Inspirational Quotes from Famous Women Quiz

Answer: Rosa Parks

Rosa Parks (1913-2005) was an African-American civil rights activist, who, on December 1, 1955, refused to obey the bus driver's order on the vehicle on which she was travelling to give up her seat to a white passenger. Though others had done this before Rosa, her act of defiance, and the subsequent Montgomery bus boycott that followed, became the symbols that flamed the already simmering embers of the modern American civil rights movement.

Answer: Alice Walker

American activist and author, Alice Walker, was born in 1944. Hers was the pen that produced the award winning 1982 book "The Colour Purple" that won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Alice's early life was one of daily discrimination because of her colour. An injury to her right eye made her childhood years just that much harder, resulting in having to deal with taunts and stares on an almost daily basis. Alice, however, was blessed with an exceptionally strong mother, and with her help, encouragement and working eleven hours a day as a maid to earn the money to put her children through school, Alice eventually graduated from college in 1965.

A writer all her life, Alice's anthology of works is more than impressive, and her lifetime of dedication to human rights issues even more so.

Answer: Marie Curie

Marie Curie (1867-1934) was a Polish born physicist and chemist famous for her pioneering work on radioactivity. Incredibly so - she won the Nobel Prize twice, the first time in 1903 for Physics, which she jointly shared with Henri Becquerel and her husband Pierre, and then again, in 1911, for Chemistry.

She was the first woman to ever win a Nobel Prize, and the first woman, very impressively, to win twice. This was still the case in 2014. Interestingly, two more Nobel Prizes were won by members of the Curie family.

Her daughter, Irene, received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935, and her son-in-law Henry Labouisse, husband to Marie's other daughter, Eve, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965. Marie's amazing achievements, apart from passing on her genes to future generations, included her theory on radioactivity, her work on isolating isotopes, the discovery of polonium and radium, and creating mobile x-ray units during World War I.

Her death in 1934 was directly linked to her long years of exposure to radiation.

Answer: Gloria Steinem

Born in Ohio in 1934, Gloria Steinem is an American journalist, magazine founder, lecturer, activist and feminist who is acknowledged today as the leader and spokeswoman for the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1950s. This movement, which would hardly raise an eyebrow today, dealt with a huge range of issues that were holding women back from achieving full equality with their male counterparts on every level, and included areas of their sexuality (the birth control pill was one of the offshoots of that), their rights, custody rulings, divorce laws, domestic violence and all the other existing societal inequalities of the time that needed to be brought out into the open, discussed and addressed.

It was a bitter battle that split society into opposing and supporting camps of both women AND men, but progress was slowly achieved. Women of today, who have gained so much from the work of Gloria and her associates, should perhaps stop now and then, in spite of having a ways to go still, to send a silent thank you.

Answer: Mae Jemison

Born in 1956, Mae Jemison is an American doctor, astronaut, university professor and technology specialist who became the first African-American woman to travel to that "final frontier". That took place on 12th September, 1992. If you're wondering why there is a "Star Trek" quotation in the middle of this section, it is because Mae was inspired to become an astronaut by Lieutenant Uhura in that great science-fiction series which aired between 1966 and 1969. Well, to be more specific, Mae was inspired by the actress, Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, and who, after her time in the series, worked as a volunteer at NASA on a recruitment program aimed at female minorities. Mae worked at NASA between 1987 and 1993, after which she left to teach at Dartmoor College and Cornell University, and form her own company that researches, markets and develops technology aids to be used in everyday life. The other three choices for the above question are actresses from the TV series "Star Trek: Voyager" which ran from 1995 until 2001.

"Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before".

Answer: Indira Gandhi

Daughter and only child of the first Prime Minister of India (Jawaharlal Nehru), Indira Gandhi was born in 1917. She served twice as India's Prime Minister, between 1966-1977 and again from 1980, until her assassination in 1984. As a leader of that large nation, she was known for her firm stance on every issue of note, her country's wars with Pakistan, the creation of Bangladesh, the establishment of her country as a powerful voice in Asia, the lasting changes she made to the India constitution, her turbulent foreign policies, impressive economic policies, and her incredible social policies that included a full on assault on the poverty that was crippling her people.

