Women achievers who changed the world

2. Swastik Nag
4th semester
B.Sc. (H) in
Biotechnology

3. Smt. Indira Gandhi (née Nehru)
(1917-84)
• Born on November 19, 1917 in an illustrious family, Smt. Indira
Gandhi was the daughter of Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru.
• She studied at prime institutions like École Nouvelle, Bex
(Switzerland), École Internationale, Geneva, Pupils’ Own School,
Poona and Bombay, Badminton School, Bristol, Vishwa Bharati,
Shantiniketan and Somerville College, Oxford.
• She was conferred Honorary doctoral degree by a host of Universities
globally. With an impressive academic background she also got the
Citation of Distinction from the Columbia University.
• Smt. Indira Gandhi was actively involved in the freedom struggle. In
her childhood, she founded the ‘Bal Charkha Sangh’ and in 1930, the
‘Vanar Sena’ of children to help the Congress party during the Non-
Cooperation Movement. She was imprisoned in September 1942, and
worked in riot-affected areas of Delhi in 1947 under Gandhi’s
guidance.

4. • She had been Minister for Information and Broadcasting (1964- 1966).
Then she held the highest office as the Prime Minister of India from
January 1966 to March 1977. Concurrently, she was the Minister for
Atomic Energy from September 1967 to March 1977. She also held
the additional charge of the Ministry of External Affairs from
September 5, 1967 to February 14, 1969. Smt. Gandhi headed the
Ministry of Home Affairs from June 1970 to November 1973 and
Minister for Space from June 1972 to March 1977. From January 1980
she was Chairperson, Planning Commission. She again chaired the
prime Minister’s Office from January 14, 1980.
• Smt. Indira Gandhi was associated with a large number of
organisations and institutions, like Kamala Nehru Memorial
Hospital, Gandhi Smarak Nidhi and Kasturba Gandhi Memorial
Trust. She was the Chairperson of Swaraj Bhavan Trust. She was also
associated with Bal Sahyog, Bal Bhavan Board and Children’s
National Museum in 1955. Smt. Gandhi founded the Kamala Nehru
Vidyalaya in Allahabad. She was also associated with certain big
institutions like Jawaharlal Nehru University and North-Eastern
University during 1966-77. She also served as a Member of Delhi
University Court, Indian Delegation to UNESCO (1960-64), Member,
Executive Board of UNESCO from 1960-64 and Member, National
Defence Council, 1962. She was also associated with Sangeet Natak
Academy, National Integration Council, Himalayan Mountaineering
Institute, Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha, Nehru Memorial
Museum and Library Society and Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund.

5. • Smt. Gandhi also became a Member of Rajya Sabha in August 1964
and served till February 1967. She was the Member of Lok Sabha
during fourth, fifth and sixth sessions. She was elected to the
Seventh Lok Sabha from Rae Bareli (U.P.) and Medak (Andhra
Pradesh) in January 1980. She chose to retain the Medak seat and
relinquished the Rae Bareli seat. She was chosen as the leader of
the Congress Parliamentary Party in 1967-77 and again in January
1980.
• Interested in a wide array of subjects, she viewed life as an
integrated process, where activities and interests are different
facets of the whole, not separated into compartments or labelled
under different heads.
• She had many achievements to her credit. She was the recipient of
Bharat Ratna in 1972, Mexican Academy Award for Liberation of
Bangladesh (1972), 2nd Annual Medal, FAO (1973) and Sahitya
Vachaspati (Hindi) by Nagari Pracharini Sabha in 1976. Smt.
Gandhi also received Mothers’ Award, U.S.A. in 1953, Isabella
d’Este Award of Italy for outstanding work in diplomacy and Yale
University’s Howland Memorial Prize. For two consecutive years
in 1967 and 1968 she was the woman most admired by the French
according to a poll by the French Institute of Public Opinion.
According to a special Gallup Poll Survey in the U.S.A. in 1971 she
was the most admired person in the world. Diploma of Honour
was conferred to her by the Argentine Society in 1971 for the
Protection of Animals.

