Rashmi Misra: Taking Action for a Cause

Rashmi Misra grew up in a military family, so she moved around, attending several schools, but completed her schooling in Delhi, India. She went to Lady Sri Ram College and studied German and public relations. Concurrently, she also studied Odissi dance, an ancient form of Indian classical dance that came originally from Hindu temples. As a young woman, she was employed as a member of the ground staff by Lufthansa Airlines. In 1985, she began teaching a class for five girls at her home, which was then on the campus of IIT Delhi; this was the beginning of what would become VIDYA. As she describes it, “…I realized that the children were thirsty to learn, but the opportunities and means were missing. I went to slums to find children and educate them… Educating the underprivileged kept me motivated.”

After she married, she emigrated to the United States. She built the small education project she had started into VIDYA, a major nonprofit that employs over 300 people and has made a difference to more than 220,000 families in the three decades since then. The NGO works with people in the extremely disadvantaged neighborhoods of Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai, supplying schools as well as remedial education; literacy, computer, and other skills training; and microfinance and other support on behalf of social entrepreneurship. Much of VIDYA’s work still focuses on helping children, as well as women entrepreneurs; but supporting women and children transforms entire communities. Misra found – and inspired – many volunteers and carried out fundraising over the years to sustain VIDYA’s efforts. Visit their web page to learn more about the fruits of her work – and never doubt that one woman who cares can make a difference: http://vidya-india.org/

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

Hilda Solis: Pioneering Politician

Hilda Solis was born in 1957 and raised in La Puente, CA; her Nicaraguan and Mexican immigrant parents had met in citizenship class and married in 1953. Her father had been a Teamsters shop steward in Mexico; he again organized for the union at the Quemetco battery recycling plant, but his efforts for the workers did not prevent him from being poisoned there by lead. Hilda’s mother was also active in the union during her years working at Mattel once all the children were in school.

At La Puente High School, students were not necessarily expected to try to better themselves through higher education; one of Hilda’s guidance counselors told her mother, “Your daughter is not college material. Maybe she should follow the career of her older sister and become a secretary.” Fortunately, another counselor supported Hilda’s applying to college, and went so far as to visit her at her house to help her fill out a college application. Hilda earned a bachelor’s in political science from California State Polytechnic University and went on to obtain a Master’s in public administration at USC.

Solis interned and edited a newsletter in the Carter Administration’s White House Office of Hispanic Affairs. In Washington, DC, she met her future husband, Sam Sayyad. She returned to the west coast, and in 1982 became the Director of the California Student Opportunity and Access Program, which helped disadvantaged young people prepare for college. Friends urged her to consider running for elective office, and after a successful run in 1985, she served for some years on the Rio Hondo Community College District. Solis also became State Senator Art Torres’ chief of staff. In 1992 she ran for the California State Assembly and won with the support of Barbara Boxer, Gloria Molina, and her mother, who notably fed her campaign volunteers on homemade burritos.

In 1994, Art Torres was nominated to a statewide position as insurance commissioner, and Solis ran for and won the State Senate seat he vacated. She was the first woman of Hispanic descent ever to serve in the State Senate as well as the youngest member of the Senate at the time. She authored domestic violence prevention bills, and she stood up for workers with a bill to raise the minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.75, which was massively opposed by business and vetoed by Governor Pete Wilson. Solis didn’t let that stop her; she successfully led a ballot initiative drive, using $50,000 from her own campaign money. When the initiative passed, others knew that she was someone to be reckoned with. Similar initiatives were enacted in other states on the wave of this victory.

Solis worked to enact an environmental justice law to protect low-income and minority neighborhoods from being repeatedly targeted for new landfills and pollution sources, and in 2000, she received the JFK Library Profile in Courage Award for this work, the first woman ever to win it. She also called out garment sweatshop operators for their violations of labor conditions, and was an advocate for the people on education and health care issues; 2000 was also the year that she successfully ran for Congress. In 2008, she became the first Hispanic woman to serve in the U.S. Cabinet when President Obama tapped her for the position of Labor Secretary. After serving for the duration of his first term, she decided to resign and returned to California, where she is presently an L.A. County Supervisor.

