To celebrate International Women’s Day, we posted a series of women who we felt were incredibly courageous throughout the whole of March.

Below we have listed all the women from the above collage (numbers ordered from left to right on the image.)

1. Rosa Parks – In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on the bus she was travelling on. This helped initiate the civil rights movement in the United States. The leaders of the local black community organized a bus boycott that began the day Parks was convicted of violating the segregation laws. She became a nationally recognized symbol of dignity and strength in the struggle to end entrenched racial segregation.
2. Naomi Wadler – 11 year old, Naomi Wadler stood in front of thousands of people and gave a courageous speech at the March For Our Lives. She spoke for black women, who are disproportionately represented among the victims of gun violence. ‘I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don’t lead on the evening news.’
3. George Sand – George was a 19th century French novelist and essayist was a socialist. She ‘shocked’ the high society circles by wearing male clothing in public. As a socialist, she started her own newspaper that was published in workers’ co-operative.
4. Gina Miller – Gina is a British–Guyanese business owner who initiated the Brexit case, saying that it has been initiated without approval from Parliament. She has courageously continued to speak up on matters that she believes unlawful even though this has led to threats to her and her family’s lives. Gina also founded the True and Fair Campaign in 2012, calling for an end to rip offs in the investment and pension industries.
5. Florence Nightingale – Known as “the lady with the lamp”, Florence Nightingale nursed injured soldiers during the Crimean war. Her passion and dedication changed the public’s perception about this profession. Her insistence on improving sanitary conditions for the patients is believed to have saved many lives.
6. Mother Tereasa – Mother Tereasa, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1979, aimed at looking after those who had nobody to look after them through her own order “The Missionaries of Charity”. She worked tirelessly towards her goal until her ill-health that included two heart attacks, pneumonia and malaria, which forced her to step down in March 1997.
7. Maya Angelou – Maya wrote seven autobiographical books and will be forever beloved for her powerful poems. Maya was an active voice in the civil rights movement. In addition to gaining national recognition for her writing, she made many people rethink their ideas about sex workers by writing about her own experience as a sex worker.
8. Marie Curie – Curie was a Polish-French physicist and chemist. She was the first person to have received two Nobel Prizes. She was also the first female professor at the University of Paris and the first lady to be enshrined in France’s national mausoleum, the Paris Panthéon.
9. Frida Kahlo – Frida had many traumas throughout her life. This includes a bus accident which left her unable to conceive. These disasters helped her paint her inner truth and her put pain on to paper. Frida’s paintings are fearless because they show the conflicting duality of female experience.
10. Helen Keller – Helen lost her sight and hearing at a young age yet she defied expectations to achieve a bachelor’s degree and inspired generations as an activist for disability rights.
11. Baroness Doreen Lawrence OBE – She is a British Jamaican campaigner and the mother of Stephen Lawrence, a black British teenager who was murdered in a racist attack in South East London, 1993. Instead of being consumed by anger, Doreen courageously promoted reforms of the police service and founded the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust.
12. Corretta Scott King – Corretta devoted much of her life to women’s equality. She helped found the National Organisation for Women in 1966. She was also the first woman to deliver the class day address at Harvard.
13. Emmeline Pankhurst – She helped towards the right to vote for women in the UK. Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, whose members were suffragettes. They protested and went on hunger strikes for their right to vote.
14. Winona LaDuke – Winona founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project in 1989, which has returned over 1400 acres of land. She also founded the Indigenous Women’s Network which works to empower Native American women.
15. Katherine Hepburn – Actress, Katherine Hepburn, won four academy awards for Best actress, making her the leading lady in Hollywood for over 60 years. Her ‘masculine’ fashion style choices made wearing trousers acceptable for women, which was considered a taboo at that time.
16. Katie Piper – Katie is an English philanthropist, television presenter and former model. She had hoped to have a full-time career in the media, but in March 2008, sulphuric acid was thrown in her face. Her ex-boyfriend arranged the attack, which blinded Piper in one eye. In 2009, Katie made the courageous choice to give up her anonymity in order to increase awareness about burn victims in acclaimed Channel 4 documentary ‘Katie: My Beautiful Face’.
