#MotivationMonday: Five of history’s most inspirational women

Throughout history a few women have come along and broken down barriers, leaving men with no choice than to allow women to prosper.

Below is but only a handful of remarkable women, who allowed other women to step up, raise their voice and leave their mark on today’s society.

1. Amelia Earhart: First female aviator.

Amelia Mary Earhart was the first female aviator to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. She was awarded the United States Distinguished Flying Cross, for this remarkable accomplishment.

She also wrote best-selling books about her experiences. She played an important role in the formation of other female pilots, and was an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.

During an attempt to make a circumnavigation flight of the globe in 1937, she disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island. Her life, career and disappearance still fascinate people to this day.

2. Rosa Parks: Fought for Civil Rights.

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an American civil rights activist, known as the mother of the freedom movement. Her brave act of standing up to racism started on December 1, 1955, when she refused to give up her seat in a coloured section on a bus, to a white man, despite being ordered to do so by the bus driver.

Rosa Parks later became an active member in the black power movement and supported political prisoners in the United States.

She received national recognition for her brave acts, and was awarded the National Association for the Advancement of Coluored People 1979 Spingarn Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, and a posthumous statue in the United States Capitol’s National Statuary Hall.

3. Edith Cavell: Believed all lives mattered.

Edith Louisa Cavell is celebrated for saving the lives of soldiers from both sides without discrimination during the First World War.

She also helped soldiers escape the bloody battle. She was arrested and accused of treason, found guilty, sentenced to death, and was shot by a German firing squad.

The Church of England commemorates her in their Calendar of Saints on 12 October.

4. Malala Yousafzai: Women’s equal rights to education.

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate.

She is known for human rights advocacy for education for women in her native Swat Valley in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of northwest Pakistan, where the local Taliban had banned girls from attending school. Her advocacy has since grown into an international movement.

She was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize by South African activist Desmond Tutu.

On October 9, 2012, she boarded her school bus, when a gunman asked for her by name. He pointed a pistol at her and fired three shots. The assassination attempt sparked a national and international outpouring of support for her, and she was named the most famous teenager in the world.

United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education Gordon Brown launched a UN petition in her name, demanding that all children worldwide be in school by the end of 2015, leading to Pakistan’s first Right to Education Bill.

She received Pakistan’s first National Youth Peace Prize, and the 2013 Sakharov Prize. In February 2014, she was nominated for the World Children’s Prize in Sweden. In 2014, she was named as the co-recipient of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize,  for the right of all children to education.

At the age of 17, Malala became the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate.

Florence Nightingale was a highly favourable nurse while serving as a manager of nurses during the Crimean War. She was also the founder of modern nursing, as well as a writer.