11-05-2025
20 famous mothers who shattered stereotypes and inspired others
(WWTI) — Today is Mother's Day and we are giving a shout-out to some of history's famous mothers and their impact on the world we live in today. From freedom fighters to science, these mothers broke the mold.
Let's take a look at 20 famous moms, courtesy of Mental Floss & CafeMom:
Known as Genghis Khan's mother, Hoelun (1142–1221) overcame being abducted, widowed and shunned on her path to becoming the advisor and mother of one of the greatest empires in history. She was abducted by Yesukhei, the leader of a small clan, around the time of her first marriage. Hoelun and her family were expelled from the clan and forced to rely on whatever they could find on the Mongolian steppes after Yesukhei was killed several years later, along with their children.
Genghis Khan, one of her offspring with Yesukhei, would grow up to be a famous conqueror, yet his mother could still correct him. When Hoelun learned that Genghis was going to put his brother to death for treason, she went to Genghis's headquarters and pleaded with him to spare him, according to Frank McLynn in Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy. When that failed, 'Hoelun grew angry, got to her feet and roundly rebuked the khan for thinking to execute his brother … Genghis raised her up and said he would grant the boon because of his love and deference for his mother.'
Abigail Adams (1744–1818) was the second First Lady of the United States and the wife of President John Adams. Due to her husband's frequent absences for work, she was often left to manage their farm alone, write letters advocating for women's equality and the abolition of slavery and raise their five children, one of whom went on to become future president John Quincy Adams. He wrote: 'My mother was an angel upon Earth. She was a minister of blessing to all human beings within her sphere of action. Her heart was the abode of heavenly purity … She was the real personification of female virtue, of piety, of charity, of ever active and never intermitting benevolence.'
When women were just not permitted to be trailblazers, Lucretia Mott was an unrepentant pioneer. She was one of the first known feminists and a fervent supporter of abolishing slavery in America. She was born in 1793. After joining William Lloyd Garrison's Anti-Slavery Society in the 1830s with the help of her like-minded husband, Mott went on to openly advocate for abolition and was a founding member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833.
She quickly became friends with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as a result of her campaigning, which rekindled her enthusiasm for women's rights. They collaborated to plan the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, which attracted eminent abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass.
In Ulster County, New York, Sojourner Truth (1797–1883) and her infant daughter fled slavery in 1826. According to most accounts, she soon learned that her 5-year-old son, Peter, had been sold to a man in Alabama without permission. In a historic instance when a Black woman successfully sued a white man in court, Truth gathered money for an attorney, filed a complaint, and was successful in freeing Peter from slavery. Truth later became a Christian preacher in New York City and traveled throughout the Northeast, giving talks on women's suffrage, abolition and the Bible.
Thomas Alva Edison was the youngest of Nancy Edison's seven children. We do know that Nancy Edison chose to homeschool her son when his teacher declared him to be 'addled' (meaning mentally ill or incapable), despite the fact that some of the stories about his mother's virtues were probably overblown. 'My mother was the making of me,' Edison, who may have simply been dyslexic in an era before that learning disability was researched or recognized, remarked of her. 'She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint.'
Ada Lovelace, born in London in 1815, was the daughter of poet Lord Byron and a gifted mathematician. Lovelace's mother made sure she had access to some of the brightest minds in the world after she demonstrated an early love for mathematics. One such person was Mary Somerville, a Scottish mathematician and astronomer who trained her as a young child.
In 1842, Lovelace added complex annotations and speculations to an article on the so-called calculating engine written by Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea. Her pioneering notes are regarded as an important element of early computer history and later became the first computer program, or algorithm, created to be executed by a machine.
The unstoppable Harriet Tubman is well-known to anyone who has heard the amazing tale of the Underground Railroad. Tubman, who was born a slave in 1820, spent years assisting others in their escape until making her own journey to freedom in the North in 1849.
Tubman led hundreds of family members and other slaves to freedom in the middle of the night by utilizing the Underground Railroad, a complex network of safe homes established throughout the South. By the end of her life, she was one of the most prominent members of the abolitionist movement and was also said to have served as a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War. She is regarded as one of the most courageous women in American history for these and other reasons.
One of the first Black women in America to publish a short tale was Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911). Harper was a prolific poet and lecturer who traversed the nation delivering lectures advocating for women's rights and abolition. She had a gift for language. She gained notoriety as 'the mother of African American journalism' because her statements were published so often in anti-slavery publications. Following her husband's death, Harper supported her family by giving talks across the United States after giving birth to a daughter in 1860.
In addition to being the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, Marie Curie (1867–1934) was a scientist who raised her two young kids by herself when her husband passed away in an accident in 1906. Irène Joliot-Curie, one of their daughters, and her husband shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their respective contributions to the field of radioactivity. According to Joliot-Curie, her mother taught her kids to be flexible and hardworking: 'That one must do some work seriously and must be independent and not merely amuse oneself in life—this our mother has told us always, but never that science was the only career worth following.'
The first self-made female millionaire in the United States was Madam C.J. Walker (1867–1919). She was motivated to improve her life by her daughter, A'Lelia. 'As I bent over the washboard and looked at my arms buried in soapsuds, I said to myself: 'What are you going to do when you grow old and your back gets stiff? Who is going to take care of your little girl?' Walker later developed a range of hair care products specifically designed for Black women. Her company prospered in the Midwest, and after she accompanied her daughter to New York, where she interacted with some of the greatest artists of the time and dabbled in political engagement, her empire grew even more. After her mother passed away, A'Lelia Walker took over as president of the corporation, having previously managed its East Coast operations. For LGBTQ+ artists of the Harlem Renaissance, her renowned extravagant events served as a safe haven.
