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

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

Yvonne Brathwaite Burke: Political Standout

Yvonne Burke was the first black woman elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from California, serving from 1973-1978. The daughter of a janitor and a real estate agent, the Angeleno native was noted as exceptionally bright by her teachers and was sent to a “model” UCLA college prep school. The only African American student at the school, Yvonne was treated viciously by the other students, but didn’t let that stop her from turning in a stellar performance. Everywhere Yvonne went, she encountered more bigotry, including the women’s law sorority she was turned down by, compelling her to form an alternative women’s law sorority with two Jewish law students. Starting with her election in 1972, Yvonne Brathwaite’s career in Congress was equally outstanding; she was unfailingly supportive of the causes of desegregation, equal employment, and better housing. In ’78, she chose to run for California State Attorney General rather than seek reelection. She currently practices law in Los Angeles. Yvonne is a visionary with the smarts and dignity to rise above the hatred she has personally experienced just for being black, saying, “It’s just a matter of time until we have a black governor and, yes, a black president.” With the election of Barack Obama, she was proven right.

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

Katherine Graham: Katherine the Great

Although Katherine Graham was not a politician, she wielded enormous power in the political arena as owner of the Washington Post, still one of the most important and respected newspapers in the world today. Born Katherine Meyer, she was the daughter of Eugene Meyer, a brilliant French Jew who moved to America and attended Yale, made a fortune in banking and on the stock exchange, and retired a multimillionaire before he was thirty years old!

Katherine’s childhood is a classic silver spoon story, raised by domestic help while her parents maintained the lifestyle of the glittery successes they were. A staunch Republican, Eugene Meyer took on a second career as a public servant and served as an independent thinker, swung to the opposite pole on the left, and earned a degree in journalism. After a brief stint in San Francisco reporting for the now defunct News, Katherine accepted an offer of $29 a week to go and work for the paper Eugene Meyer had bought five years before—the Washington Post.

Katherine fell in love with the publisher of the Post, Philip Graham, and after they wed, they bought the paper from her father for a million dollars. Philip was brilliant and bipolar. He was keenly interested in building a publishing empire, and soon they added the magazine Newsweek to their holdings. Philip also dabbled in the high stakes game of politics and became involved in the very inner circles of power on Capitol Hill, convincing the young John Fitzgerald Kennedy to go with Lyndon Johnson from Texas as his running mate for the presidency. Then, in 1963, he committed suicide after a manic depressive episode. Katherine became a widow and responsible for both Newsweek and the Post in one day.

Katherine battled her shyness and rose to the occasion, becoming the publisher of the Post. Diving in feet first, she saw that the Post had been drifting along listlessly. It needed, Katherine believed, a charismatic editor to become a first-rate example of journalistic excellence. She found him in Ben Bradlee, a hard charging investigative reporter whom she quickly named managing editor.

In 1971, the Post received worldwide attention when President Richard Nixon slapped a restraining order on the paper for the publishing of the Pentagon Papers, revealing the United States government’s involvement in the political machinery of Southeast Asia. Graham refused to back down and later emerged the victor in the skirmish when the Supreme Court decided in the Post’s favor.

One year later, the Post took the spotlight again for breaking the story of the Watergate scandal. Graham financed the Watergate investigation and stood firmly behind her editor and reporters against the White House’s retaliatory measures. Her sheroism in the face of enormous pressure from friends and political players to back off from Watergate was simply astounding. She remained steadfast while the Post’s stock plummeted and so-called friends disappeared rather than be associated with the woman who challenged Richard Nixon and, ultimately, brought him and his house of cards down. When she retired in 1991, she was one of only two women heads of Fortune 500 companies.

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

Kate Millett: The “Lavender Menace”

The second wave of feminism had many facets. While Betty Friedan argued for economic equality, in her 1970s book Sexual Politics, Kate Millett advocated a more militant revolution and boldly decried patriarchy with a call for a radical revision of roles for women. Millett represented the “lavender menace” uptight Americans feared—lesbians! Wild woman politico Millett minced no words in her crusade against sexism, even criticizing missionary style intercourse as one of the evils of keeping women down. She has gone on to write several more books guaranteed to shock in some form or fashion: The Prostitution Papers, an exploration and defense of hooking; Flying, a frank account of her love life; and Sita, about the death of a lesbian affair. She has also made a well-regarded film, Three Lives, and revealed her institutionalization for mental illness in an eye-opening account. According to Gayle Graham Yates in Makers of Modern Culture, Kate Millett is the best known American feminist outside America because of her newsmaking trip to Iran to work on behalf of Iranian women’s rights ending in her expulsion from the country by the Ayatollah Khomeni.

“Patriarchy decrees that the status of both child and mother is primarily or ultimately dependent on the male.”

— Kate Millett

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

Betty’s Personal Sheroes

From a 1984 radio interview: “I admire Barbara Jordan [and] Martha Griffiths, the lieutenant governor of Michigan…I have in some ways, great admiration for Indira Gandhi…After the winning of the vote in 1920, until my Feminine Mystique in 1963, women’s history was almost blotted out of the national consciousness. We didn’t study it in school. So, the women that are now, in my opinion, heroines of history before me: Mary Wollstonecraft in England, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Fuller, Susan B. Anthony, [and] Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the United States, and their like in other countries…Eleanor Roosevelt, of course…I criticized, but also admired a great deal; Margaret Mead, Abigail Adams, the wife of John Adams, one of the first Presidents of the United States…I always adored Collette, and the idea of Collette and the writings of Collette. I love the imagery of Madame de Stael, who would be doing all the things at once the way women have to do them. She would be having a pedicure, having her nails polished, nursing her baby at her breast, dictating a menu to
her cook, waving goodbye to her lover going off to the Napoleonic Wars and writing at the same time, writing her stories, her memoirs…I love that image. But the images of women we are beginning to have now, we are only [now] discovering that they are as a result of the women’s movement. We, who have made the women’s movement, had to create ourselves and help each other create ourselves as a new kind of woman.”