17. Dorothy Lawrence – She was a journalist who secretly posed as a man to become a soldier during World War I, making her the only know English woman on the frontline during the First World War. Having tried to become a war correspondent, Lawrence decided the only way she was going to write the story was to experience it.
18. Tatyana Fazlalizadeh – Tatyana is the creator of Stop Telling Women to Smile, an international street art series which aims to combat street harassment. Her work can be found on walls across the globe. She began drawing portraits of women she spoke to and incorporating quotes from them or harassment they may have heard with the portraits. Tatyana’s pieces are in the same public spaces where many women may have experienced street harassment.
19. Malala Yousafzai – In 2012, a gunman boarded Malala’s school bus in Pakistan and shot her three times in the head. Her crime? Speaking out about education for girls. Crazy, right? In 2013, The Time magazine listed Yousafzai as one of ‘The 100 Most Influential People in the World’. On the 10th of October 2014, she co-received the Nobel Peace Prize. At only 17 years old, this is an incredible achievement!
20. Victoria Woodull – Victoria was the first woman to run for President of the United States, almost 50 years before women received the right to vote. She was an activist, author and a leader of women’s suffrage movement.
21. Michelle Obama – Obama is a writer and lawyer and is the first African-American First Lady of the United States. She continues to work on issues close to her heart such as supporting military families and helping children lead healthier lives.
22. Benazir Bhutto – She was the 11th Prime Minister of Pakistan (1993-1996) and the first woman to head a Muslim state. During her leadership, she ended military dictatorship in her country and fought for women rights. Unfortunately, Benazir was assassinated in a suicide attack in 2007.
23. Ruby Bridges – Ruby was the first black child to attend a white Southern elementary school. She had to be escorted to school by her mother and U.S marshals to keep her safe and only one teacher agreed to teach her, Barbara Henry. The parents of all of Ruby’s classmates pulled their children from the class, so Barbara and Ruby spent a year alone together at the school. As she grew older, her courage to embrace herself for who she was is something we can all look up to.
24. Angela Davis – Angela is best known for her political activism with the Black Panthers, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Community and the Civil Rights Movement. She continues to lecture and write about human rights and equality. Davis is currently a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
25. Shirley Chisholm – Chisholm was born into poverty in Brooklyn. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts, she taught in a nursery school. At the same time, she was studying for her master’s at Colombia. Shirley later got into politics and would become the first African-American woman elected to the US Congress, and the first woman and black person to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
26. Wangari Maathai – Wangari was the founder of the Green Belt Movement and the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. She was the first African woman to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, which was for ‘contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.’
27. Amelia Earhart –  She was the first female pilot to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean. Amelia received the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross and wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences. She was also a member of the National Woman’s Party and supported the Equal Rights Amendment. Earhart’s attempt to be the first person to travel round the earth from the equator then resulted in her disappearance on July 2, 1937.
28. Oprah Winfrey – Oprah has become an influential television host, actress, producer, and philanthropist. She uses her status as a platform to highlight global issues such as poverty and child abuse. Through her charity organisation, ‘The Oprah Winfrey Foundation’, she has donated millions of dollars to provide help for people in countries across the globe.
29. Dame Stephanie Shirley – She founded the software company called ‘Freelance Programmers.’ She wanted to create job opportunities for women with dependents, and predominantly employed women, with only 3 male programmers out of the first 300 staff, until the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 made that practice illegal. She adopted the name, Steve, to help her in the male-dominated business world. Her team’s projects included programming Concorde’s black box flight recorder.

We’d love to hear your thoughts! Who is your favourite from our list of courageous women? Who would you add to list?