TEN REMARKABLE WOMEN WHO CHANGED THE WORLD

Lady Godiva

MARIE ANTOINETTE

Born an Austrian princess in a turbulent time, Marie Antoinette (1755–1792) was married to Louis XVI of France at the age of fourteen to end hostilities between Austria and France. When she first arrived in France, she was received like a teen idol. Her peaches-and-cream complexion and innovative fashion sense—including wearing a miniature replica of a battleship in her hair at a palace party—earned her the favor of the style-loving French. Politically, Marie Antoinette held little influence over her husband and mainly served as a pawn for her mother, the empress of Austria. So instead she worked her influence to modernize the French court, which garnered great criticism from court elders. For example, when she was painted in a portrait wearing a casual muslin dress, this was viewed as improper for a queen; she also hired a female portrait painter, which was unheard of at the time.

As the French Revolution gained force, Marie Antoinette was scapegoated as “Madame Deficit,” as her extravagant displays of style, for which she was so loved by some, became the personification of aristocratic excess. While we all know her miserable fate, she must be exonerated from ever saying “Let them eat cake”—that statement first appeared in a text by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, describing a Spanish princess long before Marie Antoinette was even born. It should be noted, she was ever the gentlewoman. Her actual last words were “Pardon me sir, I meant not to do it,” after she accidentally stepped on the foot of her executioner.

LADY GODIVA

Lady Godiva (1040–1067) was an eleventh-century English noblewoman who ponied up for her people, literally. Born into a wealthy family, she was one of the few female landowners of her time. Godiva married the Earl of Mercia, Leofric, who was not a very nice lord over the tenants of their land. When Leofric levied an additional tax on the people of Coventry just to pay for the king’s guard, Godiva pleaded with him to lift the debt. He challenged her that if she rode through the town naked, he would cancel the tax. So she mounted a white horse and rode through the town with only her long golden hair as a cover, to save the people of Coventry. Legend has it Leofric then lifted all the taxes. Once again, a woman’s courage saves the day.

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) is the founder of modern nursing and compassionate care worldwide. Before she established it, there was no formal education for nursing practices. She found her calling early in life and worked hard to educate herself in the field of nursing, despite being born into a wealthy upper-class family that disapproved of her decision to work. Nightingale came to prominence when she and thirty-eight nurses she had trained were sent to a British base in the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean War. There, horrified by the state of the medical tents and overworked medical staff, she developed a reputation as a compassionate caretaker and a brilliant statistician who observed that the care and sanitation conditions of the patients directly correlated with their mortality rate. It’s recorded that with her intervention, the medical camp mortality rate went from 42 percent to 2 percent. Her pie charts depicting death rates and the spread of disease began the practice of evidence-based medicine; her diagrams were so significant that the British government established a statistical branch of the Army Medical Department a year after her return from Crimea.

She spearheaded campaigns for sanitation and care practices in hospitals, with guidelines as basic as establishing hand-washing rules, and she wrote the textbook on modern nursing, Notes on Nursing, that is still used today. Perhaps most significantly, Nightingale established the first formal school of nursing, the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London. She went on to write extensively on her medical knowledge and mentor other nurses who went out and established her methods globally.

ANITA GARIBALDI

Anita Garibaldi (1821–1849) was the legendary love who shaped the life of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the father of modern Italy. Born to a poor family in Brazil, Anita met the young revolutionary Garibaldi when he came to the country for the Ragamuffin War. A skilled and courageous horsewoman, she taught him the gaucho way of life and joined him on the battlefield. They fought together with many rebel groups across South America, including in the Battle of Curitibanos, where she was captured by their adversaries and told that Giuseppe had died. She searched the battlegrounds, and when she didn’t find his body, she escaped on horseback and crawled through the woods for four days without food or water until she was reunited with the rebels and Giuseppe—all while pregnant with their first child. Together in 1848 they traveled to join the war for a liberated and united state of Italy. Anita passed away a year later during a defeat; when Giuseppe rode out to hail the new king of a united Italy in 1860, he wore Anita’s striped scarf as tribute.

