What Parents of These World-Changing Women Did to Raise Them

Venus and Serena Williams changed the sport of tennis. Not only are they GOATS thought to be the best doubles team ever, but they showed up as two underprivileged Black women in a white-dominated sport and completely turned the tables. Their father, Richard Williams, sacrificed everything for their tennis careers and made sure they understood never to sell themselves short, give up on themselves, or take no for an answer. When he quit his job to put all of his time into managing them, their mom, Oracene, stepped up and worked to financially support their family of seven on her own.

“To have that faith and to have that back-end support, we wouldn’t have survived without that,” Venus once said.

Ballerina Misty Copeland broke the mold, eventually becoming the first Black woman promoted to principal dancer in the American Ballet Theatre. She didn’t have an easy start in life though. She was one of six kids raised by a single mother. She says they moved around most of her life until she was about 7. Her mom signed all the kids up for the Boys and Girls Club so they’d have somewhere to go after school while she was at work, and that’s how she ended up discovering ballet and meeting her first mentor, who ended up essentially becoming a second mother to her. “…It was really just a safe place that my mother could have all of us kids while she was working two jobs after school,” Misty told Parents.

That mentor saw Misty’s potential immediately and took her into her own home for over three years so she could pursue ballet in a more stable environment. So really, it was the sacrifices of two mother figures that helped Misty reach her full potential.

Olympic gold medalist Simone Biles leveled up the entire sport of gymnastics when she entered the world arena, and she deserves so much credit for that. But even more importantly, during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, she put the importance of mental health at the forefront, advocating for herself and breaking precedent by sitting out of events so that she could prioritize her health.

Simone was actually raised by her grandparents, Ronald and Nellie Biles, who have lifted her up and prioritized her success and well-being since they adopted her when she was 6 years old. “My parents saved me,” Simone said during a Dancing With the Stars segment, according to Marie Claire. “They’ve set huge examples of how to treat other people, and they’ve been there to support me since day one,” she said.

Malala Yousafzai changed the world when she was just a young teenager. She had been an advocate for girls’ education in her home country of Pakistan her entire childhood, and one day, she was attacked by a member of the Taliban who boarded her school bus and shot her in the face. She spent 10 days in a coma. That experience only fueled her passion, and she has continued to fight for women’s rights for the past decade, eventually becoming the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate ever.

Despite long-standing traditions and customs, her father, Ziauddin, has stood by her side and encouraged her every step of the way. She says that from the time she was born, he was determined to give her “every opportunity a boy would have.” And he’s done so no matter how much danger it put him in.

Climate change activist Greta Thunberg, who gained international attention back in 2018 when she was just 15, suffered from depression and panic attacks from the time she was just 11 years old. Her parents, who worked as musicians, quit all of their contracts, and spent all of their free time trying to figure out a way to help her.

After months and months of Greta, who has since been diagnosed with Asperger’s, essentially starving herself and countless doctors visits, they finally learned that she was being brutally bullied at school. They advocated for her, proving again and again that they would have her back through anything and everything. That’s the kind of parenting that emboldens and strengthens a person in unimaginable ways.

Iconic Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is known for her talent, but she’s also respected and appreciated for her refusal to conform to societal standards regarding beauty, sexuality, and gender roles. She was ahead of her time, and while it was her life experiences that shaped her ideals, her art was the medium for expressing them. That art was inspired and nurtured by her father, Guillermo. He worked as a photographer, and despite fathers taking active roles in their daughter’s lives not being the norm at the time, he encouraged Frida to assist him in the darkroom and travel with him to various shoots.

Interestingly, Frida is known for her self-portraits, many of which bear incredible similarities to photos her father took of her.

When legendary mathematician Katherine Johnson was a child in West Virginia in the early 20th century, Black children rarely made it past the eighth grade. Katherine, though, was already a freshman in high school at age 10, and that’s in large part thanks to the dedication of her father, who recognized her academic ability early on and moved his family 120 miles just so she could complete her high school education.

