Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Social Activists

Women played a major part in the French Revolution of 1789, but have received very little recognition for their contributions. The many claims and protests put forth by women at that time were suppressed, women's clubs were banned, and Olympe de Gouges, a leading contemporary advocate for women's rights, was silenced and has since remained an obscure figure. This book is the first biography of this astonishing woman.

After boldly publishing her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in 1791, de Gouges was sent to the guillotine for having had the...

Andrew Carnegie, the great steel-baron-turned-philanthropist, was an industrialist unlike any other. His famous dictum, that he who dies rich dies disgraced, has inspired a generation of twenty-first-century philanthropists to follow in his footsteps and put their money towards philanthropic causes. He had an unwavering belief in distributing wealth for good, and systematically and deliberately gave away the bulk of his riches throughout his lifetime.

Born in 1835, he emigrated with his family to the United States from Scotland at a young age. His first job was in a cotton factory, and...

Betsy Mix Cowles--a champion of equality whose circle of acquaintances included Frederick Douglass, Abby Kelley, and William Lloyd Garrison--is a brilliant example of what an educated and independent woman can accomplish. A staunch defender of abolitionism, Cowles also took up the cause of women's rights and dedicated her life to the advocacy of women's access to education, equal rights, and independence in the pre-Civil War era. The life of this devoted social reformer illuminates the struggles and historical developments relating to abolitionism and the fledgling women's movement...

Lu Hsiu-lien's journey is the story of Taiwan. Through her successive drives for gender equality, human rights, political reform, Taiwan independence, and, currently, environmental protection, Lu has played a key role in Taiwan's evolution from dictatorship to democracy. The election in 2000 of Democratic Progressive Party leader Chen Shui-bian to the presidency, with Lu as his vice president, ended more than fifty years of rule by the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party).

Taiwan's painful struggle for democratization is dramatized here in the life of Lu, a feminist leader and...

First-hand, human stories of hope, resilience, determination, and family: a call to see the world's children as our own, by the President and CEO of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF

In I Believe in ZERO, President and CEO of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF Caryl M. Stern draws on her travels around the world, offering memorable stories that present powerful and sometimes counter-intuitive lessons about life. I Believe in ZERO reflects her--and UNICEF's--mission to reduce the number of preventable deaths of children under the age of five from 19,000 each day to zero.

Each of the...