Though her body
looked male, her
childhood self-portraits
showed a girl named
Rebecca. A developer
of an imaging tool
that searches for plan-
ets outside our solar
system for California’s
Palomar Hale Telescope,
Rebecca Oppenheimer
avoids “transition” as
a label for her public
emergence in 2014:
“I like to say I stopped
pretending to be a boy.”UNITED STATES
ASTROPHYSICIST
Act. During the two years of her administration, the maternal mortality
rate declined, an issue Banda had long highlighted after she suffered post-
partum hemorrhaging during the birth of her fourth child. She enlisted the
help of male chiefs, persuading them to encourage medically supervised
deliveries in clinics instead of traditional home births. It’s an example,
she says, of feminism that works within a culture and with men’s support
to change social norms.
Malawi’s mostly rural-based population is deeply conservative, Banda
says, and while some communities practice matrilineal succession or
have women participate in the selection of a male chief, “the chiefs in this
country, three-quarters of them are men, and they are chauvinistic,” she
says, spitting out the word. “They are traditionally patriarchal like you’ve
never seen! Eighty-five percent of our people are grassroots based, and
so they are under those chiefs. You have to engage them and turn them
into fellow champions, and that’s what I did.”
SHAPING THE FUTURE 65