Trustlaw Women Contest: Who is your all time heroine?

By Danielle Liffmann, Kama Duggan and Charmaine Lirio

To mark the launch of our latest programme - TrustLaw Women, our global hub of information, news and blogs on women’s rights - we have asked women who their all-time heroine is and why. Here are the winning entries:

1. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-Dutch feminist and writer

By Danielle Liffmann

“She has been an inspiring heroine to me since I picked up her first novel, “Infidel”. I am amazed by her ability to disregard the limitations cast on her by others and fight for her beliefs.

Ali was born in Somalia to a prominent member of a revolutionary opposition party.  At the age of five, she underwent female circumcision at the insistence of her grandmother – a painful and dangerous procedure intended to reduce women’s libido and thereby help them resist sexual acts outside of marriage. 

She later moved to Kenya where she and her family adopted a rigorous interpretation of Islam that promoted the suppression of women’s rights.  Ali continued to suffer a life of abuse at the hand of not only the male members of her family, but also her mother and grandmother.

In her early twenties, her father attempted to force Ali to marry a distant cousin in Canada. Ali refused to submit to a man, but knew if she stayed in Somalia she could be beaten or killed for dishonouring her father. 

Instead of switching planes in Germany, she escaped and found her way to the Netherlands where she sought political asylum. There she worked her way up from cleaning hotels to earning a master’s degree in political science.

Despite her upbringing in a conservative Muslim household, Ali became critical of interpretations of the Qur’an that allow the abuse of women. 

She became involved politically and was elected to the Dutch Parliament in 2002.  During her time in Parliament, she made a number of controversial statements about her beliefs towards Islam and its abuse of women.

She also worked on a film, Submission, which portrayed Muslim women suffering abuse. Shortly after its release, her co-producer was murdered and Ali was forced to go into hiding due to threats on her life.

Since then, she has published several novels detailing her story. She has received numerous awards for her work to further freedom of speech and the rights of women. 

Ali also founded the AHA foundation, a non-profit humanitarian organization created to protect females in the U.S. against denial of education, genital cutting, forced marriage, honour violence or killings, suppression of information, and other crimes against women custom in radical Islam.

Ali is a heroine not just for fighting for her own asylum from abuse, but also for her endless struggle to protect others.  Despite the risks to her own life, she continues to speak out towards reforming Islamic traditions that oppress women and demands equal treatment for everyone. 

As a woman, she inspires me to never accept a situation in which I face inequality.  Ali’s values empower women to fight not only for equal rights in religion, but in the work force, political landscape, and the classroom.  She has inspired me to speak up for what I believe in, even if it goes against the tradition of society, because a woman’s worth is limited only by how much she values herself.”

2. Margaret Sanger, sex educator, birth control activist and founder of the American Birth Control League

By Kama Duggan

“When my grandma passed away she left me a memory book.  In this book was this question: what invention changed the world the most in your lifetime? 

My grandma answered access to birth control. I thought about all the changes birth control could have contributed to (careers, education, lower infant mortality rates, etc.) and imagined what it would have been like living in an era where the average person had no access to family planning knowledge or any related topics such as venereal diseases and women’s health.

Would I have ended up like countless other women who lost their lives due to poor health conditions related to birthing? It was one of these incidents that sparked the passion of my heroine, Margaret Sanger, to pursue a worldwide change.  

Margaret Sanger believed that access to birth control would reduce the need for abortion (a common and dangerous method of family planning at the time), save women’s and children’s lives, strengthen the family, lift families out of poverty, improve the health and well-being for all, and help women gain their legal and civil rights.

Via this advocacy, she showed the world that women matter and women helping other women can be the greatest force in improving the future.  Though she endured public ridicule, was arrested eight times, sued many times, and lived in exile, she knew knowledge of family planning was her life goal and she pursued it until the end of her life.

Her passion to make the world a better place for women and children across continents was obvious in everything she did and said. Through her actions she helped make it legal to talk about birth, family planning, diseases and other issues that affected women. 

She started women’s clinics, eventually called Planned Parenthood. In 1942 she organized the first international population conference.  She met with many great world leaders and traveled to many countries to encourage family planning policies.

She was actively involved in starting the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Currently, this organization is active in 170 countries and has approximately 36 million visits a year.

I would love to fill this page up with specific examples of policies, writings, and the letters from lives that have been changed as a result of Margaret Sanger’s actions, but instead I am going to share a quote that should inspire us all to do great things. 

She said: “There is an old Indian proverb which has inspired me in the work of my adult life. ‘Build thou beyond thyself, but first be sure that thou thyself be strong and healthy in body and mind.”

Yes, to build, to work, to plan to do something, not for yourself, not for your own benefit, but ‘beyond thyself’—and when this idea permeates the mind you begin to think in terms of a future. This I believe—at the end as at the beginning of my long crusade for the future of the human race.”

3. Lourdes “Chit” Estella-Simbulan, Filipino journalist and university professor

By Charmaine Lirio

Her life was dedicated to the pursuit of truth and service to the people.

When Lourdes “Chit” Estella-Simbulan died in a car accident in the Philippines in May this year, those reckless drivers didn’t just deprive a husband of a wife and rob students of a teacher. They stole from an entire nation a great journalist and a true public servant.

She would not have wanted a lot of attention paid to her death and rather put the spotlight on how many lives that so-called killer highway and our flawed traffic rules have taken. But, no matter how she downplayed her achievements and kept her profile low, her loved ones, colleagues, students and the many people she helped will not allow her death go unnoticed and her life be forgotten. I am one of them.

I will not call her my heroine because she was not mine. It is not an exaggeration to say that she helped save, until her last moments, an entire country.

In the 70s and 80s, when the Philippines were under martial rule and the media was controlled by the repressive government, Ma’am Simbulan (as we called her in class) went underground. She joined other practitioners, amid certain danger, in reporting corruption and human rights violations perpetrated by the Marcos administration.

The death of some of her colleagues and friends devastated her, as her husband said, but she continued fighting.

In the late 90s, faced with intimidation from once again the highest man in the country, Ma’am Simbulan stood up for what she knew was right and true. The newspaper she worked for succumbed to the president’s bullying and apologised for its reports on his wrongdoings, so she resigned, joined another publication and continued her expositions.

In fact, she never stopped, not even after she entered the university to train young journalists. Ma’am Simbulan and her friends, who are also veteran journalists, started a non-profit media organisation (Vera Files) that writes in-depth, investigative pieces on issues concerning the Philippine society.

And yet, despite all that she had done and achieved, Ma’am Simbulan remained open and accessible to everyone who needed her. She never bragged about her experience and never intimidated her students. She taught journalism with dedication and imparted to her students, many of whom are now media practitioners themselves, a strong sense of ethics and understanding of the value of truth and loyalty to the public.

“She lived the life she wanted,” one of her friends and colleagues said. And through that choice, she showed me, she showed us, a life that we should all want to live.”

Who is your “All time heroine”? Please share with us your comments and stories here