Aretha Franklin - Wonderful Woman No. 66

Aretha Franklin - Born 1942
America Singer, Songwriter, Musician and Political Activist

Added to the album by a wonderful man called Howie

(Things that are wonderful about Aretha Franklin) 1. her voice 2. her range 3. her voice 4. her songs 5. her voice.
Steve, A Wonderful Man

I make no apologies for the number of soul singers in the album. They all deserve to be here, to me and the other contributors to the album, they really have enriched our lives and made the world a more wonderful place.

Writing about the likes of Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone (Wonderful Woman No. 54 - http://iamawonderfulwoman.blogspot.com/2012/02/nina-simone-wonderful-woman-no-54.html), Erykah Badu (Wonderful Woman No. 45 - http://iamawonderfulwoman.blogspot.com/2012/02/erykah-badu-wonderful-woman-no-45.html) and so on, is not easy... capturing their greatness in words a seemingly impossible task. Part of me wants to say, just listen to their music, then you'll understand.

But I set about this task with good reason and so I should really write a little of what they have achieved that is so wondrous...

The Queen of Soul, master of blues, jazz, pop and good old fashioned gospel, an absolute powerhouse of a voice that is instantly recognisable. Aretha was the first female artist to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

In 1960, at the age of 18, Aretha released her first single. Her music career has spanned six decades and has provided us with some of the greatest soul anthems of all time, including Respect, (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, Until You Come Back to Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do) and Think. She has released 38 studio albums, a further six live albums and yet more compilations, she continues to be one of the world's top selling artists.

The list of awards Aretha has received is endless and she is regarded within the music industry as a living legend. She has other artists queuing up to collaborate with her, to name but a few of those she has recorded with; George Michael, Curtis Mayfield, Annie Lennox (another wonderful woman) and Elton John.

Aretha has also appeared in a number of television shows and soul music films, including both Blues Brothers movies.

Aside from her music career, Aretha was strongly connected with the civil rights movement in the U.S.A. She was a close friend of Martin Luther King and was seen by many as an empowered black woman and her music became anthemic for those involved in the fight for change. Indeed, she received the honour of being personally asked by incoming president Barrack Obama, to perform at his inauguration ceremony which was a symbolic victory for a free America welcoming their first black president.

The voice of the civil rights movement, the voice of the black America.
Nikki Giovanni, Poet

Again, I worry that there is something wonderful that has gone unsaid or been understated... for some women words will never be enough for their wonderfulness.

If a song's about something I've experienced or that could've happened to me it's good. But if it's alien to me, I couldn't lend anything to it. Because that's what soul is all about.
Aretha Franklin

Angela Hartnett - Wonderful Woman No. 65

Angela Hartnett - Born 1968
British Chef, Culinary Writer, Television Personality and Restaurant Owner

Added to the album by a wonderful man called Howie

In the United Kingdom, only 20% of chefs working in professional kitchens are women. As we have learned from previous women in the album, making it in a male dominated world is not easy and those that do are quite remarkable. I could not imagine a more testosterone-filled, macho atmosphere than the kitchen of Gordon Ramsey but that is exactly where Angela Hartnett learnt her craft and made her name.

The hardest thing for us was the number of people who came and left. Less than one in 10 actually stayed. But Angela Hartnett is a grafter, she just battened down the hatches and got on with it. She's a true-grit chef.
Marcus Wareing, Chef and fellow former junior to Gordon Ramsey

Under Ramsey, Angela worked six days a week, often sixteen to seventeen hours per day. She worked closely with him as a soux chef and then helped launch a restaurant in Dubai.

(Angela is) warm and natural with everybody she meets ...she has no airs and graces.
Gordon Ramsey

After mastering the kitchen and learning to become business savvy from Ramsey, Angela went on to open her own restaurants and has published the book Cucina: Three Generations of Italian Family Cooking. She also regularly appears on British television, a rarity for female chefs.

Angela has been acknowledged with several awards, including a Michelin Star for her first restaurant.

She is clearly a wonderful chef, a great business woman and has taken on a male dominated industry and come out fighting, making her an excellent addition to the album.