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

Anita Hill: We Always Believed You

Nobody could have guessed that the televised Senate hearings on the nominations of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court would be the top-rated show of 1991. America’s collective mouth hung open in amazement
at the brouhaha that brewed up around Judge Thomas’ worthiness based on the charges of sexual harassment by one Anita Hill. The hearings catapulted the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace into the most hotly debated and analyzed topic of the day, one that still reverberates years later. Prior to Anita’s brave stand, sexual harassment was mainly swept under the industrial gray carpeting of most offices, but she singlehandedly forced it to the very center of the national agenda.

The nation and, indeed, the world, watched transfixed as the incredibly poised Anita revealed her experiences with Clarence Thomas as a coworker. With great dignity, she testified that Thomas kept after her to go out with him, referred to himself as “an individual who had a very large penis and…used a name…in pornographic material,” and asked her to see “this woman (who) has this kind of breasts that measure this size,” in a seemingly endless barrage of ludicrous and lugubrious insults to her as a fellow professional. Senate hearings, usually desert dry and devoid of tabloid titillation, suddenly featured long discussions including the terms “penis” and “pubic hair.”

The prelude to the media circus took place when the president announced his choice of “black Horatio Alger” Clarence Thomas as the Supreme Court replacement for the retiring Thurgood Marshall. Anita Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, contacted Harriet Grant, the Judiciary Committee’s nominations counsel. She told Grant that Thomas had harassed her in a sexual and inappropriate manner when she had worked as his assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She had, in fact, quit the EEOC because of his behavior and gone into academia. Grant cc’d the senatorial committee on the allegations, but the Senate whipped through the approval process with nary a word about Hill’s report and prepared to vote for confirmation of Thomas. Then journalist shero Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio and New York Newsday’s Timothy Phelps broke the story wide open to a shocked public. Seven women from the House of Representatives marched in protest to the Senate building, demanding of the sheepish Senate committee to know why the committee had ignored Hill’s complaint.

Nothing in Hill’s background could have prepared her for the media onslaught. Born in 1956 as the youngest of thirteen children, she was raised in rural Oklahoma in a deeply religious family. An outstanding student, she graduated as valedictorian of her integrated high school, earned top honors in college, and was one of only eleven black students out of a class of 160 at Yale University Law School.

Even through Anita Hill had been promised immunity and total confidentiality, she appeared before the committee in a special session before the scrutiny of the nation. The Judiciary Committee was dismissive, as only Old Boys can be, of Anita Hill and her testimony, even going so far as to ask her if she was taking her revenge as the “woman scorned,” and they suggested that she was a patsy for radical liberals and feminists. While Anita’s allegations were ultimately disregarded and Clarence Thomas was voted in, Anita’s grace under pressure won many admirers who protested the Thomas appointment. The controversy remained headline news for months; polls of public opinion showed Anita Hill gaining and Bush losing points as I Believe You Anita! bumper stickers appeared on thousands of cars across America. For her outspokenness, she was awarded the Ida B. Wells Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women and named one of Glamour’s Ten Women of the Year in 1991.

Anita Hill’s courage of conviction made her a shero of the late twentieth century. In her words, “I felt I had to tell the truth. I could not keep silent.”

“You just have to tell the truth and that’s the most anyone can expect from you and if you get that opportunity, you will have accomplished something.”

— Anita Hill

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

Megyn Kelly: Truth Teller

Megyn Kelly, born in 1970, is a journalist and political commentator. She earned a degree in political science from Syracuse University, and while an undergraduate, investigated sexual harassment cases. She then went on to obtain a J.D. from Albany Law School. After some time as an associate at a Chicago corporate defense firm, Kelly moved to Washington D.C. and was hired by ABC affiliate WJLA in 2003 as a general assignment television reporter. In 2004 she made a move to Fox News, where she was the contributor of legal segments to Special Report with Brit Hume as well as hosting her own segment during Weekend Live, Kelly’s Court. In 2010 she became the host of her own afternoon show, America Live. During the 2012 presidential election contest, in the evening of election day, Fox News made a projection that Obama would win re-election after partial returns had been released. When Republican strategist Karl Rove took issue with the projection, Kelly asked him, “Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better? Or is this real?” This drew attention to political independent Kelly. She left America Live in 2013, but after the birth of her third child that year, returned to Fox News as the host of her new nightly program, The Kelly File, which has at times occupied the number one ratings spot among Fox News shows. Megyn Kelly has drawn a lot of controversy over the years due to her outspoken persona, including sparring with candidate Trump; she responded to his criticism of her by saying that she would not “apologize for doing good journalism”.

