Inspiring Women From History. Part two of three. From 1700s to WW1
13) Mary Woollestonecraft Journalist, Author, Critic, Philosopher and Feminist. "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" was published in 1792 - a progressive social critique from a radical thinker who believed passionately in education, equality and freedom. When I read about her life and how she rejected the confines of a career as a governess and the many rigid social morales to which she was expected to adhere, I know she had fire in her belly and her heart. It must have been liberating when eventually she was offered a position as assistant editor and secretary for a radical magazine at the time - and even more extraordinary to go to France and become involved in events unfolding in the years of the French Revolution.
14) Harriet Tubman This reamrkably courageous and compassionate woman escaped from slavery, took huge physical and life-threatening risks to help others escape and became a fierce and influential abolitionist, human and civil rights activist, public speaker and suffragette. Read her life story - it will fire your imagination, she was truly brave.
15) Hazrat Babajan. Born in Northern India (now Pakistan) she was a Muslim Saint and Guru - considered to be a holy person of highest order. Born around 1806 and died 1931. I include her on my list because I think it has been so hard - as to be impossible almost- for women to be recognised as major spiritual leaders and teachers in most faiths since matriarchal eras. I might exclude taoism and buddhism from this though, not completely - but there are so few records, it seems, of the names and actual lives of their great women teachers . Also in the religions of the Children of the Book, as a whole, the actual doctrines themselves would have forbidden women to preach or teach. So a sort of double bind on them, in that case - if they were truly women of faith, they would not dream of violating their religious code by speaking of spiritual matters. As ever, there have always been exceptions to the rule - but they had to be truly remarkable. In England, for example, through the years of Celtic Christianity and Medieval period, we had wonderful Christian Mystics such as Julian of Norwich (yes, female) and Margery Kempe. But revered or respected though they were - no-one would ever have considered giving them an ecclesiastical title. Abbess was the best you would hope for. By the way, again, like so many women who achieved remarkable things (including the nuns and abbesses just mentioned) she declined the prospect of marriage from a young age. For more on the life of Hazrat Babajan:
16) George Eliot I do love George Eliot, for me Middlemarch is the greatest English novel ever written and I re-read it probably every three years. Nobody could portray small town life and everyday real characters and their choices, dreams and dilemmas as she did. With a warm and honest voice. To me, this kind of literature matters enormously for women. Because good literature may be fictional but always reflects real truths about our lives. If you read MiddleMarch - you couldn't help but share and feel Dorothea's passion for social reform and her burning desire to have an intellectual life and real ethics and values, whatever the smaller concerns of the dramas unfolding around her. The portrayal of social and political concerns of rural small town life was insightful and honest. But George Eliot's personal life was interesting, too. Another woman who broke the rules ... born Mary Ann Evans. she chose a masculine name to make it easier to write and publish. She mixed with shockingly radical people in definitely not the best circles and lived with her common law husband outside of matrimony. Was shunned for this by many friends and family - but I'll bet she felt she lived a full, rich and rewarding life.
17) Annie Besant. She was a human and civil rights activist and socialist member of the Fabian Society (along with George Bernard Shaw and many other prominent figures at that time) Annie Besant as I see her had a very broad view of the real world around her - she fought for causes outside of her own personal sphere of experience with great imagination and insight. Prominent in fighting for Home Rule for India and for Ireland. Also for suffrage for women and working classes. She also became President of the Theosophy Society. In this way she was an important part of creating broader possibilities for religious tolerance and understanding and I find it interesting the way she combined her socialist views with a spiritual life. The link I have given here focuses on her having belonged to the Freemasons, as I find it quite amusing. But read around if you want a broader picture of her work, that's lots of good links on the web.
18) George Sand. Well, I debated hard with myself over this one.... as a novelist she was well-known but probably not one of the most outstanding, as a woman she was a strong person, but not noted for remarkable acts benefiting other women or human kind or womankind generally, and some of her philosophies and personal politics were a bit dodgy. (In my view anyway: though I have tried to make this list so as to be not based on my own political or spiritual views, but on recognising women who made a difference and followed a powerful path in life.) If I am not sure about her, so why include her, then? I think because she made it more possible for a woman to be just - odd or eccentric or a maverick without necessarily being carted off to a lunatic asylum. Though I am sure many women were, and had she not been from a very privileged background, she too might have been. She was a French baroness (name Amantine but chose masculine name, as did many women writers) who wrote novels, well-received by many, slated by some. Also a journalist. She put aside the typical constraining and modest clothing of female aristocracy (and their manners, too!) in favour of men's attire, which allowed her to move about more freely and go where she pleased and do as she pleased, as she said. We can only imagine now how shocking and immodest a comment that was, or horribly unfeminine thing to even think. Women weren't supposed to want to do as they pleased or to move freely. Those who wished to insult her or couldn't deal with this feisty lady, and described her as "loud-mouthed and garrulous." Probably she interrupted men when they were talking and had opinions! She also chewed tobacco and had love affairs with both men and women. I guess she was the equivalent of what would in later days be termed, in hostile and insulting mood, a dyke, or butch.. Well good for her, I hope she enjoyed herself hugely, and very glad I am that these days I can wear trousers and march about if I want to.