6. • Her famous publications include ‘The Years of Challenge’ (1966-
69), ‘The Years of Endeavour’ (1969-72), ‘India’ (London) in 1975;
‘Inde’ (Lausanne) in 1979 and numerous other collections of
speeches and writings.
• She travelled widely in India and all over the world.
 Smt. Gandhi visited neighbours like Afghanistan,
Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, China, Nepal and Sri Lanka.
 She paid official visits to countries like France, German
Democratic Republic, Federal Republic of Germany,
Guyana, Hungary, Iran, Iraq and Italy.
 Smt. Gandhi was one to visit majority of the countries like
Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Austria Belgium, Brazil,
Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Czechoslovakia, Bolivia and Egypt.
 She paid visits to many European, American and Asian
nationals like Indonesia, Japan, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia,
Mauritius, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria,
Oman, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Switzerland, Syria,
Sweden, Tanzania, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, U.A.E.,
the United Kingdom, U.S.A., U.S.S.R., Uruguay, Venezuela,
Yugoslavia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
 She also marked her presence in the United Nations
Headquarters.

7. Sirimavo Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike
(1916-2000)
• Sirimavo Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike became the
world’s first woman prime minister in the south Asian
country of erstwhile Ceylon, which she renamed as
Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.
• Her husband, Solomon West Ridgeway Dias
Bandaranaike rose to great prominence in Sri Lankan
politics.
• Born into a wealthy family, she, in 1940, began to
interest herself in social welfare.
• After her husband, who became prime minister in
1956, was assassinated in 1959, she was induced by his
Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) to become the party’s
leader. The SLFP won a decisive victory at the general
election in July 1960, and she became prime minister.

8. • Bandaranaike carried on her husband’s program of
socialist economic policies, neutrality in international
relations, and the active encouragement of the
Buddhist religion and of the Sinhalese language and
culture. Her government nationalized various
economic enterprises and enforced a law making
Sinhalese the sole official language. By 1964 a
deepening economic crisis and the SLFP’s coalition
with the Marxist Lanka Sama Samaj Party (“Ceylon
Socialist Party”) had eroded popular support for her
government, which was resoundingly defeated in the
general election of 1965.
• In 1980 the Sri Lanka parliament stripped
Bandaranaike of her political rights and barred her
from political office, but in 1986 Pres. J.R.
Jayawardene granted her a pardon that restored her
rights. She ran unsuccessfully as the SLFP’s candidate
for president in 1988, and after regaining a seat in
parliament in 1989 she became the leader of the
opposition.

9. Bandaranaike’s children, in the meantime, had become major political
figures within the SLFP. Her son, Anura P.S.D. Bandaranaike, was first
elected to parliament in 1977 and had become the leader of the SLFP’s right-
wing faction by 1984. He was frustrated in his bid to become the party’s
leader, however, by his sister Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, who
held left-wing views and was favoured by their mother for the leadership. In
response, Anura defected from the SLFP and joined the rival United National
Party (UNP) in 1993.
Chandrika had been active in the SLFP before marrying the film actor Vijaya
Kumaratunga in 1978, and after his assassination in 1988 she re-joined her
mother’s party. She soon came to head its left-wing faction, and a string of
electoral victories propelled her to the leadership of an SLFP-based coalition
that won the parliamentary elections of August 1994. Chandrika became
prime minister, and in November of that year she won the presidential
election over the UNP candidate, becoming the country’s first female
president. Chandrika appointed her mother, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, to serve
as prime minister in her new government, which mounted a major military
campaign against Tamil separatists in 1995. Failing health forced Sirimavo to
resign her post in August 2000. Shortly after voting in the October
parliamentary elections, she suffered a heart attack and died. Chandrika,
barred from seeking a third term, left office in 2005.

