10 great mothers who left their mark on history

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Mom is the most holy and priceless person in this life, who will endure all bitterness and resentment, and who, in spite of everything, will stand up for her children until the end of her days. History has hundreds of women, whose names are included in the list of the most famous mothers in the world. And even though some of them are not as perfect as many would like, but these women are rightfully worthy to be called a mother.

1. Mary Wollstonecraft

Five years before Mary Wollstonecraft published her early feminist treatise In Defense of the Rights of Women in 1792, she published her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Focusing on a theme that would later be reflected in In Defense …, Wollstonecraft's first publication laid out her theories about raising women as intelligent thinkers, not just wives and mothers in the making. In an era where marriage largely revolved around wealth and property, and women enjoyed little autonomy and few legal rights, her call for gender equality was radical. Unfortunately, Mary did not have the opportunity (in 1797 she died in childbirth) to educate her two daughters, Fanny and Mary. However, she passed on her writing talent to Mary, who eventually wrote the literary gem and horror classic Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus, which made Shelley famous throughout the world.

2. Marie Curie

Eve Curie Labouisse did not often see her mother at home. This is not surprising, since Marie Curie was heading for the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which she received when her youngest daughter, Eva, was seven years old. Of course, this was not the only Nobel Prize she brought home. In 1903, Curie shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre, with whom she isolated the radioactive isotopes of polonium and radium. After Pierre was knocked to death by a horse-drawn carriage in 1906, Curie devoted more time to studying radioactivity than raising Eva and her older sister Irene, but her career clearly made an impression on both daughters. Although Eva Curie was more in the free arts than in science, in 1943 she published a bestselling biography of her mother. Irene Curie's adult life largely repeated the life of her famous mother: the eldest daughter studied radioactivity with Marie Curie and shared the Nobel Prize in physics with her husband Frederic Joliot in 1935. Irene, like her mother Maria, also died of leukemia, which some suspect was caused by their laboratory interactions with radioactive materials.

3. Josephine Baker

When Josephine Baker's popularity began to wane in the 1950s, she quickly found a new occupation for herself. In 1954, performing in Copenhagen, the dancer and aging beauty icon explained her desire to adopt "five little boys" from all over the world to symbolize racial brotherhood. And ten years later, in her home in France, nicknamed the "World Capital of Brotherhood", this initial desire surpassed itself, increasing to ten boys and two girls from different countries: Japan, Finland, Colombia, France, Algeria, Ivory Coast, Venezuela and Morocco. Baker jokingly referred to her ethnically eclectic pupils as "the rainbow tribe." While Baker continued to tour and communicate with famous and influential people, her husband, Joe Bullon, oversaw the raising of the children in the huge castle that he and his wife owned. But even though it sounds like a fairy tale, the twelve children slept together in the same room in the attic and were regularly displayed for tourists who were charged per view. By 1975, when Josephine Baker died, her husband had long since left her. She also lost the castle in 1969 due to the astronomical costs of maintaining her luxurious lifestyle and raising a dozen boys and girls who eventually dispersed around the world to various boarding schools and only a few of them lived with Joe after their evicted from the castle.

4. Florence Owens Thompson

In 1936, Florence Owens Thompson unwittingly became the face of the Great Depression. It was then that photographer Dorothea Lange took a black and white photograph of a worried Thompson and handed it over to the San Francisco News. While working for the U. S. government resettlement administration, which was formed to help migrant farm workers, Lange confronted Thompson and her disadvantaged family at a pea picker camp in Nipomo, California. News channels quickly began reprinting the iconic portrait, later dubbed "Migrant Mother," as an illustration of the brutal poverty that left Thompson and other Americans on the brink of starvation. In her field notes, Lange told her story that the woman in the photo and her family, surviving, ate the remains of vegetables and birds collected from the fields, which her children managed to catch. Unfortunately, at that time Lange was not able to find out the name of this woman, and only in 1975 Florence Owens Thompson publicly identified herself. Four years later, photographer Bill Ganzel tracked down Thompson and her three daughters, also featured in Migrant Mother, who barely survived the Great Depression, snapping a new photo of them hungry and plump from hunger. Although Thompson never made any profit from this painting, the federal government sent her nearly ten thousand kilograms of food to a pea picker camp shortly after the photograph was published in 1936.

5. Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn

Despite not being as famous as her movie star daughter, Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn left a significant legacy when she died in 1951. Following her mother's laconic advice on her deathbed to pursue her education, Hepburn received her BA in Political Science and History in 1899 and her MA in Chemistry and Physics in 1900 - both from Bryn Mawr College, an unusual academic achievement for a woman at the time. Less than a decade later, she became an active suffragette, picketing women's right to vote and then championing access to birth control. After establishing a friendship with Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, Hepburn helped lobby the US government to loosen its restrictions on birth control clinics and sexuality education, working with the National Committee on Federal Laws for Birth Control in the 1930s. Back then, birth control and abortion rights were even more controversial than they are today, but Hepburn was indifferent to the unpopularity of her birth control policies and the accusations of moral depravity that critics threw after her.