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

Betty Friedan: Mad Housewife

When Betty Friedan submitted her article in 1956 about the frustrations women experience in their traditional roles as housewife and mother, she received rejections from McCalls, The Ladies’s Home Journal, and every other publication she approached. The editors, all men at that day and age, were pretty disapproving, too, going so far as to say any woman would have to be “sick” not to be completely satisfied in her rightful role!

But Betty knew that she and millions of women like her were not sick, just stifled. Betty nee Goldstein Friedan put aside her dream of being a psychologist for fear of becoming a spinster, instead choosing to marry and work for a small newspaper. She was fired from her job when she got pregnant for the second time, and began, like most middle-class women of her day and age, to devote herself full-time to the work of running a home and family, what she called “the dream of life, supposedly, of American women at that time.” But after a decade of such devotion, she still wasn’t happy and theorized she wasn’t alone. A graduate of Smith College, she decided to poll her fellow alumnae. Most of her classmates, who had given up promising careers to devote themselves to their families, felt incomplete; many were deeply depressed. They felt guilty for not being completely content sacrificing their individual dreams for their families, each woman certain that her dissatisfaction was a personal failing. Betty called this “the problem that has no name” and so she gave it one, “the feminine mystique.”

Over the next five years, her rejected article evolved into a book as she interviewed hundreds of women around the country. The Feminine Mystique explored the issue, criticizing American advertisers’ exclusively domestic portrayal of women and issuing a call to action for women to say no to the housewife role and adopt a “new life plan” in which they could have both families and careers. With its publication in 1963, The Feminine Mystique hit America like a thunderbolt; the publisher W.W.I. Norton had printed only 2,000 copies, never anticipating the sale of 3 million copies in hardcover alone!

Unintentionally, Betty had started a revolution; she began to be flooded with letters from women saying her book gave them the courage to change their lives and pursue equal access to employment opportunities and other equality issues. Ultimately, the response to Betty’s challenge created the momentum that led to the formalization of the second wave of the U.S. women’s movement in 1966 with the organization of NOW—the National Organization for Women.

Betty was NOW’s first president and took her role as a leader in the women’s movement seriously, traveling to lectures and campaigns for change, engendering many of the freedoms women now enjoy. She pushed for equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, and access to birth control and legalized abortion. In 1970, she quit NOW to fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, and in 1975, was named Humanist of the Year. Of her, author Barbara Seaman wrote, “Betty Friedan is to the women’s movement what Martin Luther King was to blacks.”

In 1981, responding to critics who claimed feminism ignored the importance of relationships and families to most women, she penned The Second Stage, in which she called on men and women to work together to make both the home and the workplace havens for both genders. Before her death in 2006, Betty was making another revolution with her book, The Fountain of Age, raising consciousness about society’s stereotypes about aging thirty years after she, as futurist Alvin Toffler so aptly put it, “pulled the trigger of history” with The Feminine Mystique.

“It’s been a lot of fun making the revolution.” — Betty Friedan

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

Lee Tai-Young: Woman Warrior

Lee Tai-Young was the first Korean woman ever to become a lawyer and a judge as well as the founder of the first Korean legal aid center. She was born in what is now North Korea in 1914, the daughter of a gold miner. She received a degree in home economics from Ewha Womans University, a Methodist college, and married a Methodist minister in 1936. Lee had dreams of becoming a lawyer when she came to Seoul to study at Ewha, but when her husband fell under suspicion of being a spy for the U.S. and was jailed for sedition by the Japanese colonial government in the early 1940s, she had to go to work to maintain her family. She took jobs as a school teacher and a radio singer, and took in sewing and washing as well.

After the war, Lee continued her studies with the support of her husband. In 1946, she became the first woman to attend Seoul National University and earned her law degree in 1949. She was the first woman ever to pass the National Judicial Examination in 1952. Five years later she founded the Women’s Legal Counseling Center, a law practice that provided services to poor women. Lee, along with her husband, were participants in the 1976 Myongdong Declaration, which called for the return of civil liberties to Korean citizens. Because of her political views, she was arrested as an enemy of President Park Chung-hee, and in 1977 received a three-year suspended sentence along with a loss of civil liberties including being automatically disbarred for ten years.

Her law practice evolved into the Korea Legal Aid Center for Family Relations and served more than 10,000 clients per year. She authored 15 books on women’s issues, beginning with a 1957 guide to Korea’s divorce system. In 1972, she published Commonsense in Law for Women; other notable titles include Born A Woman and The Woman of North Korea. She also translated Eleanor Roosevelt’s book On My Own into Korean. In 1975, the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation chose her as the recipient of their Community Leadership Award; she was given an award by the International Legal Aid Association in 1978. She received international recognition from many quarters, including an honorary law doctorate from Drew University in Madison, NJ in 1981. In 1984, she published a memoir, Dipping the Han River Out with a Gourd, four years before she passed away at the ripe old age of 84.

“No society can or will prosper without the cooperation of women.”

— Lee Tai-Young

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