10. Malala Malik (née Yousafzai)
(b. 1997)
• Malala Yousafzai was born on July 12, 1997, in Mingora,
the largest city in the Swat Valley in what is now the
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan. She is the
daughter of Ziauddin and Toor Pekai Yousafzai and has
two younger brothers. On 9 November 2021, Yousafzai
married Asser Malik, a manager with the Pakistan
Cricket Board, in Birmingham.
• At a very young age, Malala developed a thirst for
knowledge. For years her father, a passionate education
advocate himself, ran a learning institution in the city,
and school was a big part of Malala’s family. She later
wrote that her father told her stories about how she
would toddle into classes even before she could talk and
acted as if she were the teacher.

11. • In 2007, when Malala was ten years old, the situation in the
Swat Valley rapidly changed for her family and community.
The Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) began to control the
Swat Valley and quickly became the dominant socio-
political force throughout much of north-western Pakistan.
Girls were banned from attending school, and cultural
activities like dancing and watching television were
prohibited. Suicide attacks were widespread, and the group
made its opposition to a proper education for girls a
cornerstone of its terror campaign. By the end of 2008, the
TTP had destroyed some 400 schools.
• Determined to go to school and with a firm belief in her
right to an education, Malala stood up to the Taliban.
Alongside her father, Malala quickly became a critic of their
tactics. “How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to
education?” she once said on Pakistani TV.
• In early 2009, Malala started to blog anonymously on the
Urdu language site of the British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC). She wrote about life in the Swat Valley under Taliban
rule, and about her desire to go to school. Using the name
“Gul Makai,” she described being forced to stay at home,
and she questioned the motives of the Taliban.

12. • Malala was 11 years old when she wrote her first BBC diary entry.
Under the blog heading “I am afraid,” she described her fear of a
full-blown war in her beautiful Swat Valley, and her nightmares
about being afraid to go to school because of the Taliban.
• Pakistan’s war with the Taliban was fast approaching, and on
May 5, 2009, Malala became an internally displaced person (IDP),
after having been forced to leave her home and seek safety
hundreds of miles away.
• On her return, after weeks of being away from Swat, Malala once
again used the media and continued her public campaign for her
right to go to school. Her voice grew louder, and over the course
of the next three years, she and her father became known
throughout Pakistan for their determination to give Pakistani girls
access to a free quality education. Her activism resulted in a
nomination for the International Children’s Peace Prize in 2011.
That same year, she was awarded Pakistan’s National Youth
Peace Prize. But, not everyone supported and welcomed her
campaign to bring about change in Swat. On the morning of
October 9, 2012, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai was shot by the
Taliban.

13. • After the shooting, her incredible recovery and return to school resulted in a global
outpouring of support for Malala. On July 12, 2013, her 16th birthday, Malala
visited New York and spoke at the United Nations. Later that year, she published
her first book, an autobiography entitled “I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for
Education and Was Shot by the Taliban.” On October 10, 2013, in acknowledgement
of her work, the European Parliament awarded Malala the prestigious Sakharov
Prize for Freedom of Thought.
• In 2014, through the Malala Fund, the organization she co-founded with her father,
Malala travelled to Jordan to meet Syrian refugees, to Kenya to meet young female
students, and finally to northern Nigeria for her 17th birthday. In Nigeria, she
spoke out in support of the abducted girls who were kidnapped earlier that year by
Boko Haram, a terrorist group which, like the Taliban, tries to stop girls from going
to school. Today, the Malala Fund has become an organization that, through
education, empowers girls to achieve their potential and become confident and
strong leaders in their own countries. Funding education projects in six countries
and working with international leaders, the Malala Fund joins with local partners
to invest in innovative solutions on the ground and advocates globally for quality
secondary education for all girls.
• In October 2014, Malala, along with Indian children’s rights activist Kailash
Satyarthi, was named a Nobel Peace Prize winner. At age 17, she became the
youngest person to receive this prize. Accepting the award, Malala reaffirmed that
“This award is not just for me. It is for those forgotten children who want
education. It is for those frightened children who want peace. It is for those
voiceless children who want change.”