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

Esther Ibanga: The Peacemaker

Esther Ibanga is a Nigerian pastor and dedicated community organizer for peace in conflict-ridden regions who has received the Niwano Peace Prize for her advocacy of peace and unity in Jos, Nigeria. She was born in 1961
in Kagbu, Nigeria, the seventh of ten children, eight of them girls. Both of her parents were very religious; her father was a policeman who won awards for his honesty and bravery, and her mother went on many mission trips as part of her involvement with her church. Ibanga earned a degree in business administration in 1983 from Ahmadu Bello University, and after serving the mandatory year in the National Youth Service Corps, she went to work for
the Central Bank of Nigeria, where she eventually gained a position as a manager. She left the bank to become the first female church leader in the city of Jos, Nigeria, in 1995.

In 2010, Pastor Ibanga founded the Women Without Walls Initiative in response to the constant state of crisis in Plateau State Nigeria since 2000. WoWWI is an NGO that includes Nigerian women from all walks of life and provides advocacy, training for women in building peace, mediation between warring parties, help for people displaced within Nigeria, assistance to the poor, empowerment of women and youth, and development projects in underprivileged areas to prevent grievances from sparking violent conflicts. Her hard work and dedication has helped to restore peace between Christian and Muslim communities in Jos North, a potentially volatile flashpoint. Her approach is to empower women, both inside and outside of Nigeria, to successfully strive to advance the status of women and children of all ethnicities, religions, and political leanings – to allow women to realize themselves as “natural agents of change”.

Pastor Ibanga was the leader of a march in February 2010 to the Jos government house in protest of the Dogon Nahawa ethno-religious crisis, in which many lives, including those of women and children, had been lost; more than 100,000 women dressed in black participated. When 276 teenaged girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram terrorists from their school in Chibok, Nigeria, WoWWI joined in the Bring Back Our Girls campaign with other women leaders. Rallies crossing religious and cultural lines were held to demand that the government expedite the girls’ release. Pastor Ibanga continues to campaign for the freeing of the 113 girls who are still held captive and speaks internationally on the issue.

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

Corazon Aquino: Mother in the Limelight

Hot on the heels of anti-shero Imelda Marcos (or should I saw hot on the 1,600 heels; remember the 800 pairs of shoe scandal?) came Corazon Aquino, a political neophyte who quietly and competently took the helm of the volatile islands nation in the aftermath of the Marcos regime.

Cory didn’t set out to run a country. Educated in the Catholic school system in the United States and the Philippines, she abandoned higher education to marry Benigno Aquino, a promising politician, and served as his helpmate and mother of their five children. Benigno opposed the martial law of Marcos and was jailed in 1972; when he was released, the family fled to the United States, where they lived until 1983. By this time Marcos was losing control of the reins of power, and Benigno decided to return to help agitate for his resignation.

As the Aquinos stepped off the plane, Benigno was assassinated. In that moment, Cory had to decide—turn tail or take up the mantle of her slain husband. She chose the latter, uniting the dissidents against Marcos. In 1986, she ran for the presidency of the Philippines, abandoning the speeches that had been prepared for her to talk of the suffering that Marcos had caused her in life. Although both sides declared victory, Marcos soon fled and Cory assumed power.

After the tabloid dictatorship style of the Marcos family, the widow-turned-stateswoman stunned the world with her no-nonsense manner and absolute fearlessness. Corazon Cojuangco Aquino stood fast amid the corrupt circus of Filipino politics even though coup after coup attempted to remove her from office. She quickly earned the respect of her enemies when they discovered it wasn’t so easy to knock the homemaker and mother of five from her post as president of the explosively unstable nation. And she refused to live in the opulent palace the Marcos had built, proclaiming it a symbol of oppression of the poor masses by the wealthy few, and chose to live in a modest residence nearby.

