'Liberty Leading the People', the painting by Eugene Delacroix, 'Liberte, Egalite et Fraternite' depicting the storming of the Bastille.
Delacroix depicted Liberty as both an allegorical goddess-figure and a real woman during the first French Revolution, of 1789-94. This powerful image: woman as leader wasn’t a possibility at the time unless through marriage or birth.
In the 20th century there have been a few remarkable women leaders such as Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and Indira Gandhi polled by the BBC in 1999 as the Woman of the Millennium. Gandhi's contributions as Prime Minister in India are remarkable, but would she have even gotten in the door if she weren’t Nehru’s daughter.
More than 200 years later, women still fight to gain a seat at the table. In 2016, American’s are holding their breath to see if they will have their first woman president.
As Betty Friedan said in “Particular Passions: Talks with Women who Shaped our Times.”
“When you're under the aegis of the feminine mystique, ...to do anything at all, you're going against the stream of society…” Fifty years after Friedan published her 'The Feminine Mystique' which reverberated around the world, for women to accomplish that’s what is required.
Read the brief chapter and oral biography of Betty Friedan, who fueled the women’s liberation movement that continues today around the globe.
"This is a wonderful book... The book is recommended reading for anyone — no matter what political or sociological background — who wants to know more about living history." — Santa Cruz Sentinel.