14. • Currently residing in Birmingham, Malala is an active proponent
of education as a fundamental social and economic right.
• Through the Malala Fund and with her own voice, Malala
Yousafzai remains a staunch advocate for the power of education
and for girls to become agents of change in their communities.

15. Junko Tabei (née Ishibashi)
(1939-2016)
• Junko Tabei was born in Miharu, Fukushima, Japan. Her family
had seven children, and she was the fifth daughter. When she was
ten years old, she joined a trip to climb Mount Nasu with her class.
• She was described as a delicate child, but that did not dampen her
enthusiasm to climb mountains. Instead, she fell in love with the
natural beauty that the landscape provided at mountain peaks.
• Tabei particularly enjoyed the non-competitive nature of
mountain climbing. However, she did not come from a well-off
family and could not afford to pay for her love for sports, so she
only had a few trips when she was in high school.
• She later enrolled at Showa Women’s University to study English
and American Literature to be a teacher. However, when she
graduated, she decided to pursue her love of climbing mountains.

16. • To pay for her mountain climbing activities, Junko worked as an editor for the
Journal of the Physical Society of Japan. After being mistreated by male
mountaineers, she founded the Joshi-Tohan Club. The motto of the club was
“let’s go on an overseas expedition by ourselves.”
• For the club’s first expedition, they climbed a Nepalese mountain called
Annapurna III in 1970. With the guidance of two Sherpa people, Tabei and her
fellow club member were selected to complete the final climb to the peak.
• Japanese Women’s Everest Expedition (JWEE), consisting of 15 members, was
later established. Eiko Hisano formed this organization to climb Everest. Most
of the members were made up of professional working women.
• They requested a climbing authorization, but it took four years for their team
to obtain a climbing schedule. Tabei tried to request sponsorship for her
team’s Everest expedition. It was only at the last minute that two news and
media companies agreed to partially fund and sponsor their quest.
• However, the money was still not enough, so each of her teammates had to
pay $5k each for the climb. Tabei worked as a piano teacher to help cover the
costs for their Everest expedition. She also had to make most of her climbing
equipment to save money.
• The team was finally able to climb Everest in May after undergoing intense
training in 1975. This attempt to climb Everest gained extreme media
attention. Several reporters and media personalities went with them.

17. • While camping at 6309.36 meters, they were hit by an
avalanche, which resulted in Tabei losing consciousness.
Fortunately, nobody died in the incident, and after recovering
for two days, Tabei carried on the expedition with her team.
• On May 16, 1975, she opened a new era in mountain climbing
as the first female to ever reach the Everest summit. Two
women were supposed to complete the climb, but she was
ultimately chosen because her teammates experienced altitude
sickness, resulting in a lack of oxygen supply.
• Later on, she also conquered the Seven Summits consisting of
Kilimanjaro, Mt. Aconcagua, Denali, Mt. Elbrus, Mount
Vinson, and Puncak Jaya. After this, Tabei focused on helping
the environment and furthered her studies at Kyushu
University.
• She became the head of the Himalayan Adventure Trust of
Japan and was also able to write seven books between 1998
and 2006.

18. Helen Adams Keller
(1880-1968)
• Helen Adams Keller was an American author, political
activist and lecturer. She was the first deaf – blind
person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. After
graduating from Radcliffe, she went on to become one of
the most influential people in the 20th Century. She
worked for the rights of persons with disabilities,
women and under privileged sections of society.
•
Helen Keller was born a normal child in Tuscumbia,
Alabama on June 27, 1880. She lost her hearing and sight
at 19 months of age to what is now diagnosed as scarlet
fever. Five years later, her parents, on Alexander
Graham Bell’s advice, applied to hire a teacher from the
Perkins Institute for the Blind, in Boston.

