of Plymouth Sutton in a by-election in 1919, when her husband, Waldorf became...

Catherine Margaret Ashton or Baroness Ashton of Upholland was born in Lancashire. After gaining a degree in economics at the University of London, Baroness Ashton has had a varied career...

Despite frequent death threats and assassination attempts, Malalai Joya is resolute in pursuing a real democracy for the people of Afghanistan.   Joya was born in Afghanistan in 1978, her father was...

Born in Hamburg, Angela Merkel grew up in a rural part of East Germany, took a degree in physics from the University of Leipzig, and then worked as an academic...

Shirin Edabi is an Iranian lawyer, human rights campaigner and democracy activist. In 1975, she became the first woman judge in Iran, but, 4 years later, conservative Islamic clerics forced...

One of the many dangers of life in Colombia is that of being taken hostage, and thousands of people are now held by the marxist guerilla group FARC in the...

Ding Zilin was a professor of philospohy at Beijing University, but, following the death of her seventeen-year-old son in Tienanen Square in 1989 and the foundation of the Tienanmen...