Spelthorne Socialists Women's Group

11/07/2026

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She promised a dying man she would find a cure. Nobody told her the world would make her fight for the right to even try.

In 1937, a nineteen-year-old chemistry graduate walked out of Hunter College with a summa cm laude degree and Phi Beta Kappa honors. She wrote to fifteen graduate schools, hoping one would give her a fellowship.

Fifteen said no.

Not because she wasn't brilliant. Because she was a woman, and in 1937, laboratories simply weren't hiring them.

Her name was Gertrude Belle Elion. And what she did next would eventually save millions of lives — including, quite possibly, someone you love.

A promise made at fifteen

Gertrude was born January 23, 1918, in New York City, to Jewish immigrant parents. Her father had come from Lithuania at twelve and put himself through dental school. Her mother arrived from what is now Poland at fourteen. Home was a small apartment attached to her father's dental office in Manhattan, later a house in the Bronx after her brother Herbert was born.

She was the kind of student teachers remember. Sharp enough to skip two grades. Hungry for every subject she touched. She graduated high school at just fifteen.

Then, in the summer of 1933, she watched her grandfather die of stomach cancer.

She had been close to him since he'd arrived from Russia when she was three. She watched the disease take him slowly. She watched doctors run out of options.

"I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of stomach cancer," she said later. "I decided that nobody should suffer that much."

That fall, still fifteen, she enrolled at Hunter College — the free women's college of CUNY, and the only school her Depression-ravaged family could afford after losing their savings in the 1929 crash. She chose chemistry. She chose it on purpose.

Brilliant, and unwanted

Graduating at nineteen should have opened doors. It didn't.

Fifteen rejections later, Gertrude took what she could get. Six months at secretarial school. A three-month teaching post at a nursing school. When that ended, she worked an unpaid lab assistant job just to stay near science — eventually earning twenty dollars a week after a year and a half.

She kept studying anyway. In 1939 she started a graduate chemistry program at NYU, teaching high school by day and sitting in night classes as the only woman in the room. She earned her Master's in 1941.

She later said the only reason the doors opened even that much was World War II — with men leaving for the war, chemistry labs suddenly needed anyone qualified, including women.

The partnership that changed medicine

In 1944, Gertrude took a job as a lab assistant to biochemist George Hitchings at Burroughs Wellcome. Hitchings recognized immediately that he wasn't looking at an assistant. He was looking at a scientist.

Together they pioneered something almost nobody was doing at the time: designing drugs on purpose, based on the biochemistry of disease, instead of testing chemicals at random and hoping.

She kept pursuing her PhD at night, commuting long hours after full lab days at Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. In 1946, the school gave her an ultimatum — quit her job and study full-time, or give up the degree.

She chose the lab. She never became "Dr. Elion" through a doctorate. Not then, anyway.

What she built

In 1950 and 1951, she synthesized a compound called 6-mercaptopurine — 6-MP. It became the first drug to meaningfully fight childhood leukemia, a diagnosis that had almost always meant death within months. Combined with other treatments, it began turning that death sentence into survival.

She wasn't finished. She developed azathioprine, the drug that made organ transplants actually work by holding back the immune system's rejection response — opening the door to viable kidney and heart transplants.

In the 1970s, her lab developed acyclovir, one of the first drugs that could target a virus with real precision, effective against herpes, chickenpox, shingles, and Epstein-Barr.

Her research into how drugs interact with DNA and RNA later laid the groundwork for AZT, the first effective treatment for HIV and AIDS — work she stayed involved in even after her official retirement.

The loss she never spoke of easily

Before Burroughs Wellcome, Gertrude had been engaged to a man named Leonard Canter. He developed a heart infection called subacute bacterial endocarditis. There was no treatment for it. He died.

She never married. She said no one afterward compared to him. Her brother's children and grandchildren became her family — one great-niece called her "my goddess."

Recognition, decades late

In 1967 she was named head of the Department of Experimental Therapy at Burroughs Wellcome, staying until her 1983 retirement — and then continuing to work almost full-time as Scientist Emeritus. She also mentored medical students as a Research Professor at Duke University.

In 1988, at seventy years old, the Nobel Committee awarded her the Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She was one of the only Nobel science laureates in history without a PhD.

Brooklyn Polytechnic — the school that once told her to quit her job or quit her degree — gave her an honorary PhD.

In 1991, she became the first woman inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and received the National Medal of Science from President George H.W. Bush. Honorary doctorates followed from Harvard, Brown, the University of Michigan, George Washington University, and more.

She held over forty-five patents. She spent her later years mentoring young scientists, especially women, and spoke openly about the discrimination she'd faced.

She died on February 21, 1999, at eighty-one.

Why this still matters

Children treated with 6-MP grew up. Went to college. Had families. Transplant patients lived decades they weren't supposed to get. People with viral infections recovered instead of enduring lifelong damage. HIV patients survived, in part because of a path she opened.

She once said, "It's amazing how much you can accomplish when you don't care who gets the credit."

Fifteen universities turned her away. She spent the rest of her life curing what they couldn't even fund her to study.