19. • Anne Mansfield Sullivan Macy was able to bring about
an extraordinary transformation in Helen’s isolated
world, so much so that Helen later mentioned the day
she arrived at Anne’s house as my soul’s birthday. She
taught Helen to understand and communicate with the
world around her. She went on to acquire an excellent
education and become an important spokesperson for
the blind and the deaf. Anne Sullivan taught Helen to
read and write in Braille and hand signals of the deaf
mute, which she could understand by touch. Her
efforts to speak later on in life, were not as successful,
when she went on to become a public figure, but she
was able to make herself be understood.
• Helen Keller’s father, Arthur H Keller, was an editor
for the Tuscumbia North Alabamian and had served as
a captain for the Confederate Army. Her mother Kate
Adam’s father was Charles W Adams, a Confederate
general, in the American Civil War.
• Helen had two siblings, Mildred Campbell and Philip
Brooks Keller, and two older half brothers from her
father’s prior marriage, James and William Simpson
Keller.

20. • Helen Keller started attending the Perkins Institute
for the Blind in May, 1888. Anne Sullivan and Helen
Keller moved to New York to attend the Wright –
Humason School for the Deaf, and to learn from
Sarah Fuller at the Horace Mann School for the
Deaf. In 1896, they returned to Massachusetts and
Helen entered The Cambridge School for Young
Ladies before gaining admittance to Radcliffe in
1900.
• She became the first deaf blind person to earn a
Bachelor of Arts degree, at the age of 24 in 1904.
• Helen Keller was determined to communicate with
others and she learned to speak. She spent much of
her life giving lectures and speeches. She learned to
read lips with her finger tips, so she could ‘listen’ to
other people’s speeches.
• She is known for her strong support for people with
disabilities. She travelled to over 25 countries,
giving lectures and motivational speeches about
deaf people’s conditions.

21. Lata (Hema) Mangeshkar
(1929-2022)
• Lata Mangeshkar was born in Indore on September
28, 1929, and became, quite simply, the most popular
playback singer in Bollywood's history.
• She sung for over 50 years for actresses
from Nargis to Preity Zinta, as well as recorded
albums of all kinds (ghazals, pop, etc).
• Until the 1991 edition, when her entry disappeared,
the Guinness Book of World Records listed her as the
most-recorded artist in the world with not less than
30,000 solo, duet and chorus-backed songs recorded
in 20 Indian languages between 948 and 1987. Today
that number may have reached 40,000!

22. • She was born the daughter of Dinanath Mangeshkar,
the owner of a theatre company and a reputed classical
singer in his own right. He started giving Lata singing
lessons from the age of five, and she also studied with
renowned singers Aman Ali Khan Sahib and Amanat
Khan. Even at a young age she displayed a God-given
musical gift and could master vocal exercises the first
time.
• Ironically, for someone of her stature, she made her
entry into Bollywood at the wrong time - around the
1940s, when bass singers with heavily nasal voices,
such as Noor Jehan and Shamshad Begum were in
style. She was rejected from many projects because it
was believed that her voice was too high-pitched and
thin. The circumstances of her entry into the industry
were no less inauspicious - her father died in 1942, the
responsibility of earning income to support her family
fell upon her, and between 1942 and 1948 she acted in
as many as eight films in Hindi and Marathi to take
care of economic hardships. She made her debut as a
playback singer in the Marathi film Kiti Hasaal (1942)
but, ironically, the song was edited out!

23. • However, in 1948, she got her big break with Ghulam
Haider in the film Majboor (1948), and 1949 saw the
release of four of her
films: Mahal (1949), Dulari (1949), Barsaat (1949),
and Andaz (1949); all four of them became runaway hits,
with their songs reaching to heights of what was until then
unseen popularity. Her unusually high-pitched singing
rendered the trend of heavily nasal voices of the day
totally obsolete and, within a year, she had changed the
face of playback singing forever. The only two lower-
pitched singers to survive her treble onslaught to a certain
extent were Geeta Dutt and Shamshad Begum.
• Her singing style was initially reminiscent of Noor Jehan,
but she soon overcame that and evolved her own
distinctive style. Her sister, Asha Bhosle, too, came up in
the late 1950s and the two of them were the queens of
Indian playback singing right through to the 1990s. Her
voice had a special versatile quality, which meant that
finally music composers could stretch their creative
experiments to the fullest. Although all her songs were
immediate hits under any composer, it was the
composers C. Ramchandra and Madan Mohan who made
her sound her sweetest and challenged her voice like no
other music director.

