Louise Yim

Born in Korea in 1899, five years after the Japanese assassinated the Korean queen and took over her country, Louise Yim was only a young girl when she was accused of having "wild blood" because she didn't want to marry before she even reached her teens. As the Japanese continued to establish and wield their power, Yim and tens of thousands of other Koreans responded by organizing the March 1st Movement in 1919. The Japanese took brutal retaliatory action, using beatings, torture, imprisonment, and public executions to put down the rebellion and maintain their domination until 1945.

Yim -- who was tortured herself and called by some "Korea's Joan of Arc" -- eventually wrote a book entitled My Forty Year Fight for Korea. She didn't just fight to free her country, however. She also fought to free the women of her country from Korean traditional norms, such as child marriage and the refusal to allow women and girls to be educated.

Earning her Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Southern California, Yim served in the Republic of Korea National Assembly for several years after the Korean War and then served as the South Korean delegate to the United Nations, as well. "It has always been a great mystery to me why men think that women are different from them intellectually," Yim wrote as the in-your-face woman she has been since a child. "[B]esides certain physical differences and the ability of a woman to bear children, a women thinks of all the things a man does. Just because she allows herself to be exiled in the kitchen doesn't mean she gives up her feelings as an individual."