TAKE THE LEAD A salute to our role models ahead of International Women’s Day
To honour the upcoming International Women’s Day, we honour trailblazing role models of literature, science and politics
ITHE ESSAYISTS
n December 2017, Salma Hayek wrote an article for The New York Times detailing her ordeal at the hands of Harvey Weinstein while she was making the biopic of Frida Kahlo. As the highest-profile actress to have come forward, she reignited the public outcry against the producer.
The searingly personal essay is now part of an anthology that reflects the diversity of voices in feminism today, putting paid to the belief that there is a single narrative to which women should subscribe. Included in this exploration of politics, gender and power is an excerpt from Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women and a vision of how to build a feminist society by Naomi Alderman. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her piece, she has been ‘troubled by how many people… saw something menacing… as though feminism was supposed to be an elite little cult, with esoteric rites of membership… Feminism should be an inclusive party.’ helena lee ‘The Future is Feminist’, edited by Jessica Valenti (£17.99, Chronicle), is out now.
THE SCIENTIST
‘I will have won when gender becomes irrelevant,’ says Professor Gina Rippon (left), the cognitive neuroscientist whose brilliant new book deconstructs centuries of entrenched scientific misogyny to refute the myth that the brains of women and men are fundamentally different. ellen peirson-hagger
‘The Gendered Brain’ by Gina Rippon (£20, Bodley Head) is published on 28 February.
THE LAWYER
Ruth Bader Ginsburg became America’s second female
Supreme Court Justice in
1993 and has been overturning gender-discriminatory legislation ever since. Profiled in January’s rousing documentary RBG, the self-professed ‘flaming feminist’ is now the subject of the empowering biopic On the Basis of Sex (out on 22 February), starring Felicity Jones. yasmin omar