Inspirational women

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 Party. Eventually, she became the most prominent woman in the Soviet administration following the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, when she was appointed a diplomatic counsellor to the Soviet legation in Norway, being soon promoted to head of the legation – one of the first women to hold such a post.

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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” law) – that would have her marry her abuser to “restore” her honor. Instead, she and her family pressed charges against the rapist, Filippo Melodia, and won. Franca Viola thus became a symbol of cultural progress and emancipation of women in post-war Italy.

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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 only in her early 30s when she led the team that developed the computer code for the command and lunar modules used on the Apollo missions to the Moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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