Celebrate National Women's Day with stories you'd never see anywhere else
NPR celebrates with "Portraits of women who 'shine a light': from an 'analog' astronaut to a watermelon farmer."
You probably won’t be surprised to know I’m an NPR supporter. I have to admit I was concerned after the internal uproar last year following the naming of a new CEO—a woman, ya know. But particularly in the last few months, I’ve seen an increase in relevant coverage other media just don’t present, like this context on the size of our government compared to others.
In NPR’s Goats and Soda section today, to celebrate International Women’s Day, they have some unusual stories about terrific women, and the photos are even better—stories and images we’d otherwise never see unless you happen to visit the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky.
Click to read about a 19-year-old mechanic in Nigeria who maintains the water supply, a ground-breaking jazz guitarist from Sudan, deep-sea diving women in their 60s from South Korea, a watermelon vendor in Indonesia who at 82 is her family's main bread winner, and gender barrier-breaking female firefighters in Nigeria.
The stories are drawn from subjects in the photography exhibition, "Iconic Women: From Everyday Life to Global Heroes," that opened today at the Muhammad Ali Center and will run through January 19. The photos represent the winners of the Center's eleventh annual "Shining a Light" document photo contest, chosen from 472 submissions from photographers from 65 countries.
Join Women Untamed in celebrating the indomitable spirit of women all over the world in this piece, and give yourself a pat on the back for being a sister to these amazing women! They might not have DC, but many of them persevere through odds we’ve never, ever seen.
And consider this quote, part of the first paragraph of Jodi Picoult’s new book, By Any Other Name: “One day, the professor had flashed a slide of a bone with twenty-nine tiny incisions on one long side. ‘The Lebomo bone was found in a cave in Swaziland in the 1970s and is about forty-three thousand years old,’ she had said. ‘It’s made of a baboon fibula. For years, it’s been the first calendar attributed to man. But I ask you: what man uses a twenty-nine-day calendar?…History,’ she said, ‘is written by those in power.’”
Katherine Maher, the new CEO at NPR is writing a different history. We’d like to think we are, too; join us!
: from an 'analog' astronaut to a watermelon farmer