My Mother Said "No" Trivia Quiz

Answer: John Kennedy

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the USA, was born in 1917 and killed by an assassin's bullet on 22nd November 1963. Events of note that took place during his leadership of the nation included the space race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the escalating Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement. JFK was part of a large Irish-American family with parents who believed in their children reaching their full potential. Becoming President of a great nation certainly achieved just that.

Answer: Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher who lived from 384-322 BC. There is little information on his childhood except that his father, who was the physician to the King of Macedon, died young, and he was subsequently brought up by Proxenus of Atarneus who married Aristotle's sister and, keeping it in the family, eventually married Aristotle's daughter as well.

He was known to have somewhat negative views about women, for the most part,

Answer: Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) established the first birth control clinic in the USA and dedicated the greater part of her life to sex education, nursing, and activism on behalf of women. That ground-breaking clinic staffed entirely by women was opened in 1916 at a time when women's lives were still very controlled by men, when unsafe back alley abortions by desperate women were killing them, and when birth control was looked upon as a sin against the teachings of the Bible. Margaret's distribution of contraceptives and various birth control devices led to her immediate arrest and trial, with the trial judge ruling that women did not have "the right to copulate with a feeling of security that there will be no resulting conception." This trial, her sentence, and her appeal gave this issue America-wide attention and led to the support of various donors, including John D Rockefeller Jr, which allowed Margaret to expand her work. Margaret's parents were hard-working Irish immigrants, with her father extremely supportive of women's suffrage, and a mother equally so, but who died at the young age of 49 after having undergone 18 pregnancies in twenty-two years.

It's interesting how the influence of the parents finds echo in the lives of their children. Margaret married in 1902 and seemed set for a life of quiet domesticity in the suburbs of New York, until a fire destroyed the family home in 1911. These were the flames that changed the entire direction of her life. From that time, she began working in the slums of New York, became interested in politics and women's issues because of all the misery she witnessed in that daily work, and also became involved with the work of many of the leading activists of the day. In her search to ease the misery of the lives of the perpetually pregnant women she witnessed in the slums, she could find no information on contraception to share with them, and, seeking advice from a leading male doctor on this issue, was told curtly to try abstinence instead. Her course was thus set, and the vast output of Margaret's work that followed included the founding of the American Birth Control League in 1921 (her husband divorced her that same year), hundreds of annual lectures and talks, responding to the thousands of letters she received on a yearly basis from desperate women whose lives had become little more than permanent breeding machines, and the establishment of further clinics both in the States and in the wider world. Margaret Sanger, with her birth control advocacy, took the first gigantic step forward in enabling women, through planned parenthood, to lead vastly improved, fulfilled and happier lives surrounded by children who were, finally, definitely wanted, and most certainly loved.

Answer: Elayne Boosler

Born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1952, Elayne Boosler tried singing, dancing, waitressing and working as a doorman before she finally settled down in a career in standup comedy. Her work has also included hosting various rather unsuccessful game shows on television, cable and TV specials, and guest appearances on a wide variety of talk shows.

Answer: Edward Morgan Forster

E. M. Forster (1879-1970) was an English author and librettist. His works tend to be centred around class differences in the society of his time. He had a huge volume of writing to his credit, but his 1924 "A Passage to India" is considered to be his most successful.

After his early education was complete, he travelled with his mother to Europe, and then to India, Germany and Egypt at a later time with the political scientist and philosopher Goldsworthy Lowe Dickinson. By then he had written all but one of his great works.

As a conscientious objector during the First World War, Forster worked as a volunteer for the International Red Cross in Egypt instead. Following on from his writing career, he became a figurehead/spokesman for the British Humanist Societyl, an organisation that seeks to advance harmonious cooperation between societies. With Forster's strong anti-war beliefs, this would have suited him perfectly.

Answer: Ellen Barkin

Ellen Barkin (born 1954) is an American actress noted for her roles in film, on stage and television and on radio. She received several awards for her work including an Emmy for her role in the 1997 "Before Women Had Wings" which tells the story of a woman whose abusive husband commits suicide, but who then turns to abusing her own children in his place.

The other three choices for this question are all Australian actresses.

Answer: Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906-2001) was the wife of the famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh. Anne was also an aviator, an acclaimed author of thirteen books, and a prolific writer on various articles ranging from poetry to human nature, youth and age, women's roles, love, marriage, peace and contentment. One of her most notable works is the 1955 "Gift From the Sea" which discusses the lives of famous women in the 20th century. This became a number one best selling book of that year. Anne was the first American woman to earn a first-class glider pilot's licence and, with her husband, was the first woman to fly "from Africa to South America, and explore polar air routes from North America to Asia and Europe".

Honours which were bestowed on Anne during her lifetime included the Hubbard Medal from the National Geographical Society for exploration, discovery and research during flights totalling 40,000 miles over five continents, an Aerospace Explorer Award, her induction into the "National Aviation Hall of Fame (1979), the National Women's Hall of Fame (1996), the Aviation Hall of Fame of New Jersey, and the International Women in Aviation Pioneer Hall of Fame (1999)", a National Book Award (twice), the Christopher Award for works that affirmed "the highest values of the human spirit", and various Masters and Doctorates from five different colleges. What a remarkable woman.

The other three choices for this question are female aviators from Sweden, England and Australia.

Answer: Anne Robinson

Anne Josephine Robinson (born 1944) is an English journalist, author and TV presenter, noted for her crisp and abrasive style of delivery. This was particularly the case during the time she hosted the British game show "The Weakest Link" for twelve years.

She was even downright rude at times, and not even remotely sympathetic towards the woes of the contestants, as, with her famous catchphrase of "You are the weakest link - goodbye!" she bundled out the losers. Anne came from a family with an alcoholic mother, and for a time in her later life she also struggled with that illness, labelling herself as an unfit parent, and accordingly naming her 2001 autobiography "Memoirs of an Unfit Mother".

Answer: Jodi Picoult

Jodi Lynn Picoult (born 1966) is an American author awarded the New England Best Seller Award for Fiction in 2003 for her writings. By 2014 she had already published over twenty works of literature, five of which she also adapted for film and televisions productions.

Born and raised on Long Island, this talented woman wrote her first short story at the age of five. Graduating from Princeton University in 1987 she initially worked as a teacher and editor of textbooks before moving on to her full time writing career. Two of her works have reached number one on the New York Selling List.

The first of these is the 2007 thriller "Nineteen Minutes" which details the events leading up to and following of a school shooting. In 2008, her follow up best selling eerie novel "Change of Heart" tells of the murder by a young man of a father and his step-daughter, leaving behind his distraught, pregnant wife, widowed a second time, to grieve.

Answer: Pearl Buck

Pearl Buck (1892-1973), also known as Sai Zhenzhu, was an American novelist who won the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature for her works "which pave the way to a human sympathy passing over widely separated racial boundaries and for the studies of human ideals which are a great and living art of portraiture".

Born in West Virginia to missionary parents, the family moved back to China after her birth to continue the work they had previously carried out there. She was raised in a bilingual environment, learning to speak Chinese with ease while maintaining her native language as well. Over her lifetime, she produced forty novels, sixteen works of non-fiction, two biographies, two auto-biographies and over twenty volumes of short stories.

She won that Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938 for her overall work, and the William Dean Howells Medal (1935) and Pulitzer Prize (1932) in recognition of her 1931 novel "The Good Earth", a fascinating work that dramatizes the family life in a Chinese village of one Wang Lung from his wedding as a young man right up until his old age.