"I’m a woman
Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman,
That’s me"
Phenomenal Woman, by Maya Angelou

March is Women's History Month. I've been planning to make a series of illustrations of great women for years, and this is the right day, the right month to finally start. When I say great women, I mean women who inspire me and who I think deserve to be known by everyone. Women who changed the world, women who are fighting right now to make a change. I don't particularly like the idea of putting a lot of women together just because they share the same gender, when they actually did extremely different things. For example, what do Marie Curie and Frida Kahlo have in common except for the fact that they were women? Yet, I think that women who do something great, despite being women in a patriarchal society never get enough credit and get too often forgotten. I, as woman, have always been looking for female role models. Yet, as a student, have always been studying men. As an artist, or a writer, have always been learning from men. And when I found women to learn from, I found them thanks to my personal researches, my personal studies and readings. I found women, astonishing and bewildering women at the bottom of the pages, in the last chapters of textbooks, their names hidden between the lines.
I feel the need to celebrate these women and give them my personal tribute. And I don't want the future young women to struggle to learn from people of their same gender.