Activists
One woman's movement planted 50 million trees
Wangari Maathai paid rural Kenyan women a few cents per surviving seedling. The Green Belt Movement reforested hillsides and won her the Nobel Peace Prize.
More in Activists
Malala went back to school 9 months after being shot
Attacked on her school bus at 15 for insisting girls should be educated, she survived, kept campaigning, and became the youngest Nobel laureate in history at 17.
Rosa Parks was not simply tired
She was a trained secretary of her local NAACP chapter who had studied civil disobedience. Her refusal in 1955 launched a bus boycott that lasted 381 days.
The world's first female prime minister was Sri Lankan
Sirimavo Bandaranaike took office in 1960, decades before most countries elected a woman leader, and served three separate terms.
She carried a Bhagavad Gita and a poem into orbit
Kalpana Chawla was the first woman of Indian origin in space, flying more than 30 days in total. A satellite series and a Mars hill now carry her name.
She walked untethered on the ocean floor
Sylvia Earle made a record dive to 381 metres in a pressurised suit in 1979, with no cable to the surface. She has spent over 7,000 hours underwater.