Alberta Williams King (1904–1974), the mother of Martin Luther King, Jr., was active in women's organizations, the NAACP, and the YWCA. She also played the organ and started the choir at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. As MLK Jr. stated in his autobiography, she set out to instill in her three children a strong sense of self-respect and to teach them that the segregation they witnessed on a daily basis was really 'a social condition rather than a natural order.' MLK Jr. wrote in his autobiography, 'She made it clear that she opposed this system and that I must never allow it to make me feel inferior. … At this time Mother had no idea that the little boy in her arms would years later be involved in a struggle against the system she was speaking of.' Alberta King was shot and died at her church in 1974, six years after her son was killed in Memphis.
During the Holocaust, Irena Sendler (1910–2008), a Polish worker at the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, saved the lives of around 2500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto. She created temporary (non-Jewish) identities for these youngsters, gave them fake identification documents and placed them in Christian families, orphanages and convents under the code name Jolanta. She did not provide the Nazis with any information regarding the whereabouts of the children or the inner workings of her smuggling enterprise, despite the fact that she was captured, tortured and sentenced to death. She survived because the Gestapo was bought off. In 2003, Sendler, who is a mother of three children herself, was awarded Poland's Order of the White Eagle.
In order to address food shortages, Indira Gandhi (1917–1984), India's first female prime minister, sought to establish democracy and provide employment. She was in charge of India's green revolution, which eliminated the need for imported crops and made the nation self-sufficient. She famously said, 'Education is a liberating force, and in our age it is also a democratizing force, cutting across the barriers of caste and class, smoothing out inequalities imposed by birth and other circumstances.' In addition, she instilled a feeling of responsibility in her two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay Gandhi, who both went on to become politicians. Following his mother's 1984 assassination, Rajiv Gandhi was appointed prime minister of India.
In Jinhua, China, Lou Xiaoying was an impoverished, illiterate woman who made her living by picking through the rubbish. She began adopting or saving 30 kids she discovered in the trash in 1972. Some parents disposed of their undesired children in the trash due to the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution (and later China's one-child policy) and great poverty, particularly in rural areas. 'These children need love and care. They are all precious human lives,' In 2012, Xiaoying, who had a biological daughter before she started saving babies, told reporters, 'I do not understand how people can leave such a vulnerable baby on the streets.'
One terrible incident at the age of eight completely upended Maya Angelou's life: she was raped by her mother's boyfriend, and when she told her uncles about it, they killed the guy. The young girl from St. Louis, Missouri, was afraid to speak and lived in silence for the next five years of her life.
She developed her ability to express herself during those years and later came to appreciate poetry, dance and singing. She overcame a challenging upbringing, an unplanned pregnancy at the age of 16 and years of working in nightclubs to make ends meet because to her love of reading and performing.
After landing a part in a touring production of Porgy and Bess, Angelou eventually fought her way out of poverty and started writing. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, her coming-of-age autobiography, was released in 1969 and has since sold millions of copies worldwide and won other accolades.
The first elected female chief of the Cherokee Nation was Wilma Mankiller (1945–2010). Mankiller chose to go back to school despite her then-husband's expectations that she stay at home and raise their two kids, who were both born in the 1960s. In the 1960s, she started advocating for civil rights, and in the 1970s, she started working as a social worker. She stayed committed to her girls even though she spent the ensuing decades helping her community and fighting for Native American rights. At her memorial, Mankiller's daughter Gina Olaya remarked, 'Mom taught us how to laugh, how to dance, to appreciate Motown music, to be a humble servant to our people, to love one another unequivocally, and to cherish each and every moment we spent together as a family.'
One of Candy Lightner's 13-year-old twin daughters was killed in a hit-and-run in 1980 by a drunk motorist. The motorist had been detained for another hit-and-run two days previously and had three previous convictions for drunk driving. Lightner established Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) in a matter of months with the goals of preventing drunk driving, enacting stricter laws and assisting those who have been harmed by drunk drivers. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved thanks to MADD's efforts to increase awareness and pass legislation.
Mothers Without Borders was founded by Kathy Headlee, a mother of seven, the youngest of whom she adopted from Romania, to aid orphans worldwide. She oversaw a team of volunteers who trained caretakers in Romania and delivered emergency supplies to orphanages starting in 1992. Mothers Without Borders has since dispatched volunteers to aid children in Haiti, India, Mexico, Bolivia, Bosnia, Guatemala, Zimbabwe, Uganda and Nepal.
Theresa Kachindamoto is the chieftain of Malawi, an African nation with a population of around 900,000. Malawi has a high rate of child marriage—one in two girls gets married before turning 18—because impoverished parents find it difficult to provide for their kids. Kachindamoto, who has enacted legislation to prevent nearly 850 child marriages, hosts gatherings to educate Malawians about the risks of child marriage, including HIV, and the advantages of education for both boys and girls. In addition, she advocates for raising the legal marriage age in Malawi's Dedza district to 21 and works to abolish cultural sexual initiation rituals, in which a young girl's parents pay an older man to 'teach' her how to have sex, despite criticism for advising families on how to raise girls given that she herself has five boys.
Waris Dirie was five years old when she was subjected to female genital mutilation in her Somalian home in 1970. After her parents arranged for her to marry a guy in his sixties when she was thirteen, she fled her home and ultimately made it to London. She was a successful model, but she gave up modeling in 1997 to focus on fighting female genital mutilation, in part by serving as a UN special ambassador. She established Desert Flower, an organization that fights female genital mutilation globally. In 2010, she told Harper's Bazaar that female genital mutilation is not solely a female problem, saying, 'Every education begins with Mama. We have to rethink what we teach our sons. That's the most important thing.'
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