Textos con la historia de tres importantes mujeres y un movimiento femenino.
Rosa Parks: On December 1st, 1955, in Montgomery (Alabama), she says ‘NO’ to give her seat to a white passenger. She is tired of being discriminated against because of her skin colour. In the fifties, there is still racial segregation. White and black people are separated. At schools, in restaurants, in restrooms, theatres or buses white and black people must be kept apart. On buses, whites ride in the front of the bus and the ‘coloured’ at the back. When a bus becomes crowded, coloured people give their seats to white passengers. When she says ‘NO’, she is arrested and sent to jail. When she gets out the next day, people in the city join together and the revolution begins.
Black people start a boycott and they don’t use buses anymore. A year later, the Supreme Court rules that segregation on buses is against the constitution. She is one of the most famous American activists against racism, together with Martin Luther King.
Amelia Earhart: On May 21st, 1932 she becomes the most famous pilot in the United States because she was the first woman to fly an aeroplane over the Atlantic solo.
In January 1935, after many flights across the United States, she makes the first successful flight across the Pacific Ocean, from Hawaii to California. She received international recognition for her effort and become as known as one of the world’s most skilled and adventurous aviators.
You may not know her name but her image is world famous. So, you can easily recognize her face. She’s not real, but a fictional character. In World War II, many American men went to Europe to fight in the war. The American government launched campaigns to encourage women to do jobs that only men usually did. For example, they worked in factories that produce ammunition and other weapons for the war.
There is a famous song with her name inspired by a real-life woman named Rosalind P. Walter, who worked as a riveter at an aircraft factory. This song became very popular at that time.
This famous propaganda poster (see below) is really an advert for the war that Howard Miller made in 1942. And from that moment everybody associates this fictional character with the poster. She is still a symbol of women’s empowerment.
Katherine Switzer became the first woman who officially ran the Boston marathon in 1967. For 70 years, women were not allowed to take part in that race. She entered using her initials, K. Switzer, to hide her gender and ran with the number 261.
She became famous because during the race an official tried to force her out from the course after a few miles. ‘The marathon was a man’s race in those days; women were considered too fragile to run in it’, she once said. It was assumed that no woman in her right mind would want to run a marathon and they wouldn’t be able to anyway. Before the race, she had to train hard and was very confident of her strength. She finished the race in 4 hours and 20 minutes. She realised at that moment that everything had changed for women. It became a contest of proving that women could do it. She was determined that nothing would stop her. She thought she deserved to be there because it was a public road. She once said: ‘I started the Boston Marathon as a young girl, and came out the other end a grown woman’. After that, she was determined to be a better athlete and tried to create opportunities for women so they could experience the same sense of power, strength and freedom that she had. In the 1984 Olympics, women were allowed to run in the marathon for the first time and in 1974 in the Boston Marathon.
Switzer was the women’s winner of the 1974 New York City Marathon. Kathrine is the founder of ‘261 Fearless’, a running club for women and has worked as a television commentator. ‘When I go to the Boston Marathon, I have wet shoulders. Women fall into my arms crying. They’re weeping for joy because running has changed their lives. They feel they can do anything’, she once said.
Este conjunto de audios forma parte de la colección de recursos disponibles para su descarga y uso dentro del trabajo docente, para incluir en documentos, apuntes, presentaciones… dando así la posibilidad de desarrollar trabajos más creativos y personalizados.