International Women's Day 2011: Statues.

We talked in class about statues of famous people and today is the International Women's Day, so here are three examples of what we did in class, all of them women:

The statue of Florence Nightingale in London.


Florence Nightingale was a British woman but she was born in Florence (Italy) in 1820.

She was a celebrated English nurse, writer and statistician.

She was the founder of professional nursing with the establishment, in 1860, of her nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London, the first secular nursing school in the world.

The Nightingale Pledge taken by new nurses was named in her honour, and the annual International Nurses Day is celebrated around the world on her birthday.

The statue of Queen Boadicea on Wesminster Bridge.

Boadicea was born in Wales (United Kingdom) around AD 60 or 61. She was queen of the Iceni tribe (Wales) and was the leader of one of the most important rebellions against the Roman Empire during its occupation of the British Isles.

Her original Welsh name was Boudica and it means victory, but she was not lucky in this enterprise.

The last woman is Mary Wollstonecraft. She was born in 1759 in Spitafields (London, UK).

She was a very unusual woman for her age and was famous as a writer and philosopher. She was the authoress of A Vindication of the Rights of Women and defended the idea of sex equality at a time when it was normal to think that women were inferior to men.

Unfortunately, she has no statue and that is why this year, on the 100th International Women's Day, plans are getting underway to create the first statue anywhere in the world honouring her... Read more in The Guardian.