My Personal Heroines On International Women’s Day - Who Are Yours?

This week, people all over the world will be celebrating IWD - International Women’s Day. There will be lots of articles, well-deserved, about women who have made the world a better place note only for themselves and other women but for everyone. From Marie Curie to Ann Richards, from Florence Nightingale to Eleanor Roosevelt to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I feel proud of and grateful to all these women and so many others for their courage, tenacity and accomplishments.

Heroines Closer to Home

At the same time, I encourage all of us to reflect on the powerful, loving female change-makers in our own lives; those women who have affected you personally and made you the person you are today.

I feel very fortunate to have had marvelous female forbearers, whose examples I am inspired to emulate every day:

• My paternal great-grandmother, Mina Jensen. When she was 20 and pregnant with her first child, my grandfather, she and her husband Nils Andersen, both Danish immigrants, bought a horse and cart and drove it from upstate New York to Nebraska to take advantage of the government’s land grant policy in the late 1800’s: you could have as much land as you could work. They built a farm and raised five children there.

• My grandmothers Ellen Cole Swarr and Leota Byars Andersen. Both were working women and suffragists in the early decades of the 20th century, and both passed on to their children their deep conviction that all people deserve to be treated with dignity and to have equal rights before the law.
• My mother, Jean Swarr Andersen. When her fiancé, my father, was fighting in the South Pacific in World War II, she volunteered to join an elite code-cracking group working out of Arlington Hall, Virginia on behalf of the US government. After the war, she supported herself and my father while he went to law school on the GI bill. She raised my brothers, my sister and me to expect that we could create good lives for ourselves that would include satisfying work and loving families - and to understand the importance of working to make sure everyone had that same opportunity.

Thank you all, my lovely family of women, for helping to move this world in the direction of inclusion and equality.

Who are your personal heroines?

By Erika Andersen, Contributor