24. • The 1960s and 1970s saw her go from strength to
strength, even as there were accusations that she
was monopolizing the playback-singing
industry. However, in the 1980s, she cut down
her workload to concentrate on her shows
abroad. In the 2000s, Lata sang infrequently
despite a sudden resurgence in her popularity,
but even today some of Hindi Cinema's biggest
hits, including Dilwale Dulhania Le
Jayenge (1995), Dil to Pagal Hai (1997), and Veer
Zaara (2004) feature her legendary voice.
• No matter which female playback singer breaks
through in any generation, she cannot replace
the timeless voice of Lata Mangeshkar. She was
an icon beyond icons.

25. Dr. Rosalind Elsie Franklin
(1920-1958)
• Rosalind Franklin was a scientist whose work
was very important in discovering the structure
of DNA. She used X-ray diffraction to take
pictures of DNA. These pictures showed that
DNA has a structure called a double helix, which
looks like a ladder twisted into a spiral.
• Rosalind’s work helped other scientists
to understand the structure of DNA and to find
out how genetic information is passed from
parents to their children.

26. • Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born in London
on 25th July 1920 into a wealthy family. Her
father, Ellis Arthur Franklin, was a
merchant banker and later a teacher, and
her mother was Muriel Francis Waley.
• Rosalind had three brothers and one sister
and she was the second child in her family.
At school she excelled at science, Latin, and
sports. At that time, girls were not
encouraged to study subjects like
science but Rosalind had an
excellent scientific mind. In her spare time
she liked to make things, draw pictures,
take photographs, and read books.

27. • When she was 18, Rosalind went to study natural
sciences at Newnham College in Cambridge and she
specialized in chemistry. The Second World War
was happening when Rosalind finished her studies.
• Rosalind used her skills to study the fine structure of
coal. This work was useful during the war for
understanding how efficient coal would be as fuel
and for producing useful devices such as gas masks.
She was awarded a PhD (the highest type of
university degree) for this work when she was 25.
After the war, Rosalind moved to Paris to work with
a French scientist called Jacques Méring. Here, she
became very good at using X-ray diffraction. At that
time, women who worked in science laboratories
were usually only employed as assistants, not as
scientists. So Rosalind’s male co-workers did
not always accept her as an equal and she struggled
to be respected as a scientist.

28. • In 1951, when Rosalind was 30, she started
to work at King’s College in London.
Here, she used the X-ray diffraction method
to study the structure of DNA.
• Rosalind had a difficult relationship with
one of her co-workers, Maurice Wilkins.
They had very different personalities, so
they did not work very well together and
chose to work separately.
• Rosalind’s work (photo 51) showed some
important facts about DNA and convinced
her that the structure of DNA was a double
helix (like a ladder twisted into a spiral).
This was different from what other scientists
thought.
Photo 51

29. • Although Rosalind’s work was so important to James Watson and
Francis Crick’s model of DNA, she was not mentioned in the article they
published about this. Sadly, Rosalind developed cancer and died in 1958
when she was just 37 years old.
• Four years later, in 1962, James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice
Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work. The Nobel Prize is
awarded once a year for important contributions to science. Rosalind
was not included in being awarded this prize. People cannot be
awarded this prize after they have died. But even if she was alive, it
seems that she still would not have been included.
• These days, Rosalind’s contribution to the discovery of the structure of
DNA is well known, and some buildings, laboratories, awards and
colleges have been named after her.