06/07/2026

What a woman!
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She was six months pregnant, her husband was three days from a Gestapo firing squad, and she walked into the office of Klaus Barbie and lied to his face.

Her name was Lucie Aubrac.

Her husband Raymond had been arrested on June 21, 1943, in the Lyon suburb of Caluire — the same catastrophic Resistance meeting at which Jean Moulin himself, de Gaulle's personal representative for the entire unified French Resistance, was captured. Both men were now inside the specific Gestapo prison at Montluc, in the specific interrogation cellars of the SS Obersturmführer known across occupied France as the Butcher of Lyon.

Barbie personally interrogated Raymond. Repeatedly. Brutally. Raymond told him nothing.

Lucie was thirty years old, seven months into her second pregnancy, and running a Resistance cell of her own.

She was not going to let her husband die.

She had been born Lucie Bernard on June 29, 1912, into a modest Burgundian farming family in the small village of Mâcon. Her parents were winegrowers. She was the first in the family to receive higher education. She studied history at the Sorbonne. She earned her agrégation — the specific competitive French national qualification that permitted the holder to teach at the university level — at twenty-six years old.

In 1939 she married a young Jewish civil engineer from Vesoul named Raymond Samuel.

When France fell in June 1940, they were in Strasbourg. They fled south to the specific unoccupied zone. They both immediately joined what was then a fragmentary network of anti-Nazi resistance groups — the specific movement that would eventually consolidate under the umbrella of Libération-Sud. They took cover names. Raymond became Aubrac. Lucie became Catherine.

Raymond's arrest on June 21, 1943 was the specific catastrophic single blow that the Vichy-and-Gestapo apparatus had been trying to land against the French Resistance for two years.

Lucie had approximately four weeks before Raymond was expected to be executed.

She got to work.

She fabricated a false identity — Madame Ghislaine de Barbentane, a wealthy young Catholic Frenchwoman from an old family. She dressed the part. She fitted a false pregnancy story onto her real pregnancy. She presented herself at the Gestapo headquarters at 32 Avenue Berthelot in Lyon and asked to speak with the officers holding the specific prisoner known to the Gestapo as René Vallet — Raymond's cover identity.

She told them Raymond had seduced her under false pretenses.

She told them she was carrying his child.

She told them her Catholic family was demanding, in the specific institutional-family honor code of the specific 1943 French provincial aristocracy, that Raymond marry her before his ex*****on so the child would not be born illegitimate.

She asked, through tears, for permission to see him one last time to arrange the marriage.

The Gestapo officers were not persuaded on the first visit.

She came back.

Across the specific approximately two months between Raymond's June 21 arrest and mid-October 1943, Lucie personally returned to Avenue Berthelot repeatedly. She met with subordinate officers. She wept convincingly. She quoted French Catholic family honor at them. She was, on the operating record of every French Resistance historian who has written about the specific case, one of the most sustained live-action performances by any Resistance agent of the entire war.

At least one of the meetings, per the specific primary-source consensus of her own 1984 memoir Ils partiront dans l'ivresse and Raymond's own subsequent writings, was with Klaus Barbie himself.

She got the visit. She got several.

While she was inside the specific prison compound each time, she was memorizing the specific institutional layout — guard positions, patrol timings, doorways, corridors, the specific institutional protocol for transporting condemned prisoners from Montluc to their ex*****on site. She was not there to say goodbye. She was there to plan.

She spent the specific same September-through-October 1943 window quietly assembling a Groupe Franc — a small dedicated armed unit of the Movements Unis de la Résistance — of approximately twelve to fifteen specific French Resistance fighters. She personally briefed each of them. She personally planned the specific ambush.

At approximately 5:00 PM on the afternoon of Thursday, October 21, 1943, a German Wehrmacht truck rolled out of the Montluc prison courtyard onto Boulevard des Hirondelles in Lyon. It was carrying Raymond and thirteen other condemned Resistance prisoners.

The specific ambush point Lucie had selected was a bend in the road where the truck was forced to slow.

The Groupe Franc opened fire.

The specific action lasted less than five minutes. Two German soldiers were killed. The other guards were incapacitated. Raymond and all thirteen of his fellow prisoners were pulled free of the truck. Lucie was on the scene. Six months pregnant. Personally coordinating the extraction.

Every single one of the fourteen prisoners escaped.

The Aubracs went into hiding immediately. They spent the specific following three months moving between Resistance safe houses across France while the Gestapo hunted them across the entire occupied country. Klaus Barbie personally posted a substantial reward for their capture.

They made it out.

In February 1944, a small Lysander aircraft from RAF Special Operations Executive landed on a specific improvised airstrip in a field near Mâcon and lifted Raymond, Lucie, and their four-year-old son Jean-Pierre to England.

Lucie gave birth to their daughter Catherine in London on February 12, 1944.

She named her Catherine after her own Resistance cover name.

She named her Catherine because Catherine was the name of the woman who had, six months pregnant, walked into the office of Klaus Barbie and lied to his face to save her husband's life.

