Women’s History Month Kicks off today in the US, UK, and Australia amongst other countries. 

Madeleine Albright deserves a place in U.S. History books as the first woman to serve as Secretary of State for the country she immigrated to as a girl.  She immigrated to the US after living in the UK and Switzerland after her own country was overtaken at the outset of World War II.

In 2012, she published a book called Prague Winter which recounted her family’s journey from a relatively young democracy, Czechoslovakia, to England, where she and her family were again in harms way thanks to Nazi bombing raids.  The book provides a great deal of background detail on the history of the country and the region so that those unfamiliar with it could understand the pre-conditions that gave Hitler the excuses he exploited to annex her homeland in 1938.

When discussing why she wrote the book, and the key lessons people should take from it, she summarized (paraphrased from memory):

Czechoslovakia was the only democracy in the region and over a weekend other countries decided it was worth sacrificing to a madman because it was small and spoke a funny language.

No wonder she was the first woman who came to mind as we start out this month.  Long before Madeleine Albright was making history, she had a first-row seat TO history.