However, longterm leadership proved difficult. Although she was credited with drafting a new democratic constitution that was ratified by a landslide popular vote, her support dwindled in the face of chronic poverty, an overstrong military, and governmental corruption. Her presidency ended in 1992.

For her achievements and courage, Cory Aquino has received numerous honorary degrees from sources as diverse as Fordham University and Waseda University in Tokyo. Named Time magazine’s Woman of the Year, Cory is also the recipient of many awards and distinctions, including the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award, the United Nations Silver Medal, and the Canadian International Prize for Freedom. Acknowledged by the Women’s International Center for her “perseverance and dedication,” Corazon Aquino was honored as an International Leadership Living Legacy who “faced adversity with courage and directness.”

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

Phoolan Devi: India’s Bandit Queen

While many Indians reviled their own elected Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, they embraced Phoolan Devi, an outlaw believed to have killed sixty people in central India’s Chambal Valley. It is difficult to separate fact from fiction in the story; the male outlaw figure is a common subject of North Indian folklore, and Phoolan’s tale has many of the same elements. This version is based on the story reported by Mala Sen, in her fascinating and assiduously researched biography of Devi.

Born in 1956 into a boatman subcaste, Phoolan’s (which means “flowerlike” in Hindi, but she was more like a steel magnolia!) first insurrection took place when she and her sister wanted to sit in the mustard field they had worked in all day to “stop and smell the mustard blossoms.” When their higher caste landlord beat them up because they wouldn’t instantly leave, Phoolan watched her sister and parents nearly bleed to death. When she refused at age ten to put up with an arranged marriage to a man twenty years older, her traditionally minded village couldn’t deal with it, and Phoolan fell victim to kidnapping by a group of dacoits; bandits to you and me. The kidnapping was just as violent as you might expect a gang of marauders to be, and she was dragged, kicked, slapped, and suffered indignities of guns aimed at her private parts and a threat to cut off her nose. It is a real testament to Phoolan’s strength that she wasn’t utterly broken by the repeated rapes. Phoolan’s family was unable to get any help from authorities, who refused to waste their time looking for their rebellious “good- for-nothing” daughter. Meanwhile, the press had a field day with the story, inventing sensational details of their own to make for a good read in the papers. One such tall tale involved Phoolan engineering her own kidnapping because she wanted to be with the dacoits.

Whatever happened, one year later, Phoolan took charge of the gang through her own strength of will and personal power. Mala Sen also reports that the gang (thanks to the execution of the rapists by Phoolan’s champion, Vikram Mallah) turned into post-Raj Robin Hoods, giving stolen money to elderly and poor Indians. Well-embroidered accounts of Phoolan Devi’s exploits were soon making her the second most famous woman in India after Indira Gandhi, who urged peaceful measures in dealing with the headline-grabbing outlaw girl.

Soon, songs about the “Rebel of the Ravines” were being composed, statues of Phoolan Devi were sold in the market next to Krishna and Kali, and millions of Indians begged for her life to be spared in the “manhunt” to bring “The Bandit Queen” in after the alleged massacre of twenty-two Hindu men by Devi’s gang. Thanks to

the national attention, Phoolan’s capture took place safely in front of thousands of witnesses, and she kept up her spirits in prison, where she gave interviews, prayed, and walked unshackled. (She spent eleven years in prison without ever being charged.) India was even more delighted when they finally saw the Phoolan Devi they’d heard so much about; she is strikingly beautiful, with dark, commanding eyes and a magnificent smile. (Phoolan’s fairy tale-like story contains a tragic footnote, exemplifying the place of women in a societal admixture of medieval and modern. In prison, she suffered a ruptured ovarian cyst and the presiding doctor performed a hysterectomy, admittedly to prevent “Phoolan Devi breeding more Phoolan Devis!”)

