5 Hollywood heroines for ‘feminist’ Miley Cyrus to look up to

In an effort to raise awareness about breast cancer, Angelina Jolie shared a deeply personal story in a New York Times op-ed article. In May, she wrote about testing positive for BRCA1 and BRCA2, known as the breast cancer genes, and, consequently, electing to have a double mastectomy to drastically decrease her chances of getting cancer. “I am writing about it now because I hope that other women can benefit from my experience,” she wrote. “Cancer is still a word that strikes fear into people’s hearts, producing a deep sense of powerlessness. But today it is possible to find out through a blood test whether you are highly susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer, and then take action.”   (Facundo Arrizabalaga / EPA)

When the first installment of “The Hunger Games” came out in 2012, Jennifer Lawrence was criticized for not looking hungry enough to play heroine Katniss Everdeen. So, in advance of the film’s second installment, “Catching Fire,” out in the U.S. on Nov. 22, she’s made a point to talk about her body in positive terms during interviews. Lawrence, for example, told BBC News that she made a conscious decision to make her character strong instead of svelte so that she could be a positive role model for her young, impressionable fans. “We have the ability to control this image that young girls are going to be seeing,” she said. So she took this “amazing opportunity” to make a statement: “It’s better to look strong and healthy.”  (Vittorio Zunino Celotto / Getty Images)

Anna Gunn took to the New York Times opinion pages in August to talk about Skyler White, her character on “Breaking Bad,” and shed a harsh light on the misogynistic views that still, maddeningly, exist. Frustrated that Skyler had elicited such vitriolic, misogynistic responses from the show’s fans, Gunn asked: “Could it be that they can’t stand a woman who won’t suffer silently or ‘stand by her man’? That they despise her because she won’t back down or give up? Or because she is, in fact, Walter’s equal? [...] But I finally realized that most people’s hatred of Skyler had little to do with me and a lot to do with their own perception of women and wives. Because Skyler didn’t conform to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.”  (Robyn Beck / AFP/Getty Images)