We like to act as if we can achieve things by our self. It is the masculine model of independence. In reality everyone however who made it big…man or woman had many people supporting them. You can achieve anything you want in life or business if you have a clear answer to WHY you want it, focus on it, use your mind, listen to your heart, and as important have a strong, intelligent support network of peers to help you achieve it. When women support one another they can achieve more than they could ever do by themselves.
Elizabeth Arden
Business executive
Born: 1878 Died: 1966
Birthplace: Woodbridge, Ontario, Canada
She opened her first beauty salon in New York in 1907, forming the cornerstone of an international empire of salons, beauty products, and chic image. Arden and her rival, Helena Rubinstein, made cosmetics acceptable to “respectable” American women. Under the name Elizabeth Graham, from the 1930s–early 1960s she ran the Maine Chance Stables in Kentucky where the 1947 Kentucky Derby winner was bred.
Cara Carleton “Carly” Fiorina
business executive
Born: 1954
Birthplace: Austin, Texas
Cara Carleton Sneed attended high schools in Ghana, England, North Carolina, and California because her father, a lawyer and later a judge, moved around a lot. She earned a BA in medieval history from Stanford University in 1976, working as a secretary at Hewlett-Packard (HP) one summer. She dropped out of UCLA law school, but later earned an MBA from the University of Maryland and a master of science from MIT. At 25 she got an entry-level job at AT&T. Ten years later Fiorina was the company’s first female officer. In another five years she was named head of North American operations. In 1996 she successfully guided the spinoff of AT&T’s equipment and research branch, Lucent Technologies, through an initial public stock offering of $3 billion. In 1999 Fiorina became president and CEO of HP, a Fortune 500 company with close to $50 billion in annual sales.
Macarthur, Mary Reid,
1880–1921, British labor organizer,
Glasgow, Scotland. Working in her father’s draper’s shop, she became prominent in the shop assistants’ union. As the representative of the women chain makers of Cradley Heath, she secured (1909) a minimum wage and led a strike to compel employers to pay the increase without delay. She visited the United States in 1920 as a British representative in the first labor conference convened under the League of Nations. She married (1911) William Crawford Anderson, chairman of the Independent Labour party.
Martha Stewart
(Martha Kostyra)
writer; television personality; entrepreneur
Born: 8/03/1941
Birthplace: Nutley, N.J.
With a partial scholarship and money earned by modeling, Stewart was able to leave her small New Jersey home town behind for the ivy halls of Barnard College. After graduating, she continued to model, worked as a stockbroker, started a catering business, wrote a column for House Beautiful, and worked as a contributing editor to Family Circle. Appearances on morning television programs led to the development of her own syndicated show, Martha Stewart Living (1993–present). Her publications include the books Pies and Tarts (1985) and Gardening (1993) and the magazine Martha Stewart Living (1990–present). In 2003, Stewart was indicted on charges of obstruction of justice and securities fraud, the result of a 2001 sale of ImClone stock. She served five months in a minimum security prison and was released in March 2005. In January 2006, an appeals court denied her appeal and her verdict was upheld.
Margaret C. “Meg,” Whitman
business executive
Born: 1957
Birthplace: New York
She grew up in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, N.Y. When Whitman entered Princeton University, she planned a career in medicine, but she became an economics major after a summer job selling advertising for a campus publication. She graduated with an economics degree in 1977 and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School two years later. Whitman joined Procter & Gamble, later working for the consulting firm Bain & Co., Walt Disney, Stride Rite Shoes, Florists’ Transworld Delivery (FTD), and Hasbro. At Hasbro she was responsible for marketing Playskool and Mr. Potato Head brands. Since joining eBay in1998 as president and CEO, Whitman has helped turn it into a major Internet presence, visited by some seven million people daily. On paper at least, Whitman is a multi-billionaire and one of the richest woman CEOs in the world, She is married to Griffith R. Harsh IV, a neurosurgeon. .