19) Mary Seacole If you ever want an example of the "just get on with it and do it, whatever the obstacles, I will plough through them" approach - here she is. Born in Jamaica, and of mixed race, she was actually a British Citizen but at that time her racial heritage gave her only partial but not full civil rights. She was a grass roots, hands on healer and nurse (of the sort taught by family and those in her West Indian community of course, not through formal training as there was none for women.) She knew hygiene, people, folk and herbal remedies and wanted to nurse and care for soldiers in the Crimean War - having heard of the desperate conditions there. Mary Seacole got herself to England, offered her services as a volunteer to the Home Office and was refused in a bigoted and foolish racist dismissal. She gathered her life savings, raised some more funds, travelled to the Crimean peninsula and set up a boarding house / hospital. We have her to thank for a huge legacy contributing to modern knowledge on health and hygiene. I often think that although Pasteur, Koch and others were recognised for advances in hygiene and germ theories, not long after this period - the real ground work had been done by women such as Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale. Probably saving hundreds and thousands of lives, ultimately.
20) Florence Nightingale. I am going to include her as I think the advances she made in good hands on health care were extensive, and as she had the courage to step outside her conventional middle class English world and do something she believed in, with tireless dedication. Also I will add: on the theme of women's contribution to hygiene in health: this has a long history. Traditionally, even since medieval times, it was often women who did the actual nursing, once a doctor had visited and made diagnosis (and applied leaches etc!) Women - very often in nunneries - and monks in monasteries - would do the everyday care. Hygienic practises were a real part of this - and a lot was known but unfortunately elsewhere in doctors surgeries and hospitals, it was dismissed.
21) Marie Stopes. Again, a huge contribution to modern health care and particularly for women's health - because of her determined and unflinching work in informing and educating on facts and methods of family planning and birth control. For a lady to talk about these matters, and as frankly (including sexually and anatomically frankly) as she did was pretty disgraceful. There was also ethical and religious attitude to contend with and the whole status quo. Doctors and Churchmen condemned her. But her books sold incredibly rapidly - people were crying out for this knowledge.,.... I mean DESPARATELY. Particularly working class women - literally dying in poverty and squalor, of post-natal or post-abortion infections, exhaustion and malnutrition from excessive childbirth and complications, and so many associated miseries. Marie Stopes founded the first national birth control clinics. She has been controversial because of some of her expressed views on eugenics. However, in context it should be remembered that this was very much a buzz concept and in vogue at the time and was not necessarily understood in the way we understand it now. George Bernard Shaw and many others were advocates. Marie Stopes did boldly assert that she believed women had the right to knowledge of and control of their own biology and to information and choice, for that I thank her.
22) Rebecca West. Yes one of my favourite bold, bright women!! Journalist, novelist, essayist, literary, social and politic critic and feminist and suffragist. Beautiful, crystal clear, thoughtful prose and observations and gentle - or sharp - humour. Read her Novel "The Birds Fall Down" - it's superb. She was made a Dame of the British Empire in recognition for her contributions to journalism and literature. Another woman with an uncoventional personal life. Very supportive of other women writers, friends with Anais Nin, and - rather funny - wrote a fairly harsh review of an HG Welles novel, refusing to compromise her literary analysis as a newspaper critic, just because he was her lover and common law husband for a decade. (I can imagine the conversation over the dinner table - "darling, so sorry, but gave your latest a bit of a bashing, in The Times this week!....")
23) Marie Curie. I won't say a lot, but every time I have had an x-ray I think of her. She eventually died from leukeumia caused by radiation: she certainly deserves my silent prayer and gratitude. What courage this brilliant woman had, in carrying on her work after the death of her husband and colleague. She was awarded two Nobel prizes, she taught at The Sorbonne, and raised a daughter who also became a Nobel Prize winning scientist. Marie Curie drove ambulances on the front line during WW1 and was head of the Red Cross Radiology department. She supervised and worked hands on with fitting ambulances with x-ray equipment.
24) Virginia Woolf. Many many other reasons to add this interesting woman to my list, for novels, essays, journalism and more. But just on the strength of the book "A Room With a View" she already earned her place. wonderful. clever, unphased by accepted current world view of women's lives.
THE THIRD AND FINAL POST OF THIS TRILOGY ON INSPIRING WOMEN WILL FOLLOW TOMORROW. SIX WOMEN FROM WW1 TO PRESENT DATE.
follow your dreams and passions my friends. we don't have to be famous or brilliant, what really makes us more whole is that we make our own and someone else's lives a little more whole along the way because we dared to do and to believe....
xx eva day