6. Rose Kennedy

Rose Kennedy's long life was dominated by politics from start to finish. The matriarch of America's most political dynasty with three sons who rose to prominence in the US government, she grew up while her father, John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, served as Congressman and then Mayor of Boston in the early 1900s. When she raised her own large family of nine children, Rosa Kennedy approached her maternal responsibilities almost like a sports team manager, keeping detailed records of everything from children's dentist visits to their shoe sizes. In the 1936 calendar, Kennedy wrote:. In recognition of her pious Catholic faith and maternal concern, the Vatican awarded her the title of "Papal Countess" in 1951. At the age of 104, Kennedy survived four of her nine children, all of whom died in tragic circumstances. Her eldest son Joseph died in World War II in 1944, and her daughter Kathleen died in a plane crash four years later. John and Robert were killed in 1963 and 1968, respectively.

7. Ma Barker

Arizona Donnie Clark was born in 1872 in Springfield, Missouri, but when she died in a shootout with the FBI in 1935, she became Ma Barker. Ma and her husband George Barker had four sons, Herman, Lloyd, Fred, and Arthur, who started out as criminals and then started a criminal gang, traveling the Midwest, robbing post offices and banks in the 1920s and 1930s. After years of imprisoning her sons and dodging arrests, the FBI finally caught up with Ma and Fred in hiding in Florida in 1935, and the couple went downstairs, guns in hand. The FBI had previously named Ma Barker a "public female enemy" for her alleged involvement in plotting her sons' criminal escapades and evading law enforcement officials. Due to the potential controversy of the murder of a 63-year-old woman, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover helped create a public image of Ma Barker as the mastermind behind her sons' atrocities. Subsequent reports from affiliated gang members later discredited this image, claiming that the boys sent Ma to the movies during their criminal schemes. However, Barker remains immortalized as a crime-loving mom who died with a gun in her left hand.

8. Coretta Scott King

When Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, tragedy left Coretta Scott King with two overwhelming burdens in 1968. After her husband's death, King's widow immediately became a single mother of four children - Yolanda, Martin, Dexter and Bernice, as well as a torchbearer of her late husband's nationwide race for racial equality. Compared to Jackie Kennedy, who likewise became a widow in 1963, King balanced the social life with travel and performing while keeping the home life for her children. In the meantime, she successfully lobbied the U. S. Congress to establish a federal holiday commemorating her husband's life and work, which President Ronald Reagan signed in 1983. Back in Atlanta, she founded the King Center to promote the type of nonviolent social change that Martin Luther King Jr. so gloriously supported. Following the death of Coretta Scott King in 2006, her children quarreled over control of her family's legacy and the King Center, which drew criticism. However, every third Monday in January reserved for MLK Day is a testament to this wife and mother's relentless commitment to human rights and her husband's indelible imprint on history.

9. Indira Gandhi

Even before she became Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi seemed to value her booming political career - aided by her then-father Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru - more than keeping her marriage together. In March 1942, a twenty-four-year-old girl married Feroz Gandhi, and in the next four years they had two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay. But the alliance deteriorated as Indira devoted much of her time to helping her widower father, who became India's first prime minister after the country declared its independence from Britain in 1947. But even though Gandhi did not like the role of wife, she combined her political and maternal roles, preparing her youngest son Sanjay as her successor and chief political adviser during her three consecutive terms in office from 1966 to 1977. However, shortly after she was elected to a fourth term, Sanjay died in a 1980 plane crash. In part because of this nepotism, Gandhi left behind a sordid legacy when she was assassinated in 1984. In addition, in the mid-1970s, she postponed elections, imprisoned opponents, and restricted civil liberties in order to prevent the Indian High Court from suspending her political participation as punishment for electoral fraud. The night before she was shot, Gandhi prophetically told the crowd:. Her eldest son, Rajiv Gandhi, was then elected by an overwhelming majority, as his mother would have liked.

10. J. K. Rowling

If J. K. Rowling regrets, it is only that she never told her mother about the fantastic stories that she began to write back in the early nineties. Her mother died of multiple sclerosis before the first part of the Boy Who Lived saga saw the light of day. This loss forced Rowling to continue creating the bizarre world of Hogwarts and wizardry, battling clinical depression and facing dire financial hardships as a single mother. Her persistence has clearly paid off and a lot of money. Finally, after completing the seventh and final volume of her writings in 2007, Rowling became “the first female billionaire novelist,” as Forbes reported a few years later. The writer remarried in 2001 and later gave birth to two more children, but she hasn't forgotten her dark period in the early nineties when she was a struggling single mother. In a 2010 column for the London Times of London entitled "The Single Mother Manifesto," Rowling praised Britain's child welfare system, which served as a safety net until Harry Potter waved his magic wand on his and his daughter's life.

Continuing the theme - who managed to marry princes.