MARIE CURIE

Polish physicist and chemist Marie Curie (1867–1934) was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the first person to win it twice, in two different sciences. She started her studies in an underground “floating university” in Warsaw because Polish colleges were then men-only. Making her way to Paris, Curie earned master’s degrees in physics and mathematics from the Sorbonne, all while subsisting on buttered bread and tea and tutoring at night to pay her way through school. Curie stayed in Paris after she was rejected for work at Krakow University because she was a woman. There she met her perfect match in fellow physicist Frenchman Pierre Curie, and together they furthered her work in radioactivity (a term she coined) and discovered two new elements, named polonium (after her native land) and radium. In 1903, together they won their first Nobel Prize in physics.

Tragedy struck when her husband was killed by a horse-drawn wagon in 1906. Despite her grief, she took over his teaching position at the Sorbonne and became their first female professor. In 1911, at the age of forty-four, she won her second Nobel Prize, in chemistry. When World War I broke out, Curie established the first on-site radiology centers to help surgeons in the field. She founded two Curie Institutes, in Paris and in Warsaw, which are still major medical research labs today. Curie overcame many barriers in her community to achieve history-making success, and even then still stayed grounded—Albert Einstein was quoted as saying that she was probably the only person who could not be corrupted by fame.

CARMEN MIRANDA

Carmen Miranda (1909–1955) was born into a deeply Catholic family that moved from Portugal to Brazil when she was a young child. Though her mother supported Miranda’s pursuit of a performance career, Miranda was beaten by her strict father after he found out she had auditioned to be on a radio show. She persisted and was soon discovered by a music producer, which led to her making records and films and becoming a Brazilian star. After six years of success in Brazil, Miranda was discovered by Lee Shubert, who brought her to New York to star in his Broadway musical The Streets of Paris. She refused to go without her band, wanting to maintain the integrity of the Brazilian sound. Brazil’s President Vargas took advantage of that opportunity to pay the band’s way to America, thereby turning Miranda into an ambassador for Brazil.

In 1939, Miranda developed her signature look of a flowing dress and fruit-and-flower turban, modeled after the style of the poor black girls from Bahia. She discovered the costume after appearing in a film in which she sang a song about empowering the lower social class of Afro-Brazilians. When she arrived in the United States that same year, Miranda and her costume became the symbol for all of South America. The Americans drank up her exuberant personality, exotic dance moves, and rapid speech. She was quickly signed by 20th Century Fox and became an international star, making over fourteen films and bringing the rhythm of samba to Technicolor life. Miranda was the first Latin woman to imprint her hands in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater and became the highest- paid woman in the United States in 1949. Unfortunately, the more she was loved by America, the more she was criticized by Brazil for becoming too “Americanized,” representing a stereotype of a Latina bimbo. Ever the showwoman, Miranda worked right up to her dying day: a recorded appearance on a 1955 episode of The Jimmy Durante Show shows her kneeling down unexpectedly, then jumping back up to finish her dance number. Durante said she reported being out of breath. She died later that night.

ANAÏS NIN

Possibly the most frank female author in history, Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) was a prolific writer who lived a salacious life and recorded all of it in a diary that, even expurgated, ran to seven published volumes. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin spent most of her life in the United States. She married a banker-turned-artist, Hugh Parker Guiler, and moved to Paris with him for a few formative years. There she lived a bohemian lifestyle and developed many friendships with men, often taking them as lovers—including psychotherapist Otto Rank and author Henry Miller.

In the 1940s, she moved to New York City and began writing erotica with Miller and fellow author friends for an anonymous collector who paid them a dollar a page. Nin’s works of erotica later became a breakthrough for female sexuality by representing the feminine perspective for the first time in the genre. These writings were published posthumously in two collections: Delta of Venus and Little Birds. Nin took on a second husband, Rupert Pole, in a marriage that she had to annul in 1966 because she was technically still married to Guiler. She continued her bicoastal bigamy, though, remaining with Pole in California for the rest of her life.

Though Nin was a fixture on the literary scene, she didn’t find success with her own writing until she was sixty-three and The Diary of Anaïs Nin was published by Harcourt Brace. Soon after, she was the toast of the feminist scene, traveling around the United States to give lectures on her writing that covered her experiences with illegal abortion, multiple love affairs with famous men, and examination of the female self in contemporary culture.