Named as "Woman of the Millennium" in a 1999 BBC poll, this great leader was shot down in cold blood by two of her Sikh bodyguards. The aftermath of that assassination was dreadful. Indira Gandhi's last speech, before her death, included the following statement: "I am alive today, I may not be there tomorrow ... I shall continue to serve until my last breath and when I die, I can say, that every drop of my blood will invigorate India and strengthen it". It did just that.

Answer: Toni Morrison

Born in 1931, Toni Morrison is an American editor, university professor and author of ten novels, three books for children, one work of short fiction, two plays, one libretto, seven works of non-fiction and more articles that can be counted. That's one heck of a resume.

Her best known novels include "The Bluest Eye" (1970), "Song of Solomon" (1977) and "Beloved" (1987). Toni's works have received twenty-five of the top awards that a writer can receive, and included the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 for writing that is "characterized by visionary force and poetic import...". That sums this writer's craft up beautifully.

Answer: Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou lived from 1928 to 2014. She was an African-American author, poet, playwright, dancer, actress, singer, journalist, director, producer, and university lecturer who received more than fifty honorary degrees for her works. Those works include eight autobiographies, eighteen volumes of poetry, three volumes of personal essays, two cookbooks, seven children's books, seven plays, and twenty-eight television scripts. She also performed in various plays and films, made two albums of her songs and six spoken word albums of her works. One busy woman indeed. In 1993, Maya recited her powerful poem, "On the Pulse of Morning", at President Clinton's inauguration. The only other poet accorded this honour until then, was the great Robert Frost (1874-1963), who recited his "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of President Kennedy in 1961.

Just because I like it, a small section of Maya's moving poem, "Caged Bird", follows:

"The caged bird sings
With a fearful trill
Of things unknown
But longed for still
And his tune is heard
On the distant hill
For the caged bird
Sings of freedom".

Answer: Audrey Hepburn

The elegant and classy Audrey Hepburn lived from 1929 to 1993. She was of course a very beautiful actress and model in her early life, but spent the major part of her later life in working for humanitarian causes, and as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. That made her far more than just a lovely shimmering image up on the silver screen. Audrey's humanitarian work involved travelling widely to help impoverished children in the poorest nations of our world. With her remarkable ability to speak many different languages fluently, this enabled her to breach that sometimes impenetrable barrier. She was incredible with that work, getting in and physically working with the poorest of the poor, helping with immunisations, feeding starving children, and hugging and loving them with every ounce of her being. She continued that work right up until four months before her death from cancer. At her funeral service, a visibly upset Gregory Peck recited her favourite poem, "Unending Love" by Rabindranath Tagore. Part of this beautiful poem follows, as it seems to sum this amazing woman up perfectly:

"Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever ...

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man's days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life...".

Answer: Louisa May Alcott

Louise May Alcott (1832-1888) was an American novelist famed for her lovely book "Little Women" and its follow up series of books. Born in Pennsylvania to a father who was a transcendentalist and teacher, and a mother who was a social worker, Louisa, who was one of four girls, based many of the idealised and romanticised events in that famous book on her own life. The father in her book however was somewhat at odds with her own father, who was a dictator, impractical and so prone to letting money run through his fingers that his family often went hungry. That early life no doubt contributed to Louisa's later drive for independence and financial security.

Because of her father's philosophical views, Louisa grew up quite at home with the men with whom he associated. These included the philosophers and writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau. Her early working life, out of necessity, included teaching, sewing and domestic help, but she also frequently turned to writing out her thoughts as a consolation at this time. Soon however, encouraged by her father's friends, her first book "Flower Fables" was published in 1849. At the close of her life she had written and published nineteen novels, seven volumes of short stories, and sixteen volumes of short stories for children. By 1860, she was also writing articles for her local paper, in which her feminist views and concerns for her fellow man became more and more evident. It is interesting to watch the progress of this writer's work from her early, idealistic writings to those of a fully developed thinker with a passion for those less fortunate, and a desire, with an accompanying ability, to express her concerns so succinctly.