I read this over the weekend.
It's a really beautiful piece and you should read the whole thing.
This is my favourite part:
"Magnificent women are surprisingly abundant: Avital Sharansky campaigned
governments for nine years on behalf of her imprisoned spouse; Eleanor
Roosevelt was her husband’s legs; Nadezhda Mandelstam sent her
unforgettable letters into the nowhere of Stalin’s prisons to her poet
husband, Osip. There were unimaginably courageous women who faced
torture by the Gestapo and died rather than give away Allied
intelligence."
"But in less interesting times, I’d invoke a simple rule.
Heroines are women who naturally self-sacrifice their own needs for
others: the mother who interposes her body between that of her children
and danger, the wife who donates an organ, the daughter who gives up all
to care for an ailing parent. Those people who crossed Boylston Street
to help the injured in Boston when, for all they knew, another bomb
could go off. Just think of it. In that blood and dust and mayhem, they
thought only of others."
I would add that anyone who can articulate these essential human attributes with such grace and clarity goes on my list of magnificent women as well.
