pharaoh
queen
president
prime minister
chancellor
1.
What do they all the words have in common?
2.
Think of the first person you associate with
each word.
3. Apart
from the queen, how many of the other people that came to mind are women?
4. Read the text
below.
When it
comes to power, the unfortunate truth is that men still rule the world. And
while this situation is changing,
change is very slow.
These
days, it’s still hard to name more than a handful of modern female leaders. But
there are, and have
been, women with great power.
How many
can you name?
A.
She was born in Chicago in the United
States in 1947 and has two younger brothers called Hugh and Tony. She studied
at Yale law school, and started working as a lawyer in the 1970s. In 1975 she
got married to Bill. The couple have a daughter called Chelsea. She became
First Lady of the United States in January 1993. She was the first First Lady
to have a postgraduate degree and to have her own professional career. Until
recently, she was the United States Secretary of State, serving in the
administration of President Barack Obama.
B. She was
born Margaret Hilda Roberts in 1925 in Grantham, England. Her father was a
shopkeeper.
She studied chemistry at
Oxford University and worked as a research chemist before becoming a Member of Parliament
in 1959. She became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, and in 1979
became Britain’s first ever woman Prime Minister. Famous for her strong
personality, she was often called the Iron Lady. She played an
important role in the
downfall of communism in the Soviet Union and the victory of capitalism in many
parts of the world.
C. She was
born in Hamburg in West Germany in 1954, but grew up in communist East Germany.
Her father was a priest in the Lutheran church, and moved to the East to defend
Christianity under communism. She was excellent at maths, sciences and languages,
and in 1978 she got a doctorate in physics. In 1989, when
the Berlin Wall came down,
she became involved in the democracy movement, and in 1990, she became a member
of the political party the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
She became Germany’s first
woman Chancellor in 2005, and is probably the most powerful woman in the world
today.
D.
When in
2002 the BBC organised a vote to choose the greatest Briton (person from Britain), this woman came
seventh in the list. (The only woman above her was Princess
Diana.)
Her father was King Henry VIII, famous for having six wives, and she was Queen
of England from 1558 till her death in 1603. Sometimes called the Virgin Queen,
she never married.
She was
highly educated and ruled at the time when England defeated the Spanish Armada
and established its first colony in America (Virginia, named after her), and
when Shakespeare wrote his plays.
E. She was
in the news in 2007, when experts decided that an unidentified mummy first
found over 100 years ago was that of this great female pharaoh, who ruled
ancient Egypt in the 15th century BC. Although less famous than Cleopatra and Nefertiti, she was more powerful
than both and ruled for 22 years. Her funerary
temple is one of the most
visited in Egypt. She was known for dressing like a male pharaoh and
wearing a false beard. Archaeologists used DNA analysis and a missing tooth,
which exactly matched a relic from the same period, to help identify her.
