The Women’s Rights Movement records beginning when Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was invited to tea on July 13, 1848.  This is one of many historical moments when women made a stand to question why human lives were being unfairly constricted.  Women have been battling for peoples’ rights for centuries.  Here is a just a few shouts out to some of our conquering Heroines:

Greece 400 BC – Agnodice, faced the death penalty practising medicine.

Mexico 1691 – Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz defended women’s rights to education proclaiming “one can perfectly well philosophize while cooking supper.”

Russia 1836 – Anna Filosofova co-founded a society supporting the poor, including affordable housing and decent work for women.

New Zealand 1893 – Kate Sheppard petitioned 32,000 signatures leading to self-governing giving women voting rights.

Japan 1911 – Raichō Hiratsuka co-founded Japan’s first all-women run literary journal, challenging women’s traditional roles at home. 

Egypt 1951 – Doria Shafik alongside 1500 women, stormed parliament demanding full political rights, pay equality and reforms to personal status laws.

England 1951 – Rosalind Franklin paved the way for the discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure through the revolutionary use of X-ray diffraction.

Guatemala 1960 – Rigoberta Menchú campaigned for social justice, ethno-cultural reconciliation and indigenous peoples’ rights.

USA 1973 – Billy Jean King threatened to boycott the US Open unless women were given equal prize money.

India 1990 – Vandana Shiva formed Navdanya to conserve unique strains of seed crops and to educate farmers on eco-diversity and created a program to empower women to protect the livelihoods of their communities.

Botswana 1992 – Unity Dow won a legal case enabling women married to non-citizens the right to confer nationality to their children.

Zimbabwe – 2016 – Loceness Mudzuru and Ruvimbo Tsopodzi sued the government on child marriage before the age of 18.

We women continually work for equal rights with much support whether from the unity of one or the many.  This work says, no matter how passive resistant women might be perceived we stand up and fight over and over again and will not stop until everyone regardless of race, colour, sex, language, religion, political opinion, social origin, or other statusshares the equality that will be.