The Big Five personalities are qualities that people possess. They include openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Different people possess different extremes of these qualities, either high or low in the trait. Openness is a characteristic which people high they are creative, open to new experiences, and take up challenges. People with the conscientiousness trait pay attention to details and are focused on accomplishing tasks—moreover, extroverted people like being the center of attention and are naturally social people. Agreeable people empathize with other people and always want to contribute to their happiness, such as civil rights activists like Angela Davis. Neurotic people get easily upset, stressed, and anxious. The low extremes of these personalities are the complete opposites of the highs. The paper analyzes various personalities of celebrated women in history.
Shirley Chisholm
Being the first black woman to serve in Congress, Shirley Chisholm is a phenomenal black woman with an open, extrusive and relaxed personality. Born on November 30, 1924, Chisholm was a New York City primary education specialist and began partnerships with community political groups. She was later elected to the New York state senate in 1964, representing her Brooklyn area. She was elected to the United States House of Representatives four years later. Her openness to experiences made her vie for the presidency in the 1972 elections, being the first-ever African American woman to run for presidential nomination (). Nonetheless, she paid attention to tasks and went for what she wanted, showing her conscientiousness personality. When she was first appointed to serve on the House Forestry Committee, she demanded to be reassigned to the Education Committee, a demand women barely made (Winslow, 2018). Through her persistence, she was able to move departments.
Nonetheless, Chisholm’s choice of vocation to work with children shows she has an extraversion personality. In 1946, she received his bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College. She started working as a lecturer and graduated from Columbia University with a postgraduate program in elementary teaching. From 1953 to 1959, she was the director of the Hamilton-Madison Child Care Center, and from 1959 to 1964, she worked as an educational consultant for the New York City Bureau of Child Welfare (Gallagher, 2007). She worked alongside many children who required an extraversion personality. Her love for championing people’s rights, such as women and immigrants in the Congress, shows her agreeable personality (Cobb-Clerk & Schurer, 2012). She was seldom an aggressive civil rights activist, as she often preferred approaching leaders to walk the streets demanding their rights which shows that her personality is less neurotic.
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou has broken barriers for African American women through her civil rights activism and poems. Through her open character, she had worked a series of unconventional jobs. First, Maya was a mum at sixteen years, which, according to Crittenden, being a mother is a full-time job (2002). As a teenager, she visited her mother in California, but after a month, she returned to San Francisco and became the first black woman to work as a streetcar tout. Maya got to work as a bartender at a nightclub in San Francisco, where she performed as a dancer, singer, and prostitute (Bloom, 2009). She exuded conscientiousness through being committed to her writing and as a civil rights activist.
Nonetheless, her low extraversion personality is reflected by her muteness when she was young. When she was eight years old, her mother’s partner sexually abused her (Bloom, 2009). Maya’s uncle s kicked the man to death. Maya was so distraught by his death that she determined to remain silent for as long as possible. Moreover, she shows agreeableness through caring about the lives of African Americans. Angelou worked alongside activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. However, Maya showed her strong neurotic personality when she got upset quickly and made impulsive decisions in her life. For instance, she argued with her boyfriend in Ghana and left him for the United States of America. Her personality made her a great inspiration to the black woman of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Nina Simone
Nina was a civil rights activist and a singer who performed various types of music. Her versatility in the music scene expressed her open personality. Simone began her piano career at an Atlantic City nightclub. Her performances at the pub were mixed jazz, blues, and classical music, earning her a small but devoted following. Additionally, Simone loved being around people, considering her nature of work of entertaining as she had an extraversion personality (Barrick & Mount, 1991). In 1958, her extraversion character made her befriend an event announcer, Don Ross, in which they married quickly and regretted the haste decision later in life (). This move showed her ease in getting into people’s lives.
Moreover, she empathized with African Americans as she joined the civil rights movement reflecting her agreeableness character. Nina Simone’s new album for Philips featured the song “Mississippi Goddam,” which she used to address racial inequity in the United States (Feldstein, 2005). The song came after a bombing in Alabama on September 15, 1963, which murdered four young black girls and left others blinded. She described the song as “shooting ten bullets back at them,” and it became a popular protest song used by African Americans (Kernodle, 2008). Nina was also highly neurotic. A case in point is when her parents came to watch her perform and sat on the front row seats, but they were moved to give space for White people. Simone refused to perform until her parents moved to the front seat. Besides that, she was a great entertainer in the twentieth century.
Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklin was a decorated African American singer. She had singles such as “Respect,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” “Spanish Harlem,” and “Think” were among the songs that made her famous in the United States, earning her the label “Queen of Soul” at the end of the 1960s (Franklin et al., 1999). Aretha underwent many challenges as a child, such as her mother leaving her while Aretha was young, getting married at a young age, and having an abusive husband. Despite her challenges, she progressed in her career, showing her openness.
Upon her conscientiousness, Aretha was a modest, hardworking, and energetic woman who frequently concentrated on completing a task. She placed a high value on both stability and creativity. As an extroverted person, Aretha appreciates debating and making challenging decisions. Moreover, her agreeable personality was highlighted by various people, such as Barack Obama, who noted that Aretha Franklin contributed to the definition of the American experience during her funeral (Fink et al., 2019). She cared about people’s lives and expressed it in her music. Her neurotics demonstrate how she would become agitated due to being in an abusive marriage. Through her powerful voice and expression of emotions through music, Aretha Franklin touched lives.
Angela Davis
Angela Yvonne Davis is an author, academic, and political activist. She has challenged herself to tackle various issues due to her open personality. In the 1960s, Angela rose to become the leader of the Communist Party of the United States, and Angela had strong relations with the Black Panther Party, where she campaigned to have prisons and the detention centers complex abolished (Davis, 2011). She has a way with words with her extraversion, and when she speaks, she makes one want to listen. Davis has many charms. She has exploited this quality to establish herself as a dynamic leader due to her charisma, attracting people when she talks (Gerber et al., 2011). The quality sets her apart from many activists as people immediately swear to her and want to listen to her views.
Nevertheless, Angela Davis is a philanthropist and humanitarian working with humanitarian organizations such as Committee Party USA, for which she has tremendous compassion and idealism, owing to her agreeable personality. One of Angela’s life lessons was to accept the natural limitations of the world and its habitants to make it possible for her to enjoy life more fully. This sentiment showed her low neurotics of rather than allowing life to stress her; she would embrace her shortcomings.
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