– Stories of Famous Women –
The names of the 13 different tastes of Pastry d’Edi pay tribute to 13 amazing women, who were each groundbreakers in their own field and set an example for generations to come.
Amelia Mary Erhart
A pioneer of aviation, she was the first woman to ever fly across the Atlantic Ocean alone. The American pilot was born in 1897, and right after finishing secondary school in 1917, she ran headfirst into danger: she joined the Red Cross to help the wounded of the First World War. Amongst her patients were several pilots who told her about the wonders of flying. She flew for the first time as a passenger in 1928 and later got her pilot license and bought her first airplane. She crossed the ocean in 1932 in a Lockheed Vega 5B without making any stops, and completely on her own. For her achievements, she received the Distinguished Flying Cross from the government of the United States. Her successes brought her fame, which she used to popularize flying amongst women. In 1937 she started a journey around the world, but her plane disappeared from the radar and has not since been found.
Junko Tabei
She was the first woman to ever climb the Mount Everest and complete the Seven Summits challenge, which is to climb the highest point of each of the 7 continents. She was the first woman to win the Snow Leopard award, which is won by climbing all 5 of the peaks of the ex-Soviet Union which reach above seven thousand meters. It can already be seen from this short description that the Japanese sportswoman was a special figure. She was born in 1939 in Japan and fell in love with mountains in her younger years. However, she was not only interested in climbing: she also wrote seven books and organized environmental projects to clean up garbage left behind by mountain climbers. In the meantime, she also brought up two children. She died in 2016, by which point she had been battling cancer for four years. Despite this, she never stopped climbing, not even when she was sick.
Gertrude Ederle
She was the first woman to swim across the La Manche channel. Even though this is her most frequently acclaimed accomplishment, it is certainly not the only one. Born in 1905, the American swimmer was an Olympic champion, at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, she won a gold medal as a member of the first-place U.S. team in the 4×100-meter freestyle relay. A year later she went professional and started to set seemingly impossible goals for herself and accomplished them one after the other. “People said women couldn't swim the Channel, but I proved they could."- she said after the 14-hour, 34-minute-long successful attempt in 1926. This time was two hours faster than anything anyone had performed before on the channel. She died at 98 years of age in 2003.
Kathrine Switzer
She was the first woman to ever run the marathon as an officially registered competitor. She was born in Germany in 1947 but is an American citizen. She became famous because of the aforementioned achievement, during which she had to compete with much more than just the other contestants and the kilometers. In the 1967 Boston Marathon Katherine was attacked by the race manager, who tried to seize her competition number, thereby preventing her from finishing the race. In the end, the manager failed in his ambitions. In 1974, Switzer won the New York City Marathon, and Runner’s World Magazine awarded her the title of Female Runner of the Decade (1967–77). Later, she also became an accomplished commentator and writer.
Susan Polgar
The first woman to win the title of Grandmaster in chess. Her origins are Hungarian, just like those of Pastry d’Edi. Her whole family are well-known: with her sisters Zsófia and Judit, they completely subverted the world of chess. Susan was born in 1969 and was active from 1980 to 2000, during which time she was regarded as one of the world’s strongest chess players. At the age of 15, she became the top-ranked female player in the world. She was Women's World Champion from 1996 to 1999, but besides traditional chess she also achieved significant successes in fast chess and rapid chess. She has four world champion tiles and five Olympic gold medals, which is unprecedented in the field. She has been living in the USA since the mid-1990s and after her retirement form chess, she founded the Susan Polgar Institute for Chess Excellence. She currently works as a trainer, writes books and deals with talent care.
Marilyn vos Savant
Born in 1946, she is a columnist for an American newspaper, however, she isn’t well-known for her job, but rather for the fact that she has the highest IQ in the world. According to the Guinness World Records, she possessed the highest intelligence quotient on the planet between 1985 and 1989, measuring up to 228. Marylin’s mind is quite exceptional, very few people have such a high IQ. Today, she is a writer for a Sunday magazine called Parade, she solves riddles and answers different questions in her column Ask Marilyn.
Monisha Kaltenborn
She was the first woman to ever become a Formula 1 team principal. Born as Monisha Narang, she reached to the top in a world where women have an immensely difficult situation. She was born in India in 1971, and later emigrated to Vienna with her family and became an Austrian citizen. First, she studied law at the University of Vienna, then she got her master’s degree in International Business Law at the London School of Economics. She worked at different UN organizations, law firms, and later was responsible for overseeing the legal affairs of the Sauber Formula 1 team. She kept on climbing the ranks until she was appointed CEO of Sauber Motorsport AG in 2010, and also became a part-owner of the team in 2012. She remained CEO until 2017 and is the mother of two children.
