About Sophia

Mission

The Sophia Foundation is an educational nonprofit corporation devoted to showing young women and men the history of women leaders and rulers, around the world and across all time periods. The foundation supports the publication of young-adult biographies that tell the stories of outstanding women, and undertakes collaborative learning initiatives for young people, based on the web, in the home, and in the classroom.

Where is history's record of women leaders? We must appreciate the "power of the mirror." We understand who we are by what we see. In societies where women are not significantly visible in leadership roles, people absorb silent messages that "acceptable" leaders are male.

--Laura Liswood, Director, Council of Women Leaders, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Board of Directors

Cynthia Ruprecht Beams, President. Teacher and entrepreneur.

Cindy Beams has a deep commitment to education, based on her extensive teaching experience with all age levels. She takes an imaginative view of learning, having worked with the San Francisco Exploratorium during its exciting formative years. Currently, she is a management consultant to a Boston venture-capital fund. She credits her sense of the possibilities for women's leadership to her mother, her daughters, and her early education at St. Louis's Mary Institute and Miss Hall's School in Massachusetts. Cindy is surrounded by energetic young people at the Groton School, where her husband Fred is Dean of Students.

Carol Antos, Treasurer. Businesswoman, MBA.

Carol Antos holds an economics degree from Cornell and an MBA from Boston University, both with honors. She is an experienced small-business owner and community organizer, and the parent of a son and a daughter. It is Carol who constantly reminds the Board that it is both young men and young women who will benefit from learning about women's leadership through the ages.

Marty Green, Clerk. Historian, Educator.

Marty Green brings to the project a broad experience in educational publishing. She has developed curriculum materials for Houghton Mifflin, D. C. Heath, and Addison Wesley, among others. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Marty also holds an M.A. in medieval history, an M. Ed. in secondary education, and a PhD in women's history.

Advisory Board

Aleta Manugian is an attorney and co-founder of a highly successful realty company in central Massachusetts.

Georgess McHargue is a much-published writer who originated the Women Who Lead book series. A graduate of Harvard College, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, she has been a children's book editor and reviewer, the CEO of an archaeological corporation, and a developer of curriculum materials in literature and history. Click here for more information about Georgess's career as a writer.

Who Is Lady Sophia?

When we were asking ourselves what to call this foundation, we remembered that the name Sophia means "a wise woman." In fact, Sophia represents the feminine aspect of divine creative energy in Christian, Jewish, and Gnostic tradition – Wonder Woman with a college degree. The image we use for her is taken from The Modern Woodcut by Robert Furst (1924) and was made by Charles Ricketts, to whom we apologize for extracting the figure from her background in order to accommodate the pixel count of most computer screens. We freely admit that the artist had no intention of portraying Sophia here. We were merely taken by the figure's elegant line and timeless garb, as well as the fact that she can be said to be lighting the lamp of knowledge.