W. Maathai

"Women, I think, have a capacity to care for others, to see beyond personal gain. Many women, I believe, are at their happiest and best when they are serving. I myself am at my happiest and my best when I am serving."

"I wish that women were not so underprivileged. They have no political power and no economic power - no power to change history and shape destiny. They need to search for that something in themselves that enables them to care beyond themselves ... to see what makes them a caring and concerned lot. They need to see that it can be strengthened, not abandoned or called something else - and to turn this awareness into power."

"I do think, however, that this will be hard, because if you really don't care about personal gain, you don't pursue political power the way some men do - I think you deliberately refuse to pursue it. And then, of course, we are put at a political disadvantage."

From You Strike The Woman an article about Wangari Maathai (Nobel Peace Prize Winner 2004)

W. Maathai is the first woman in central or eastern Africa to hold a Ph.D., first woman head of a university department in Kenya, first African woman to win the Nobel Prize in Peace.

Her husband divorced her in the 1980s, complaining that she was "too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too had to control." (quote from Encyclopedia of World Biography, 1999, Gale Group.) They had three children.

She the founded the Green Belt movement in Kenya in 1977, which has planted more than 10 million trees to prevent soil erosion and provide firewood for cooking fires. The program has been carried out primarily by women in the villages of Kenya, who through protecting their environment and through the paid employment for planting the trees are able to better care for their children and their children's future.