8 Notable Mothers in History
I was going to write about oil fields today, but since Sunday is Mother’s Day, I figured this was a good time to do a little research and find some notable mothers.
Of course, every famous person has a mother, so I wanted to find some that particularly stand out:
Olympias of Epirus
How many mothers can say their kid grew up to conquer the world? Very few. Olympias of Epirus is one of them, having given birth to Alexander III of Macedon, famously known as Alexander the Great.
Olympias was actually kind of ruthless, willing to kill for the sake of her son Alexander’s secure rise to the throne, and it’s not known whether or not she had anything to do with the assassination of Alexander’s father, Phillip II, in order to raise her son up to the Macedonian crown.
You can’t discount the other influences in Alexander’s life. His father is already a nominee for June’s “8 Notable Fathers in History”, and one of his teachers was Aristotle. But without Olympias, there would have been no Alexander, and with no Alexander, no Hellenistic Age.
Wife of Feodor Vassilyev
I don’t have her name, but she had the most children of any recorded woman in history - 69. 16 twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets.
Ouch.
Caterina, peasant girl of the 15th Century
She had possibly been a slave from the Middle East and she bore an illegitimate son with a local Italian notary. It’s kind of a boring story until you find out that the illegitimate son was Leonardo da Vinci.
She didn’t have a big influence on da Vinci’s life, as he lived with his father Piero da Vinci until apprenticing with Verrocchio at the age of 14.
Between 1493 and 1495, Leonardo listed Catarina as one of his dependents on his tax documents, which might be how history knows about her.
Sarah, wife of Abraham
Sarah was childless for much of her life, and when Abraham was to become the father of nations, she offered him the handmaid Hagar to Abraham as his concubine so that he could have children. But Sarah ended up having Isaac.
Pauline Einstein
I guess you already know who she is. But imagine telling a pregnant Pauline Einstein in 1879 that her son would one day grow up and make her last name synonymous with “genius.”
She insisted that Albert take violin lessons at age six, and even though he didn’t like it and eventually quit, who can really say how much those lessons contributed to the growth of one of the world’s most famous brains?
If Pauline Koch hadn’t found the merchant named Hermann Einstein, physics would be without one of its greatest stars, and the 20th Century without its most famous contributor to science.
Bithiah
Not all mothering is done by biological mothers, so here’s some love for those who adopt. Bithiah was the adopted mother of Moses, and according to Jewish tradition, she was exiled from the house of Pharaoh for allowing Moses, a Levite, into their house. Protecting her adopted son from harm
Nancy Matthews Edison
Nancy Edison was no slouch. Edison would say of her, “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint.” In that way, she indirectly helped contribute the light bulb and the phonograph.
She’s also notable for being the one who home-schooled the Wizard of Menlo Park. He barely had any formal schooling. This alone makes her pretty cool.
My Mom
Of course, without my mom, there would be no Dan Kenitz, no BipolarNation, and no list of 8 Notable Mothers in History for you to read right now. You can have your Pauline Einsteins and Nancy Edisons; no one has better parents than me. Happy Mother’s Day, to my mom and all the mothers out there!
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