I think that sometimes women make food with a bit more feeling.
Angela Hartnett

Linda McCartney - Wonderful Woman No. 64

Linda McCartney - 1941–1998
American Photographer, Musician, Animal Rights Activist, Culinary Writer and Business Woman

There are so many things I could write about Linda McCartney's life and many, many reasons why she should be included as a wonderful woman. It seems a shame then, that the thing she was most famous for was her marriage to a member of The Beatles.

When I was eight years old, I realised that meat came from animals and I stopped eating it. My parents thought it was a phase, I am now thirty-something and haven't had a slice of ham since. Back then, nobody really knew what a vegetarian was, eating in restaurants was a nightmare and soya was yet to enter the vocabulary of my provincial Lancashire town. Linda was a real vegetarian food pioneer, she wrote meat-free cookbooks and started her own food company with the ethos of 'celebrating life through food'. I would still have been a vegetarian without her but I do believe she made some headway in bringing an understanding of the meat-free diet into the public conciousness. And for that, I think she is truly wonderful.

While her work as a poster-girl for vegetarianism is my main reason for adding her to this album, there are a great many other reasons to include her...

Linda was a fabulous photographer, in the sixties and seventies she pictured the likes of The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jackson and, of course, The Beatles.

I have always marvelled at Linda and Paul McCartney's relationship. They were married after knowing each other for six months, had four children together and I once read that after their wedding day, they never spent a night apart until the day she died.

She was unique and the world is a better place for having known her.
Paul McCartney

It was through Paul that Linda became involved in music. The couple both appeared in Paul's post-Beatles band Wings. And they were both nominated for an Academy Award for their joint composition of the James Bond theme Live and Let Die.

I doubt I have written all that is wonderful about Linda in the few short paragraphs of this blog... but she was incredibly wonderful in so many ways.

I don't need a lot of money... simplicity is the answer for me.
Linda McCartney

Fatima Whitbred - Wonderful Woman No. 63

Fatima Whitbred - Born 1961
British Athlete and Television Personality

To be perfectly honest, naming another javelin thrower is a struggle. Fatima Whitbred is a woman who managed to get her sport into the public conciousness, capturing the hearts of the British people and becoming a household name.

In 1986, Fatima broke the word record from javelin throwing and the following year became world champion in her sport. Also in 1987, Fatima was voted the BBC's British Sports Personality of the Year. She was an Olympian winner of bronze and silver medals.

Her sporting achievements alone might have been enough to enter her into the Wonderful Women album but reading the following article and discovering what she had overcome in life before ever throwing a javelin really cemented her place here:

The Observer, March 2003

Having been abandoned as a baby, I spent the first 14 years of my life in children's homes. My biological mother left me in a flat in north London and after three or four days a neighbour noticed the noise I was making, rang the police, and I spent the next four months in hospital recovering from malnutrition.

My earliest memories are of living in a children's home in Hertfordshire when I was five. You never received Christmas cards, and nobody came to visit you, and, not having been told anything, you wondered what the situation was. One day I was told that I was going to meet my biological mother. This was the first time I realised I actually had one and it was a shock. I'd craved the love and attention of a mum and dad, and yet previously, when I'd asked, no one had told me anything.

I had always imagined a real mother figure - someone kind and loving. And because I only knew the English way of life I didn't expect her to be the large, foreign lady who wore cheap perfume and didn't speak English who I met that morning. It turned out she was Turkish Cypriot and had had an affair with a Greek Cypriot, and because Turks and Greeks didn't get on back then, her friends disowned her. It was obviously a big stigma because on my birth certificate, she named my half-brother as my father.

I was being moved to a home in Ockingdon, Essex, because the social workers thought I should integrate with my half-brother and sister who were living there at the time. It was supposed to be, 'Enjoy your next home, this is your mother,' and everything would be fine. But it wasn't. In the car over there, she hardly spoke and I looked out the window and cried.

When we arrived in Ockingdon, a house parent told me, 'Go into the garden and meet your brother and sister.' As I wandered into the garden, my mother grabbed me and said: 'This is your sister and if you don't look after her I cut your throat.' This was my introduction to my biological mother and from there things got worse.