EVA PERÓN

Raised by a poor single mother of five, Eva Perón (1919–1952) left home at fifteen to pursue the limelight as an actress in Buenos Aires. The ambitious Eva found success in theater, radio, and film over the next decade, even eventually co-owning a radio company and becoming the highest-paid actress in Argentina in 1943. She met politician Juan Perón at a charity event in 1944, and they married the following year. Eva Perón became First Lady of Argentina when Juan was elected president in 1946, which ultimately became her most successful role.

She was a passionate advocate for trade unions, labor rights, and women’s suffrage. As First Lady, she founded the Eva Perón Foundation and the Female Peronist Party, the first political group that served the interests of women in a time when women couldn’t vote or run for office. The following year, the women of Argentina were given the right to vote. By 1951, women could also run for office, and twenty-four were elected to the Chamber of Deputies and seven to the Senate, making Argentina the country with the most female representatives at the time.

Perón was so active in the community and beloved by the people of Argentina that she and Juan announced her candidacy to run beside him for vice president in the next election. This was met with great opposition and resistance from the military and elite class, who vocally opposed her work. However, it was her declining health that led to her withdrawal, and she passed away at the age of thirty-three from cancer. Her influence is still so resonant in the Argentinian consciousness that her book, The Purpose of My Life, is mandatory school reading. A testament to the international reach of her legacy, her life was made into the musical Evita, which was later adapted into a film starring Madonna.

MATA HARI

Mata Hari (1876–1917) was born Margaretha Geertruida Zelle to Dutch parents in the Netherlands. From a young age, she knew the power of her feminine sexuality and used it to parlay her way into exotic adventures when she answered a lonely hearts ad by a Dutch captain looking for a wife. They married when she was nineteen; he was twenty-two years older than she, and she wore a bright yellow gown instead of a traditional white dress. They lived in the East Indies, where they had two kids and carried on multiple affairs with other people—leading to a bitter divorce.

When they returned to Holland, her ex-husband ran a newspaper ad warning shops not to give her credit, which left her in dire straits. So she moved to Paris and used her talents to become the world’s most famous exotic dancer and courtesan. In the early 1900s, the French were obsessed with Orientalism, so she adopted the name “Mata Hari”—Indonesian for “eye of the day”—and invented an exotic origin story of being raised in the jungle. She created an East Indies–influenced striptease involving strategically placed scarves and a bejeweled bustier. She mingled with aristocracy, taking many wealthy lovers.

When World War I broke out, she still moved freely between borders because of her Dutch citizenship. Before long, however, French secret agents followed her and hired her to spy on the Germans—based on a suspicion that she was already spying for the Germans. It’s possible that she worked as a double agent, with her true allegiance only to large sums of money. There was no solid evidence of her guilt (perhaps the sign of a truly skilled spy), but the French intelligence service prosecuted her anyway, and she was executed by firing squad. She wore a tailored suit and tricorn hat and refused to be bound or blindfolded as she faced the firing squad. In death, just as in life, she boldly stared down her fate.

BETTY FRIEDAN

Betty Friedan (1921–2006) is often credited as the mother of the second wave feminist movement. With her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, Friedan dared to ask: Now that women have had the right to vote for over forty years, what else do they want to do?

Born to Jewish immigrants in suburban Chicago, Friedan faced anti-Semitic treatment growing up, which later helped her identify with minority groups in her work. She became a journalist while in college at Smith; after graduation she moved to New York City to write for labor news syndicates. Friedan married and had three children, and it was at her fifteenth Smith college reunion, where she surveyed her fellow coeds-turned-housewives, that she started to put a name to that postwar, middle class woman’s dissatisfaction that would be the subject of The Feminine Mystique. The book addressed “the problem that has no name”: that women who were educated, married, and raising children still found themselves unsatisfied.

In 1966, Friedan co-founded and served as president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which worked politically to give women fair opportunities and treatment in the workplace. The focus was to create a landscape where women could pursue a career outside the home; they also touched on issues of abortion, federal funding for child care services, poverty, and LGBT rights. In addition to NOW, Friedan also cofounded the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) and the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL). She was famously hot-headed, and her outspokenness led to her dismissal from two of the groups she helped found. Friedan wrote six more books, including memoirs and more nonfiction books on social issues.

By Ann Shen in "Bad Girls Throughout History", Chronicle Books, San Francisco, USA, 2016, excerpts pp.21,40,61,62,87, 90,118,128,129,153 & 155. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.  

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