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Women of The World

Pioneering Women of The World

She was born and christened Jennifer Mary Robson in the southern town of Gore, New Zealand. In 1971 she gained qualification as a teacher, and taught in New Zealand primary schools until 1976. She also served in a number of educational and child-care organizations, such as the Plunket Society.

Having joined the National Party in 1975, Shipley successfully stood for the Ashburton electorate in 1987 election. She would represent this electorate until her retirement from politics in 2001, though it was renamed Rakaia in 1996.

When National under Jim Bolger won the election of 1990, Shipley became Minister of Social Welfare, having been National's spokesperson on that topic while in Opposition. She also served as Minister of Women's Affairs.

In her role as Minister of Social Welfare, Shipley sparked controversy with her cutbacks to state benefits. Later, when she became Minister of Health in 1993, she caused further controversy by attempting to reform the public health service, introducing an internal market. When National gained re-election in 1996, Shipley dropped the Women's Affairs portfolio and gained a number of others, including responsibility for state-owned companies.

Shipley grew increasingly frustrated and disillusioned with the cautious pace of National's leader, Jim Bolger, as well as what she saw as the disproportionate influence of coalition partner New Zealand First. She began gathering support to replace him in mid-1997. Later that year, while Bolger attended a conference in Scotland, Shipley convinced a majority of her National Party colleagues to back her bid for the leadership. Bolger, seeing that he no longer had the support of his party, resigned, and Shipley replaced him. As leader of the governing party, she became Prime Minister on 8 December 1997.

Kim Campbell

Avril Phaedra Douglas "Kim" Campbell (born March 10, 1947) was the nineteenth Prime Minister of Canada, serving from June 25, 1993 to November 4, 1993.

Campbell was the first (and only) female Prime Minister of Canada, and the second woman in history to sit at the table of the Group of Eight leaders (after British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher). She was the third woman to serve as a head of government in North America (after Eugenia Charles of Dominica and Violeta Chamorro of Nicaragua) and was also Canada's first baby-boomer Prime Minister. She was the first to be born and elected in British Columbia.

Campbell was born in Port Alberni, British Columbia to George Thomas Campbell (1920–2002) and Phyllis "Lisa" Cook. Her mother left the family when Campbell was 12, leaving Kim and her sister Alix to be raised by their father. As a teenager, Avril permanently nicknamed herself Kim, perhaps for actress Kim Novak, as well as because "Kim" resembles the first syllable of Campbell said in a Highlander accent.

While in her pre-teens, Campbell was a host and reporter on the CBC children's program Junior Television Club.

She and her family moved to Vancouver, and Campbell attended Prince of Wales Secondary School, becoming the school's first female student president, graduating in 1964.

Gro Harlem Brundtland

Gro Harlem Brundtland, born 20 April 1939, is a Norwegian politician, diplomat, and physician, and an international leader in sustainable development and public health. She is a former Prime Minister of Norway, and has served as the Director General of the World Health Organization. She now serves as a Special Envoy on Climate Change for the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. In 2008 she became the recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture.

Brundtland was educated as a Medical Doctor (cand. med.) at the University of Oslo in 1963, and Master of Public Health at Harvard University in 1965. From 1966 to 1969, she worked as a physician at the Directorate of Health (Helsedirektoratet), and from 1969 she worked as a doctor in Oslo's public school health service. She was Norwegian Minister for Environmental Affairs from 1974 to 1979, and became Norway's first — and to date only — female Prime Minister. She served as Prime Minister from February to October in 1981.

Golda Meir

Meir was born Golda Mabovitch in Kiev in the Russian Empire (today Ukraine), to Blume Naidtich and Moshe Mabovitch, a carpenter. Golda wrote in her autobiography that her earliest memories were of her father boarding up the front door in response to rumors of an imminent pogrom. She had two sisters, Sheyna and Tzipke. Five other siblings died in childhood. Golda was especially close to Sheyna. Moshe Mabovitch left for the United States in 1903, and the family followed in 1906.

The family settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where her father found a job as a carpenter, and her mother ran a grocery store. At the age of eight, she was already put in charge of watching the store when her mother went to the market for supplies.

Golda attended the Fourth Street School (now Golda Meir School) from 1906 to 1912. A leader early on, Golda organized a fundraiser to pay for her classmates' textbooks. After forming the American Young Sisters Society, she rented a hall and scheduled a public meeting for the event. When she began school, she did not know English, but she graduated as valedictorian of her class.

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner

Cristina Elisabet Fernández was born in La Plata, province of Buenos Aires, daughter of Eduardo Fernández (of Spanish heritage) and Ofelia Esther Wilhelm (of German heritage). She studied law at the National University of La Plata during the 1970s. During her studies there, she met her future spouse, Néstor. They married on March 9, 1975 and had two children: Máximo and Florencia. Florencia received international media attention during early 2008 when she started keeping a Fotolog.

Kirchner started her political career in the Peronist Youth movement of the Justicialist Party in the 1970s. During the period of authoritarian rule in the country, she and Néstor dropped out of politics and practised law in Río Gallegos. She picked up politics again in the late 1980s, and was elected to the Santa Cruz provincial legislature in 1989, a position to which she was re-elected in 1993.

In 1995 she was elected to represent Santa Cruz in the Senate, and in 1997 in the Chamber of Deputies. In 2001 she won again a seat in the Senate.

Kirchner provided the main backbone to her husband's successful campaign for the presidency in 2003, against two other Justicialist candidates and several other competitors. In the April 27, 2003 presidential election first round, former president Carlos Saúl Menem won the greatest number of votes (25%), but failed to get the votes necessary to win an overall majority. A second-round run-off vote between Menem and second-place finisher Néstor Kirchner was scheduled for May 18. Feeling certain that he was about to face a resounding electoral defeat, Menem decided to withdraw his candidacy, thus automatically making Kirchner the new president, with 21.97% of the votes (the lowest number in the history of the country).