Her legend lives on around the globe and Mala Sen’s excellent biography has been made into an acclaimed feature film. In India and England, she has become a folk shero. At her surrender, she is reported to have said, “If I had money, I would build a house with rooms as large as the hall of this prison. But I know this is all a dream. If any woman were to go through my experience, then she too would not be able to think of a normal life. What do I know, except cutting grass, and using a rifle?”

Phoolan was freed and all charges against her were dropped in 1994. In 1996, she ran for and was elected to the Samajwadi Party, but the prejudicial odds against a lower caste woman, even an internationally famous one, were against her in the subcontinent. In August of 1997, Phoolan threatened to kill herself when the criminal charges against her were again raised. Though, tragically, she was assassinated in 2001, her colorful legend lives on.

“She was walking tall, taunting them all, answering the call…with her rifle by her side”

— a popular Indian Phoolan Devi street song

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

Elizabeth Warren: Nevertheless, She Persisted

Born in 1949, Elizabeth Warren grew up in a middle- class Oklahoma City family with three older brothers. At age 13, young Elizabeth started waiting tables to help her parents out after her father had a heart attack. A star member of her high school debate team, she won the title of “Oklahoma’s top high school debater.” This took her to George Washington University on a debate scholarship, but two years later she left to marry Jim Warren, her high school sweetheart. The couple moved to Texas when he found a job as an engineer at NASA, and Elizabeth graduated from the University of Houston in 1970 with a degree in speech pathology and audiology. She taught disabled children at a Texas school for a year before again relocating for her husband’s work, this time to New Jersey.

After the arrival of daughter Amelia, Elizabeth enrolled at Rutgers School of Law–Newark when her daughter turned two. Shortly before receiving her J.D. in 1976, she became pregnant with their second child. After passing the bar, Elizabeth worked from home, specializing in real estate closings and wills in her new law practice. They divorced in 1978; Elizabeth later remarried but kept her surname (under which she was practicing law at that time).

Warren lectured at Rutgers School of Law–Newark for a couple of years, then moved to the University of Houston Law Center where she became the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in 1980. In 1987 she became a fulltime professor at U. Penn’s law school, where she obtained an endowed chair in 1990. She became the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School in 1995; by 2011, she was the only tenured professor of law there who had gone to law school at a public university in the U.S. Warren assumed an advisory role at the National Bankruptcy Review Commission in 1995, and with others worked to oppose proposed laws which would severely limit consumers’ rights to file for bankruptcy, efforts which in the end did not prove successful. From 2006-2010, she was on the FDIC Advisory Committee on Economic Inclusion. Warren is also a member of the National Bankruptcy Conference, an independent group which advises Congress on bankruptcy law. Her work in academia and as an advocate spurred the formation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2011, the year that she declared her intention to seek nomination as the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2012; she won the nomination and the election, and became the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts.

While campaigning, Warren made a speech at Andover that went viral; she replied to a charge that asking the rich to pay more taxes is “class warfare” by pointing out that no one becomes wealthy in the U.S. without the benefit of infrastructure funded by the taxpayers: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. …You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work that the rest of us paid for. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is, you take a hunk of that and pay it forward for the next kid who comes along.”

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

Magaret Thatcher: Iron Maiden

Margaret Thatcher may have drawn fire from critics for her staunch conservativism, but she has the respect of the world for her no-nonsense strength and for her rise from greengrocer’s daughter to the first woman Prime Minister of Great Britain. MT earned all her laurels through sheer hard work, studying diligently to get into Oxford where she studied chemistry and got her first taste of politics. Upon graduation, she got a law degree, married Dennis Thatcher, and had twins in short order. Her passion for conservative politics increased, and she impressed party members with her zeal and talent for debate. She won a seat in the House of Commons in 1959, and her rise in the party ranks was steady and sure, leading to her election in the eighties as Prime Minister, the first woman ever to head a major Western democracy. Vehemently anti- Communist and anti-waste, she curtailed government with a singular fervor, surprising everyone by going to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Tough as nails, Margaret explains her modus operandi thusly: “I’ve got a fantastic stamina and great physical strength, and I have a woman’s abilitiy to stick to a job and get on with it when everyone else walks off and leaves.”