Mary Jackson
The first person of color to be an engineer at NASA. Born in 1921, the American mathematician and engineer tore down a major wall throughout her carrier – one can only imagine how hard it was to prevail in the field of space exploration as a black woman in the 1950s. However, due to her diligence and talent, Mary succeeded. She was already working as an IT professional in 1951, she got to NASA in 1958 only to work there for 34 years. Over her career, she acquired the highest possible engineering title and until her death in 2005, she worked towards helping other women get accepted at the company. Nothing shows how recognized she is as the fact that in 2021, NASA renamed their HQ in Washington to Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters. Her life was also depicted in the 2016 movie Hidden Figures.
Nawal El Saadawi
She was an Egyptian activist for women’s rights, founder of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association, and co-founder of the Arab Organization for Human Rights. She was born in 1931 into a family with 9 children. Her mother – having a progressive way of thinking – was convinced that her daughters should be educated as well. Given this, Nawal graduated as a doctor in 1955 at Cairo University, and while working as a junior doctor, she made many observations regarding women’s physical and mental problems and connected these to oppressing social and cultural norms. She became an activist and wrote books on women’s situation in the Islamic world, paying particular attention to the practice of female genital mutilation. She was often referred to as "Egypt's most radical woman". She was an acknowledged feminist writer, doctor, and psychiatrist on several continents until her death in 2021.
Nora Al-Matroushi
The first woman to ever be selected as an astronaut in the Arabic world. Born in 1993 in the United Arab Emirates, she is the youngest of all our 13 heroines. She graduated as a mechanical engineer, but her versatility can also be seen in the fact that she participated in the 2011 International Mathematical Olympiad. She has continuously been training herself, after graduating at United Arab Emirates University, she also studied at Vaasa University of Applied Sciences and Hanyang University in South Korea. She started working as an engineer at National Petroleum Construction Company in 2016 and the breakthrough came in 2021: she got admitted to NASA Astronaut Group 23. She now takes part in trainings as a member of a team of twelve people before being sent off to a mission as a specialist.
Fatima al-Fihri
She was the founder of the first university in the world. We know very little about her birth and childhood, but what is sure is that the Tunisian woman created the concept of a university as it is known today in 859 AD. They liked doing extraordinary things with her sister: while Mariam had the Mosque of the Andalusians built, form the money left to her by her father, Fatima created the Al-Qarawiyyin Mosque. It did not only serve as both an educational and religious institution but was also the center of education in the Mediterranean region. The university attracted scientists, given that they dealt with such state-of-the-art knowledge as theology, languages, rhetoric, logic, geography, history, mathematics, medicine, chemistry, and astronomy.
Rosa Parks
She was the mother of the modern civil rights movement. She was born in 1913 and went to secondary school, which was quite outstanding, considering that only seven per cent of Afro-Americans had such a qualification at the time. As a black woman, she faced racism from quite early on. She became well-known when, on the 1st of December 1955, she got on a bus after a long day of work in the center of Montgomery. She sat down onto a seat for black people just behind the sitting zone for whites. When the front of the bus got full, the driver told her to move further back, which she refused to do. She was arrested and triggered a civil rights movement known as the Montgomery bus boycott, which became one of the most successful protests against racial segregation in history. This is how she became one of the leading figures of the Afro-American civil rights movement.
Henrietta Lacks
Henrietta’s cancer cells were the source of the first immortalized human cell line. She was born in 1920 but only became known in the year of her death in 1951. Up until that point she had had a great life, she had given birth to five children. At 31 years of age, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer at the Baltimore hospital. They collected tissue samples from her which were examined by cell biologist Dr. George Gey, who came to the shocking conclusion that – contrary to previous samples – this tissue does not die, but rater multiplies every 20-24 hours. What does this mean? It means that the HeLa cell line is still being used to examine the effects of toxins, medicines, hormones, and viruses to this day. Henrietta died in 1951, but her cells still enable us to test these effects without having to run experiments on humans, and thereby still have a major influence on the world.
Vilma Hugonnai
She was brought up in Switzerland in humble circumstances, where she dropped the -y ending from her name, which was associated with nobility. She graduated in 1879 and was even offered a job after proving to be quite a skilful surgeon. Nonetheless, she returned home because she wanted to heal in Hungary. Despite not being able to do so for a time, when she could start working as a doctor, she mostly cured women and poor people, many times not accepting any royalties. She was officially registered as a doctor on 14th May 1897. She was the only woman amongst all the soon-to-be-doctors, but amongst the attendees were already first- and second-year female medical students, too. Franz Joseph himself congratulated her: “I am delighted that the countess is the first female doctor in Hungary, and I truly hope that she is going to practice her profession, since science only has value if it is utilized.” However, her degree was not accepted by Hungarian law, so Vilma Hugonnai could only operate as a maternity nurse. The sign above the entrance of her home office showed: Countess Vilma Hugonnai, graduated maternity nurse. In Hungary, women were admitted to universities after 18th November 1895, their degrees, however, were not easily accepted.