Ah, thesis time. It’s the time when the carpal tunnel syndrome kicks in, your anxiety kicks off, and you realize the ratio of how much you know compared to how much you have to write is…inadequate, to say the least. Luckily, we have a list of women that will inspire you to push through the crying jags and writer’s block, and produce something that would make them proud!
Few women inspired fear as much as the female pirate Ching Shih. Her name literally means “Cheng’s Widow” (he was a pirate too), and when they married it was rumored to be under the condition that she obtain equal control of his pirate fleet. He died six years later, which means that Ching Shih (after marrying her husband’s adopted son to stop him from inheriting everything) inherited 1,800 ships and 80,000 men. She maneuvered her way into the sole position of power and established a vigilant law code – rape was punishable by death, and if a pirate married a female he took captive he was required to be faithful to her. The East India Company, the Qing dynasty officials, and the Portuguese navy couldn’t defeat her Red Flag fleet, and she only retired after accepting amnesty from the Chinese government. Her conflict with the Black Flag fleet was getting a bit much, and Ching Shih knew when to bow down gracefully. She’s a relatively obscure character in female history, but she IS one of the most successful pirates to ever live…and even had a character in Pirates of the Caribbean modeled after her! That, my friends, is true success.
Called the “Joan of Arc of the North”, Louise de Bettignies is one of the most underrated figures of World War One. She came from a noble, albeit penniless, family, she worked as a tutor in the houses of English and German families (and learned…well, English and German). A year after German troops invaded northern France, the patriotic Louise was approached by an officer who suggested that she try her hand at being an intelligence agent. She adopted the name “Alice DuBois”, and would inform the English of information about German troops and locations, as well as pass on news to families of soldiers. The “Alice Network”, consisting of eighty people in total, could collect and transmit information within twenty-four hours, and was comprised of everything from couriers to station masters to friendly neighbors. The Allies wiped out 2000 artillery pieces due to her actions, but was arrested under vague circumstances attempting to cross the border to Belgium using fake documents. She said nothing during six months of questioning, but eventually was implicated by a fellow prisoner and sentenced to 15 years of forced labor. She refused to make arms for the German army and instigated a riot, and died in 1918 while being operated on for a pleural abscess. She’s been awarded the Legion of Honour, the Croix de Guerre and was made an officer of the British empire. Her network also inspired a fictional book called The Alice Network.
3. Ida B Wells
Ida B Wells was born in 1862 to former slaves in Mississippi, who tragically died of yellow fever when she was just fourteen. Ida took a job as a schoolteacher to support her family, but her notoriety really started when she was kicked off a train after refusing to move to the “Jim Crow” car so a white man could have her seat. She filed a court case which was overturned by the Supreme Court, but people wanted to hear her story, and that resulted in her turning to journalism. She became a partner at Free Speech and Headlight and, after three of her friends were murdered by a white mob, exposed the story amidst extreme threats. She moved to Chicago, where she continued her tireless pursuit of anti-lynching laws, as well as marched in the 1913 march for universal suffrage. She was a signee of the petition to form the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), openly opposed fellow NAACP member Booker T Washington for his conservative tactics, and became one of the first Black women in the United States for public office.
Mary Wollstonecraft is an OG feminist – her Vindication of the Rights of Woman is an amazing piece of political commentary, but her life was actually pretty turbulent. She’d published it at a time when the idea of progress was sweeping the country…unless you were a rich white man. She left a violent home at 19 and then returned three years later to look after her dying mother. She founded a school in the Dissenting community, but it floundered and then her best friend died a year later. She became a governess, and what she realized was that she hated the woman she was working for because she depended on a man for her identity and exaggerated her weakness. Not surprisingly, she was fired in 1787, and then became a writer and editorial assistant for the Analytical Review – it was here that she started to realize the situation she lived in, where women were denied education and the ability to be their own person. She published Vindication in 1792, in response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work Emile. Mary didn’t think that women shouldn’t be mothers – she just wanted them to receive an equal education to men. She then went to participate in the French Revolution, had two children out of wedlock, and suffered from depression and suicidal tendencies. She also wrote a book published posthumously in which she emphasizes women’s need to express their own sexuality – the outrage over this meant that Vindication kind of fell by the wayside. She died when she was just 38, but her creative spirit was passed down to her second daughter – Frankenstein author Mary Shelley.
5. Zenobia
Zenobia was a warrior queen who ruled the region of Palmyra, in present-day Syria. This highly educated descendent of Cleopatra was a powerful monarch, and took the throne after the death of her husband and her stepson. This was a remarkable feat for a woman, and her army conquered parts of Egypt, Turkey, Syria and Jordan. Her court was known for its intellectual atmosphere, and her reign accommodated believers of all religions. She was taken prisoner by the Roman emperor Aurelian, and she spent the remainder of her years in Rome. She has become an iconic figure in the Middle East, a national symbol in Syria, and even drew admiration from Catherine the Great. Her reign is remembered as stable and tolerant, and her intellect and political acumen allowed her to take charge of an empire.
All photos taken from Wikimedia Commons.