In pre-revolutionary Russia, aristocratic women had little choice but to be expected to become faithful wives and devoted mothers, their lives revolving around domesticity and family duties. However, the Marxist revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai showed that it was possible to follow a different path. At the age of 27, she joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour …

„Ni una menos! Vivas nos queremos!” (“Not one [woman] less! We want to stay alive!”) This “collective scream against machista violence”[1] is born in Argentina, a country where every 30 hours a woman is killed. In 1995, Susana Chávez, a Mexican poet, was the first to protest the femicides in Ciudad Juárez, writing the sentence …

1965, Sicily, Italy: a young woman named Franca Viola, abducted and raped for a week, had the courage to publicly refuse to marry her rapist, thus becoming the first Italian woman to defy a long-standing legal and cultural tradition that was harmful to women – the matrimonio riparatore (literally rehabilitating marriage, a sort of “marry-your-rapist” …

Margaret Hamilton is an American computer software programmer and systems engineer who, in the 1960s, served as Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. Renowned mathematician and computer science pioneer, she was the scientist who coined the term “software engineering” in the first place, to better describe her work. She was …

Tunisian lawyer, anti-colonial activist, feminist, MP in the French National Assembly, always committed to gender equality and to defending women and the right to receive an abortion, before the Veil Law of 1975: Gisèle Halimi’s life was always dedicated to militancy and activism in favor of women’s rights. Gisèle was born in 1927 in La …

“Disability only becomes a tragedy for me when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives—job opportunities or barrier-free buildings, for example. It is not a tragedy to me that I’m living in a wheelchair.” Judith Heumann is one of the pioneers of disability rights and an internationally recognized leader in …

In the summer of 1945, during the San Francisco Conference, the United Nation Charter was signed, becoming the first international agreement to proclaim the equal rights of men and women as part of fundamental human rights. Out of 850 delegates who participated in the Convention, only four were women: one of them was the famous …

Born in 1946 in Meerut, India, Fahmida Riaz was a human rights activist, feminist, and one of Pakistan’s best known progressive writers and Urdu poets. Author of over a dozen books on poetry and fiction, she was often regarded as a controversial figure for her use of erotic and sensual themes and allusions in her …

Anna Costanza Baldry was an Italian psychologist, criminologist and academic researcher who dedicated most of her life to women who have suffered violence and abuse, and to the protection of femicide victims’ children. Her work contributed to shedding light upon gender-based intimate partner violence, and to fostering the empowerment of the survivors. She prematurely passed …

Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a political and human rights activist from Guatemala, belonging to the K’iche’ ethnic group. Born in 1959 to a poor family in a small Mayan community, Menchú has devoted her life to defending the rights of Guatemalan indigenous feminists during and after the Civil War (1960–1996), and to the promotion of …