Random Musings: A Blog Curated by beYOUteous — women empowerment RSS

Helen Keller lost her vision and became mute February 1882. She worked on behalf of the blind, campaigning that the major cause of blindness in infants was a condition called ophthalma neonatarum.

Cleopatra ruled an empire that included Egypt, Cyprus, part of modern-day Libya and other territories in the Middle East. She first ascended the throne in 51 B.C. with her brother Ptolemy XIII as co-monarch. Following her return to Alexandria at 21-years-old, her surviving half-brother, Ptolemy XIV, was elevated to the position of pharaoh at about age 12.  She was the first Ptolemaic queen with her head and name minted on coins.

As a child, Frida was stricken with polio in her right leg at the age of six. Despite this handicap, she played soccer, boxed, wrestled, and became a champion swimmer. She spoke and wrote English, loved to use foul language in Spanish, loved floor length native Mexican dresses, and similar to Anne Frank, she kept a diary, but written in the last decade of her life.

Anne Frank was born Annaliese Marie Frank in Frankfurt, Germany. Her original red and white checkered diary was a birthday gift. Her family was sent to Auschwitz in 1944, the last shipment of Jews to leave Holland. She would die from typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp before turning 16, two weeks before the camp was liberated and two months before the war ended.

Physicist/chemist Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and the only woman to have won the Nobel Prize twice; for physics in 1903, and chemistry in 1911. During her lifetime, she would discover both polonium and radium. In 1994, a new element, Curium, would be named after her and husband, Pierre Curie.