When I was about nine or ten, the social services decided it would be a good idea for me to visit her with a view to a permanent move. She turned up one day with some guys who were more or less pimps - they were there to take a look at me because by that time I was a big girl. It was horrible and though this was reported, the social workers still insisted I see her, and around a year later they made me go to her flat in north London. It was awful - as soon as I stepped inside she said: 'Right, you're scrubbing the kitchen floor and the oven.' My half-brother and sister were living there and although they obviously had no quality of life it was all they knew.

I hated it and wanted to leave straight away but I couldn't, and that night was awful. My biological mother's boyfriend was drunk and he raped me. I was screaming and shouting, making all sorts of noise, and she came out of the bedroom and shouted at him. I was petrified but all she said in her broken English was, 'Stop shouting ... Polici, Polici!', before she hit me, went into the kitchen, came running back with a knife and held it to my neck. 'If you make all the noise,' she said, 'I'll cut your throat. The police are going to come.' So I shut up.

There was no bedroom for me so I lay on the sofa in the living room but the guy came looking for me again. I hid behind the sofa and then, when he left, ran to my brother's bedroom and spent the night in there - but he still kept doing what he was doing with his girlfriend.

It was a terrible, terrible experience yet nothing came of it. Even though the house parent at Ockingdon knew, she didn't report it. What's sad, is that I felt embarrassed: I was obviously very disturbed, was acting up at school and needed counselling, yet the stigma of seeing a child psychiatrist was hard to bear. It was a nightmare of a childhood and it was only because I loved sport so much that I got through it and met my true mother.

I actually met her during a school netball match. I'd been protesting a bit too loud and the referee said, 'Any more of that and you're off', and I turned and there was this woman named Mrs Whitbread. We didn't actually meet again until I took up javelin at the local athletics club. The coach was Margaret Whitbread, and when she arrived she recognised me and said, 'Oh no, not you! If you behave like you did on the netball court, there's no chance!'

I promised to behave myself and from there we went from strength to strength. By the time I was 14 I'd spent a lot of time with her, going to competitions and getting to know her family - her husband and two sons who would become my dad and brothers. I felt happy and relaxed and when my mother asked if I would become part of the family, I said: 'Of course!'

At times I was very lonely and sad, but I was determined to succeed and of course, with the way my javelin career went and my mother Margaret coaching me, it had to be fate. Bringing home a gold medal from the world championships was, well, like a fairytale.

A truly magnificent tale of how a woman can triumph after such a terrible start in life.

I learned to love myself like the person I've evolved into.
Fatima Whitbred

Maggie Smith - Wonderful Woman No. 62

Maggie Smith - Born 1934
British Actress

She's the ultimate.
Lee, A Wonderful Man

When I was studying Performing Arts, I was given the opportunity to perform one of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads monologues, I jumped at the chance, already a huge fan of Bennett's work. My Drama Tutor, a very wonderful man called Andy Tomlinson, gave me the script for Bed Among The Lentils and told me not to watch Maggie Smith's screen version as it would effect my performance. Like the dutiful student I was, I of course went off and sourced the video of Maggie straight away. She was absolutely amazing in the role (as you might imagine) and though I did everything I could to bring my own take to the part, it was impossible to forget Maggie's performance. Afterwards, there were some very kind comparisons and I received a lot of praise for my own performance, I understood though that no matter what I did, as a young drama student in my early twenties, I would never quite match up to the brilliance of Maggie in the screenplay.

I have forever been in awe of her acting abilities since.

Just recently, my Grandmother, a very wonderful woman herself, talked about how fabulous she felt Maggie was in the British period drama Downtown Abbey. No-one else could play that role as well as Maggie, she stressed. No-one indeed, Maggie is a very gifted actress and no other could imitate nor better.

Maggie Smith is – as always – compelling and brilliant.
George Stiles, Producer

Her career spans seven decades of television, theatre and film. She is an Academy Award Winner twice over, with a host of other accolades including Golden Globes and BAFTAs. She is regarded by the great and the good as one of the most impressive actresses and is successful in her native Britain as well as Hollywood.

It is said that Lawrence Olivier was so annoyed that her performance stole the show when they appeared in Othello together, that he vowed never to work with her again. I would consider that the greatest of compliments.

A wonderful woman of stage and screen.