Vera Wang
fashion designer
Born: 6/27/1949
Birthplace: New York City
Wang is widely considered the most respected and influential wedding dress designer in the world. She also designs evening wear, ready-to-wear, and ice-skating outfits. In fact, she designed the sleek costumes worn by Nancy Kerrigan in the 1994 Olympic Games. Wang herself was an elite skater and competed in the 1968 National Figure Skating Finals. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and the Sorbonne. Before she struck out on her own in 1990 as a designer, Wang worked for 16 years as an editor at Vogue and for two years as a design director for Ralph Lauren. Several celebrities, including Sharon Stone, Uma Thurman, Meg Ryan, and Tyra Banks, wear Vera Wang creations.
Anna Kingsley
Plantation owner and former slave
Born: 1793 Died: 1870
Birthplace: Senegal
Anna Madgigine Jai was captured in her native country of Senegal in 1806 when she was about 13 years old. She was brought to Florida, then a Spanish colony, as a slave. She was sold to Zephaniah Kingsley, a slave trader and a maritime merchant, and worked on his plantation in northeast Florida. Kingsley married her and then freed her from slavery in 1811. They had four children. She became the manager of the plantation and held the position for twenty-five years. Anna became a slave owner herself. Her husband stated that she “could carry on all the affairs of the plantation in my absence as well as I could myself.”
After Spain sold Florida to the United States in 1819, however, life grew difficult. The U.S. laws concerning freed blacks were far more restrictive than those of Spain. Anna Kingsley’s status as a freed slave and land owner were threatened, and her interracial marriage was viewed as unacceptable in the new U.S. state of Florida. The Kingsleys fled to Haiti, where they ran a large plantation and created a colony for free blacks. After Zephaniah’s death in 1843, Anna Kingsley returned to Florida, where she fought the courts to claim the land left to her and her children in Zephaniah’s will. After a difficult court battle (some of his white relatives had contested her claim), Anna Kingsley won the right to her inheritance. Her skill at running a plantation and her battle for property rights made her a celebrated and influential figure in the free black community of northern Florida.
Linda Alvarado
Entrepreneur
Born: 1952
Birthplace: Albuquerque, N.M.
Alvarado has been a pioneer on several fronts. She started her own construction company in 1976 with a $2,500 loan from her parents. Alvarado Construction, based in Denver, Colo., has become one of the fastest growing commercial general contracting firms in the country. It was one of three firms that built the new Denver Broncos stadium and was also part of the construction of the Denver International Airport and the Colorado Convention Center.
Alvarado made history in 1991, when, as part of the Colorado Baseball Partnership, she became the first Hispanic to own a major baseball franchise, the Colorado Rockies She also serves as a corporate director of Pepsi Bottling Group, Pitney Bowes, and US West Communications. She has won a long list of awards, including the Sara Lee Corporation’s Frontrunner Award, the Revlon Business Woman of the Year, and the U.S. Hispanic Chambers of Commerce Business Woman of the Year. In addition, she served on President Clinton’s Advisory Commission of Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans.
Alvarado graduated from Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.
Sheryl Sandberg
Business Executive
Born: 28 August 1969
Birthplace: Washington, D.C.
COO of Facebook, 2008-present
Sheryl Sandberg’s remarkable career has included stops at the World Bank, the U.S. Treasury, Google and Facebook, where she’s been Chief Operating Officer since 2008. Sheryl Sandberg grew up in North Miami Beach, Florida, and studied economics at Harvard. After her graduation in 1991, she worked at the World Bank as a research assistant to Lawrence Summers (who had been her professor and thesis advisor at Harvard), then went on to Harvard Business School, earning an MBA in 1995. She joined Summers again when he was Deputy Treasury Secretary under Robert Rubin; when Summers became Treasury Secretary himself in 1999, Sandberg advanced as his chief of staff. She was 29 years old. After Summers’ term ended in 2001, Sandberg moved to California and joined Larry Page and Sergey Brin at a fledgling company called Google. As Vice President of Global Online Sales & Operations, she helped build the super-successful AdWords and AdSense advertising services, which made the company billions of dollars. In 2008 she was hired away by Mark Zuckerberg to become COO of Facebook. Her position as one of Silicon Valley’s most successful female executives has made her a lightning rod for both praise and criticism, especially after the publication of her 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead in 2013
Awakening the Mysterious Feminine Spirit 