Katherine went on to work for NASA, and her calculations of orbital mechanics were imperative in the success of the first U.S. crewed space flights.

Sonia Sotomayor is the first Latina to be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, only the third woman in history, and only one of two women currently serving as a Supreme Court justice. She’s opened doors for so many to come, and her impact is undeniable. Her goal has always been simply to help people, and that’s something that was inspired by her mother.

In fact, she wrote a children’s book about it, titled Just Help! How to Build a Better World, in which she credits her mother with teaching her that small deeds and individual acts have the power to change the world.

Groundbreaking mathematician Ada Lovelace lived way back in the 19th century, and her parents weren’t very present in her life at all. But one thing her mother made sure of, despite not really raising Ada herself, was that she got a good education. Again, this was something that wasn’t generally a priority for girls during her time. Girls didn’t attend schools in England back then, so her mother hired private tutors to educate her, with a focus on science and math, which was even less common.

It’s believed that her mother herself loved those subjects, but also had Ada focus on them because she wanted to steer her away from her father’s passions. He was a poet who abandoned his family when Ada was just a baby. She was very strict with Ada when it came to her studies, and while her methods would be quite controversial today, Ada’s accomplishments are surely a reflection of her mother’s priorities. She went on to create the world’s first ever computer program.

Pioneering feminist Gloria Steinem had quite an interesting early life. She and her parents spent the first several years of her life traveling the country by van. It wasn’t a stable situation, but it was one that undoubtedly broadened Gloria’s perspective. In her memoir, My Life on the Road, Gloria recalls her mother’s stories of living through the Great Depression, and credits her mother — who lived with crippling depression — for inspiring her toward activism.

She describes her mother’s openness and honesty in conversations about social, economic, and racial issues with her from the time she was just a little girl. “I knew my mother didn’t want to frighten me, only to teach me something serious, and this made me feel important and grown-up. In later years, I wondered if she meant such small doses of hard realities to immunize me against the depression that, in her, could be triggered by as little as a sad movie or a hurt animal,” Gloria wrote, going on to assert that she believes her mother taught her to take the action that she herself never could.

Sometimes, it’s the little things we do that make a massive difference. Amelia Earhart’s parents, for instance, made sure their children had interesting and educational experiences. They took Amelia to the Iowa State Fair where she saw an airplane for the first time, when she was quite young, then years later when she was a young woman of 23, her father took her to an aerial meet. She was immediately intrigued and asked him to book her a flight, which he did immediately and without question or hesitation.

“I am sure he thought that one ride would be enough for me,” she once said, explaining that she was hooked from that very first flight. And while her parents didn’t think much of her flying ambitions at the start, it was her dad’s willingness to let her try something new that eventually led to her making history as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.

Young Jean Lee has made a name for herself as a playwright tackling controversial and uncomfortable topics, such as domestic violence and identity. Her work has been so impactful, that she’s now made history as the first Asian American playwright on Broadway.

The New York Times Magazine has pointed out that Young Jean’s blistering frankness seems to be a trait she inherited from her mother, who recalled to the publication that her daughter struggled with loneliness as an Asian child growing up in a very white town in Washington state, and trying to fill in those gaps as a parent. In a word, she says they did what they could to “comfort” her, until she made it to Berkeley where her world opened up and she learned to use her experiences in her writing.

Selena Gomez is an extremely successful singer and TV star who has been famous for what seems like most of her life. She made history as the first person on Instagram to reach 100 million followers, and then changed the game when she publicly recognized that social media was having a negative effect on her mental health and stepped away from the platform almost entirely by tasking an assistant with managing her accounts.

She was one of the first major celebrities to bring up this important and ongoing conversation and she continues to work as a mental health advocate. Selena has often talked about how important her mother — who gave birth to her at just 16 — is to her.

“Everything that I am has kind of become a little bit of what my mom has gone through. She had the ability to make me feel like I was still capable of doing anything I wanted,” she told Time.