After the Liberation, Raymond served briefly as Commissioner of the Republic for the Marseille region in the specific transitional government of General Charles de Gaulle. He then returned to his profession as a civil engineer and spent the following six decades working on French and international infrastructure projects — including landmark commercial dam and reconstruction projects across Morocco, Algeria, France, and the developing world.

Lucie returned to her profession as a historian and a teacher. She devoted the following six decades of her professional life to the specific institutional project of documenting the role of women in the French Resistance — a specific historical population that the specific institutional postwar French national mythology had, on her own recorded observation, essentially erased.

She published Ils partiront dans l'ivresse in 1984. She spoke in French schools across the following twenty years. In 1997, at age eighty-five, she watched Claude Berri direct the film Lucie Aubrac, with Carole Bouquet playing her.

She and Raymond raised three children together.

They stayed married for sixty-four years.

Lucie died at ninety-four on March 14, 2007. Raymond died at ninety-seven on April 10, 2012.

When French journalists asked Lucie, decades after the war, what had compelled her to walk into the office of the Butcher of Lyon at six months pregnant, her answer was documented in essentially every subsequent extended interview.

He was my husband. What else was I going to do?

If their story stayed with you, drop one word in the comments — Lucie, Raymond, Catherine, anything that comes to mind. Tap the like button so more people find this story. The page is small. Every reaction helps us keep telling stories like this one.

28/04/2026

At 17, the law said her ra**st could go free—if she married him. She refused, and changed a nation.
The year was 1965. The Beatles topped the charts. Man was preparing to walk on the moon. But in Italy, a medieval law still governed women's bodies—and their futures.
Franca Viola was a teenage girl in Alcamo, Sicily. She'd broken off a relationship with Filippo Melodia, a local man with mafia ties. He didn't take rejection well.
On December 26, 1965, armed men broke into her family's home. They beat her mother unconscious. They grabbed Franca and her eight-year-old brother Mariano, who screamed and fought to save his sister.
They released the boy. They kept Franca.
For eight days, she endured unspeakable violence. R**e. Captivity. And relentless pressure to agree to one thing: marriage to her abductor.
Because in 1965 Italy, marriage was the solution. Article 544 of the Penal Code stated it plainly: a ra**st who married his victim faced no punishment. The law called it matrimonio riparatore—rehabilitating marriage.
It would "restore" the woman's honor.
Her honor. Not his crime.
This wasn't folklore from centuries past. This was the modern world. Women in Italy, and across Mediterranean Europe, faced a choice: marry your ra**st, or live as damaged goods—unmarriageable, shunned, worthless.
When Franca was finally released, the expectation was clear. Everyone—neighbors, relatives, even parts of her own family—assumed she would do what women always did. Accept the proposal. Salvage what remained of her reputation. Disappear into a quiet life of survival.
Franca Viola looked at that future and said one word.
No.
With her father Bernardo standing beside her—a man who chose his daughter's dignity over tradition—Franca did the unthinkable. She refused the marriage. She went to the police. She pressed charges.
And Sicily exploded.
Her family was ostracized overnight. Their crops were burned. Threats poured in. In a culture where honor meant everything and the mafia enforced silence, Franca's defiance was seen as a betrayal—not of Melodia, but of the entire social order.
Still, she didn't break.
The trial became front-page news across Italy. A nation was forced to look at itself in the mirror. Journalists debated whether a woman could ever truly be "whole" again after r**e. Public opinion split viciously—some hailed Franca as a hero, others condemned her as a disgrace.
But she kept going.
In 1966, Filippo Melodia was convicted and sentenced to eleven years in prison. For the first time in Italian history, a woman had publicly refused rehabilitating marriage—and won.
The shockwaves were immediate. President Giuseppe Saragat invited Franca to the Quirinal Palace. Pope Paul VI received her at the Vatican. These weren't just gestures—they were admissions that something fundamental had shifted.
In 1968, Franca married Giuseppe Ruisi, her childhood friend who loved her without condition, who saw her not as broken, but as brave. Their wedding was a quiet revolution: proof that victims deserved love, respect, and ordinary happiness.
But the law? It didn't change overnight.
Article 544 remained in place. Other women suffered under it. It took fifteen more years of activism, of cultural awakening, of women who found courage in Franca's example.
Finally, in 1981, Italy abolished the rehabilitating marriage law.
Rapists could no longer escape justice by marrying their victims.
It started with one girl. One refusal.
Franca Viola never wanted to be a symbol. She lives quietly today with Giuseppe, surrounded by children and grandchildren. She rarely speaks publicly. She was never interested in fame—only in justice for what happened to her.
But history doesn't ask permission.
Because sometimes one person's courage becomes a crack in the foundation. Sometimes a 17-year-old girl's refusal to accept shame forces an entire nation to confront its laws, its values, its soul.
Franca Viola proved something the world needed to learn: a woman's honor isn't defined by what's done to her. It's defined by who she is, what she stands for, and whether she bends when the world tells her to break.
The law told her to submit.
Tradition told her to disappear.
Fear told her to comply.
She said no.
And Italy changed forever.