Cleopatra ruled an empire that included Egypt, Cyprus, part of modern-day Libya and other territories in the Middle East. She first ascended the throne in 51 B.C. with her brother Ptolemy XIII as co-monarch. Following her return to Alexandria at 21-years-old, her surviving half-brother, Ptolemy XIV, was elevated to the position of pharaoh at about age 12. She was the first Ptolemaic queen with her head and name minted on coins.
As a child, Frida was stricken with polio in her right leg at the age of six. Despite this handicap, she played soccer, boxed, wrestled, and became a champion swimmer. She spoke and wrote English, loved to use foul language in Spanish, loved floor length native Mexican dresses, and similar to Anne Frank, she kept a diary, but written in the last decade of her life.
Anne Frank was born Annaliese Marie Frank in Frankfurt, Germany. Her original red and white checkered diary was a birthday gift. Her family was sent to Auschwitz in 1944, the last shipment of Jews to leave Holland. She would die from typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp before turning 16, two weeks before the camp was liberated and two months before the war ended.
Physicist/chemist Marie Curie was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize and the only woman to have won the Nobel Prize twice; for physics in 1903, and chemistry in 1911. During her lifetime, she would discover both polonium and radium. In 1994, a new element, Curium, would be named after her and husband, Pierre Curie.
Authenticity. What does it even mean to be authentic? The courage to be yourself means speaking from the heart. Opening up to others is the way to be authentic and establish genuine lines of communication. In Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I A Woman?" speech delivered at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Georgia (1851), she shares: "...Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman?" In her speech to the troops at Tilbury (August 9, 1588) Queen Elizabeth I says, "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too."
