FIRE: My Top Ten favorites in the List of Influential Women

They may be called Influential Women but in essence, they are all our mothers. 

They paved the way for our generation to live as WOMEN,

without explanation and extra qualification. 

Thank you.

From the list, I picked out my personal favorite and the lines lifted from the book:

Margaret Mead (1901 - 1978) 

"Possibly, her greatest contribution was that she made anthropology accessible to the nonscientist. She invited millions of people to look with her at other cultures and, as she wrote, "to cherish the life of the world." 

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Hellen Keller (1880-1968)

Anne Sullivan (1866-1936)

Hellen Keller on her teacher Anne Sullivan:

 "There is not a talent or an inspiration or a joy in me that has not been awakened by her loving touch."

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Florence Nightangale (1820-1910)

"Florence Nightangale profoundly influenced the future of hospital care by transforming nursing into a noble profession."

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Mother Teresa (1910-1997)

Columnist Abigail McCarthy observed, "In a world of structures and technology in which no person seems to matter very much, Mother Teresa has affirmed the preciousness of each human life."

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Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

Her best known novel is regarded today more as a significant cultural document than as literary masterwork. Her "despairing appeal to a civilized humanity" served its era well by galvanizing public opinion, as no other piece of writing had, in the great debate over slavery.

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Aung San Suu Kyi (1945 -  )

She continues to be revered by the Burmese people as an agent of change.

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Gloria Steinem (1934 -  )

The success of Ms. in finding an audience for substantive women's issues helped push other women's magazine to deepen their approach and encouraged the general press to follow the lead of Ms. in covering similar content.

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Christine de Pisan (1364 -1430)

France's first woman of letters, she would have been an unusual person in any era; at the time in which she lived and wrote, at the end of the Middle Ages, when womankind in general was held in singularly low esteem, she was a phenomenon who would not have an equal for nearly another century. -- Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan: Her Life and Works

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 Sandra Day O'Connor (1930 -   )

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933 -   )

O'Connor and Ginsburg each bring to the Court perspectives as varied and as richly influenced by past experience as those of their male colleagues. If they are in any way representational, it is not as "the first woman" or "the second," but as a concept of diversity that has finally become a reality.