There is a kind of invisible thread between the actor and the audience, and when it's there it's stunning, and there is nothing to match that.
Maggie Smith

Corazon Aquino - Wonderful Woman No. 61

Corazon Aquino - 1933-2009
Filipino President and Political Reformer

From 1965 to 1986 to The Philippines was led under the strict dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, whose authoritarian rule oppressed the country's people, committed many violations of human rights and politically repressed the country with years of suspended elections. In 1983, the government assassinated their most prominent rival, Benigno Aquino, Jr.

Many women might have fled the country having lost their husband, a widow would be within her rights to shrivel into her grief in the face of such adversity... Benigno's widow, Corazon did neither. She stayed in her country and led what she called The People Power Revolution, toppling the dictatorship of Marcos three years after her husband's death.

When democracy arrived in The Philippines, it arrived in female form.

Her courage, determination, and moral leadership are an inspiration to us all and exemplify the best in the Filipino nation.
Barack Obama, President of the USA

Corazon led the country for six years, surviving coups by communists, Marcos supporters and Muslim separatists. Her policies in office concentrated on making her country socially responsible and creating a market-driven economy. She brought huge political reform to the country, returned civil liberty and a democratic voting system.

She was adored by her people, on her death Filipino Catholics called to have Corazon canonised, believing that she had been their saint.

I have no authority on saintliness but I believe Corazon to have been a courageous revolutionary who fought for her people, for her country and for democracy, quite wonderfully.

I don't have any formula for ousting a dictator or building democracy. All I can suggest is to forget about yourself and just think of your people. It's always the people who make things happen.
Corazon Aquino

Elizabeth David - Wonderful Woman No. 60

Elizabeth David - 1913–1992
British Cookery Writer

Added to the album by a wonderful woman called Claire

I had tried to think of a suitable culinary related lady to put in the album but could not come up with anyone I really thought was wonderful. I was so pleased when Claire suggested Elizabeth David, a true kitchen wonder, not to mention a woman full of vigour and adventure! Other female chefs, cooks and culinary writers have since been suggested and feature later in the album but I must say, I think this is the one that I personally see as a woman of wonder... and also maybe something of a kindered spirit.

Elizabeth was a woman who shook off social expectation and was strong-minded and independent from an early age. She studied art in Paris and became an actress before travelling to Italy and then sailing to the Greek islands with her lover (as a British girl having lived in Paris, on a Greek island and now residing in Sicily, you might understand why I feel myself identifying with this woman so much). The two stayed on the Greek island of Syros until the Nazis invaded in 1941, from there they fled to Crete and then to Egypt as the German invasion progressed.

After the war, Elizabeth returned to her native England and began the epic task of transforming the way British people cook and eat. In 1950, whilst rationing continued in the United Kingdom, Elizabeth's A Book of Mediterranean Food was first published.

Most readers could only dream of trying out the crisply instructive recipes. Olive oil was sold at the chemist's shop, garlic did the devil's work; but she includes in her book a method for stuffing a whole sheep. She ushered not only olive oil and garlic, but also aubergines, courgettes and basil on to the stripped-pine tables.
Caroline Stacey, The Independent

In her lifetime, she produced eight cookery books and a further five have been published since her death. She introduced the British cook to the Mediterranean diet, completely changing the way British people regarded cuisine and the dining experience.

Elizabeth also owned a shop and wrote articles for magazines. She was credited with many awards, including two honorary doctorates from British universities, her life has been immortalised both on page and on screen and she continues to be revered as one of the greatest cookery influences in the United Kingdom.

When she began writing in the 1950s, the British scarcely noticed what was on their plates at all, which was perhaps just as well. Her books and articles persuaded her readers that food was one of life's great pleasures... she inspired a whole generation not only to cook, but to think about food in an entirely different way.
Auberon Waugh, Author

Privately, Elizabeth was full of zest for life and was unwilling to meet convention. She took lovers, married a number of times, it appears to me that travel and food were her greatest loves.

In appreciation of the way she changed the British attitude towards food and for the way she lived her life, Elizabeth is a most welcome wonderful woman.

To eat figs off the tree in the very early morning, when they have been barely touched by the sun, is one of the exquisite pleasures of the Mediterranean.
Elizabeth David