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media

Indira Ghandi: Daughter of Destiny

Indira Nehru Gandhi’s life mirrors the divided country she governed as the first woman Prime Minister of India. She inherited a political consciousness from her nationalist grandfather Motilal Nehru and her father, India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The Nehrus are sometimes called India’s royal dynasty, but this is a contradiction of the very ideals the Nehru family and the peaceful revolutionary Mohandas K. Gandhi believed in as they worked to end England’s colonial rule over India.

As a girl, Indira witnessed up close the birth of modern, independent India under the leadership of Gandhi and her relatives. The Nehrus were a wealthy family who were moved by meeting Mohandas in 1919 to give up all their possessions and join in the struggle for independence. Indira endured the frequent jailings of Jawaharlal (and later, her mother) for nationalist activities. The young girl’s role model was Joan of Arc; later she told of playing with dolls to whom she assigned patriotic roles in the fight to free India from their foreign rulers. Indira’s childhood was unusual, by any means, often accompanying her father in his travels and meeting luminaries such as Albert Einstein and Ernst Toller. Indira also organized The Monkey Brigade for preteen revolutionaries and was later beaten cruelly for marching carrying India’s flag. She and her family often visited Gandhi, who was “always present in my life; he played an enormous role in my development.”

Indira suffered depression, anxiety, and illness from her unsettled life, and at age twenty-two married Feroze Gandhi, a family friend who was a Parsee, a member of a small religious sect, and not considered appropriate for Indira, who was of the Brahmin, or priestly, caste. Arrested for their nationalist activities, both Indira and Feroze spent nine months in jail, which, Indira claimed, was the most important event of her life, strengthening her political resolve.

Upon the deaths of their great leader Gandhi and the continued bloodshed during the Partition dividing India into Hindu India and the new Muslim state of Pakistan, Indira joined India’s Congress party and began to forge her own political sensibility. When India gained independence in 1947, her father became Prime Minister; because he was a widower, he needed Indira to act as his official hostess. During the time of her father’s multiple strokes, Indira was tacitly acting as Prime Minister. Upon his death in 1964, Indira became president of the India National Congress. After her father’s successor Lal Bahdur Shastri’s brief ministry and death from heart failure, Indira won the election by a landslide and became the leader of the world’s largest democracy, a leader of a country where women’s rights were not a top priority. Immediately she became a role model for millions of India’s women, traditionally subservient to men.

Indira inherited a land where starvation, civil wars, severe inflation, and religious revolts were a daily reality. She constantly endangered her health by working sixteen hour days trying to meet the needs of the second most populated country on earth. Her political fortunes rose and fell; she was booted out of office in 1977, only to be reelected a few years later to her fourth term as prime minister. Her controversial birth-control program is overlooked oftentimes in the criticisms that she traded political favors in order to hang onto the ministry.

Indira was constantly caught in between the warring factions and divisions of India’s various provinces and interests, and the history of her ministry reads like a veritable laundry list of riots, uprisings, and revolutions all played out on partisan quicksand. Her assassination demonstrates this fully. In 1919, British troops had massacred thousands of Sikhs, a proud warrior caste, in their sacred place of worship—the Golden Temple of Amritsar Sixty-five years later, Amritsar again ran red with the blood of Sikh extremists attempting to create a stronghold in which to make their demand for greater autonomy. When the Indian army invaded and seized back the temple, the sparks of anger blazed out of control. Across India, Sikhs were cursing the name of Ghandi, including some of her personal security guards. Four months later, Indira was shot to death by a Sikh in her garden, where she was about to be interviewed by Peter Ustinov. Her son, Rajiv, became the next Prime Minister and met an equally violent end when a Sri Lankan Tamil woman leapt onto him and detonated a bomb she had strapped to herself.

Indira Gandhi’s life is difficult to fully comprehend without a grasp of Indian history. Perhaps the deepest understanding of her comes through consideration of her chosen role model, Joan of Arc, a model for self-sacrifice who places the interests of her country above the value of her own life, and as a woman warrior in a battle of religious politics pitting men against men. Indira Gandhi’s own insistence to reporters who wanted to talk about her uniqueness as a woman Prime Minister speaks volumes as well: “I am not a woman. I am a human being.”

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media