Rosa Parkes & Ruth Bader-Ginsburg: Lauren Chiren's Inspiring Women.
Updated: Dec 15, 2021
Rosa Parkes and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were the two highly Inspiring Women that executive menopause coach, Lauren Chiren, from www.womenofacertainstage.com chose to discuss when she was a recent guest on the Hidden Herstory Podcast.
In this blog post, we explore the lives of these two iconic American women, discover more about their lives and work in a selection of short videos, and give suggestions for further reading.
ROSA PARKES
Rosa Louise Parks (February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005) was an activist in the Civil Rights Movement, best known for her pivotal role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement".
Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus on December 1, 1955, triggered a wave of protest that reverberated throughout the United States and eventually changed the course of history.
Growing up in the segregated South, Rosa Parks had frequently been confronted with racial discrimination and violence throughout her childhood in Alabama. Her mother, Leona, enrolled her in Montgomery Industrial School for Girls & the Alabama State Teacher’s College High School, but Rosa was unable to graduate with the rest of her classmates, because her grandmother and mother became ill, and Rosa had to stay at home and care for them. Rosa finally received her high school diploma in 1934, two years after her marriage to a barber named Raymond Parks in December 18, 1932.
Raymond Parks was an early activist in the effort to free the “Scottsboro Boys,” a celebrated case in the 1930′s. Together, Raymond and Rosa worked for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP’s). He was an active member and she served as secretary and later youth leader of the local branch. At the time of her arrest, she was preparing for a major youth conference.
By the time Parks boarded the bus in 1955, she was an established organizer and leader in the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama. Parks not only showed active resistance by refusing to move she also helped organize and plan the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Many have tried to diminish Parks’ role in the boycott by depicting her as a seamstress who simply did not want to move because she was tired.
In her autobiography, My Story, she said:
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
When Parks refused to give up her seat, a police officer arrested her. As the officer took her away, she recalled that she asked, "Why do you push us around?" She remembered him saying, "I don't know, but the law's the law, and you're under arrest." She later said, "I only knew that, as I was being arrested, that it was the very last time that I would ever ride in humiliation of this kind."
After the arrest of Rosa Parks, black people of Montgomery and sympathizers of other races organized and promoted a boycott of the city bus line that lasted 381 days. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was appointed the spokesperson for the Bus Boycott and taught nonviolence to all participants. Thousands of courageous people joined the “protest” to demand equal rights for all people.
Mrs. Parks moved to Detroit, Michigan in 1957. In 1964 she became a deaconess in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). Mrs. Parks received more than forty-three honorary doctorate degrees and was voted by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most Influential people of the 20th century.
WATCH THE VIDEOS BELOW TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT ROSA PARKES' LIFE & WORK
FURTHER READING & LINKS
RUTH BADER GINSBURG
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933. Her father was a Jewish immigrant and her mother was born in New York to Polish parents.
In 1956, Ginsburg became one of nine women accepted to Harvard Law School, and finished top of her class, but she still did not receive a job offer after graduation. "No law firm in the entire city of New York would employ me," she later said. "I struck out on three grounds: I was Jewish, a woman and a mother."
Eventually, Ginsburg became a professor at Rutgers Law School, where she taught some of the first classes on women and the law. The following year, Ginsburg became the first female professor at Columbia Law School and co-founded the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Soon, she was the ACLU's general counsel and launched a series of gender-discrimination cases. Six of these brought her before the Supreme Court - and she won five! Then in 1971, she made her first successful argument before the Supreme Court - marking the first time the Supreme Court had struck down a law because of gender-based discrimination.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton after a lengthy search process. Ginsburg was the second woman confirmed to that bench, following Sandra Day O'Connor, who was nominated by President Reagan in 1981.
WATCH THE VIDEOS BELOW FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES & WASHINGTON POST TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE LIFE AND WORK OF RUTH BADER GINSBURG
10 powerful quotes from Ruth Bader Ginsburg
"Reading is the key that opens doors to many good things in life. Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true."
"Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation."
"When contemplated in its extreme, almost any power looks dangerous.
"When I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women judges on the US Supreme Court bench] and I say, 'When there are nine,' people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that."
"Fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you."
"Women belong in all places where decisions are being made. It shouldn't be that women are the exception."
"A constitution, as important as it is, will mean nothing unless the people are yearning for liberty and freedom."
"I became a lawyer for selfish reasons. I thought I could do a lawyer's job better than any other."
"I just try to do the good job that I have to the best of my ability and I really don't think about whether I'm inspirational. I just do the best I can."
"I would like to be remembered as someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability. And to help repair tears in her society, to make things a little better through the use of whatever ability she has."
FURTHER READING AND LINKS
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