Badass Ladies You Should Know

Pay It Forward… or maybe backward?

Check out this great list of badass ladies in history, brought to you by the authors of A Tyranny of Petticoats: 15 Stories of Belles, Bank Robbers, and Other Badass Girls, a short story anthology edited by this week’s Badass Lady, Jessica Spotswood! (Excerpted from their Q&A guide, which you can read in its entirety here if you’re curious about their inspirations and research).

And don’t forget: If you want even more historical baddassery, you can always check the #badassladiesinhistory tag!

J. Anderson Coats: I’ve always admired Countess Constance Markievicz. She was born into privilege in Ireland but joined the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule. Among numerous other things, she was a sniper, a medic, an activist, and Ireland’s first female elected official. When asked about fashion advice, she advised women to “dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots, leave your jewels in the bank, and buy a revolver.

Andrea Cremer: I’ll say Ida B. Wells. Born a slave, Wells was witness to a tumultuous series of events in U.S. history. Her family was emancipated in the Civil War, and she grew up to become a suffragist and a journalist. Long before Rosa Parks made history by refusing to give up her bus seat, Wells refused to move from the first-class cabin of a train in Tennessee (for which she had a ticket) and ended up winning a suit against the railroad. Wells is best known for her campaign against the lynching of African Americans that proliferated in the 1890s, an incredibly dangerous endeavor that she strove for tirelessly. She is one of the most inspiring and courageous women in history.

Y.S. Lee: I don’t have a favorite person, but I do have a favorite type: scrappy, underprivileged, lesser-known women, the kind who seldom appear in conventional histories but fought fiercely, nevertheless, to live as interestingly and independently as possible.

Katherine Longshore: I think my first historical crush was on Amelia Earhart, another 1930s icon. Even as a child, I saw her as a heroic figure and a star of feminism. Her courage, stubbornness, and mysterious disappearance make her endlessly fascinating.

Marie Lu: My best attempts to narrow this down still end up with two: 1. Marie Curie, perhaps the first famous woman I ever read about as a little girl, and from whom I think I picked my English name to model, and 2. going more modern, Malala Yousafzai, who has already made history and will no doubt continue to for many decades to come. She inspires me every time I think about her.

Kekla Magoon: One of my favorites is Zora Neale Hurston, a black author, anthropologist, and activist from the Harlem Renaissance era (1920s and 1930s). She wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God and other things, but she wrote, spoke out, and made herself heard at a time when black women were discounted and overlooked even more than they are today. I also aspire to speak truth in the face of oppression and to be remembered for my voice, and she is an epic model of that specific achievement.

Marissa Meyer: I have to go with Cleopatra, a woman and ruler who has captivated us for millennia, spurring countless books, plays, poems, and documentaries. I particularly love that we have this common perception of her being a great beauty, but historians say she wasn’t really all that beautiful after all. Rather, it was her wit, charm, and intelligence that men of her time found so beguiling. Just as it should be!

Saundra Mitchell: This is absolutely impossible to answer — there are too many amazing women that we know about, and so many whose names and achievements were lost or obscured. But I will say that Olga of Kiev is one of my all-time favorite hardcore battle queens. She slaughtered two armies sent to force her to marry a neighboring prince, then razed an entire town by tying embers to doves’ legs and setting the birds free to fly home. Ninth-century Russian queens don’t play.

Beth Revis: I think perhaps my favorite woman in history is Anonymous. As Virginia Woolf said, “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” And so my favorite woman in history is all of the women who toiled in anonymity. Despite the odds stacked against them, despite the fact they never achieved fame, much less recognition, despite all that, they quietly got it done. And that is truly admirable.

Caroline Richmond: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, hands down! Stanton dedicated her life to fighting for women’s suffrage in the United States, and she was basically a nineteenth-century badass lady. One example of her awesomeness? Prior to her wedding, she instructed the minister to omit the phrase “promise to obey” from her vows. She also raised seven kids while working tirelessly as a suffragette, abolitionist, and social activist. She’s truly an inspiration to me.

Lindsay Smith: I love disruptive women in history! Catherine the Great, Alice Roosevelt, Empress Dowager Cixi — all women who cared nothing for others’ opinions of them and didn’t let others stand in their way when they set out to accomplish their goals.

Jessica Spotswood: I’m fascinated by Nellie Bly, who was an intrepid lady reporter. She wrote about the problems of poor working girls and called for the reform of divorce laws. She was a foreign correspondent in Mexico, but the editor of her Pittsburgh paper kept assigning her stories for their women’s section about fashion and flower shows, so she resigned and moved to New York. Most famously, she feigned madness while working undercover to write a series on the abuse of institutionalized women at the asylum at Blackwell’s Island. In 1888, she also tried to recreate Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days and filed dispatches to her paper via telegraph. She only took seventy-two days, like the boss she was.

Robin Talley: There are way too many to pick just one favorite! So I’ll name the woman who I think is the obvious choice to go on U.S. currency (preferably the twenty-dollar bill so we can get rid of Andrew Jackson) — Harriet Tubman. Through sheer determination and a lot of skill she took the biggest risk imaginable — and she succeeded, changing the lives of so many and changing the world at the same time.

Leslye Walton: I am currently infatuated with Petra Herrera, a revolutionary war hero who led over four hundred female soldiers during the Mexican Revolution, if only for the sole reason that she proved that women could be just as effective as men in the art of combat.

Elizabeth Wein: I’m going to go with Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001), because her voice as a writer and a pilot sings to my soul. I knew and read her written work long before I became a pilot myself. Her inspirational Gift from the Sea, which has never been out of print since it was first published in 1955, has been my guide throughout my adult life.

Pick up a copy of A TYRANNY OF PETTICOATS at  Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, or your indie bookseller – or enter to win a copy plus a timeline poster!

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first image:Badass Ladies You Should Know In History
middle images: author photo with historical lady in speech bubble
final image: A Tyranny of Petticoats cover

Pay It Forward: 
Author and librarian Jessica Spotswood shares more badass ladies we should know

From Jessica:

I’ve learned a lot just by following these badass authors on twitter:

· Justina Ireland, aka @justinaireland, black feminist, self-proclaimed “proud harpy & giver of zero fucks”

· Dhonielle Clayton, aka @brownbookworm, COO of We Need Diverse Books & co-founder of Cake Literary

· Kaye M., aka @gildedspine, Muslim feminist who founded #YesAllWomen & @MuslimSquad  [see Kaye’s profile here]

· Dahlia Adler, aka @MissDahlELama, an amazing resource for diverse book recommendations of all kinds

· Marieke Nijkamp, aka @mariekeyn, awesome advocate for disability rep [see Marieke’s profile here]

· Shannon Hale, aka @haleshannon, bestselling feminist author outspoken on the nonsense that is “boy books” vs “girl books”

· Kelly Jensen, aka @veronikellymars, former librarian, blogger at Stacked and Book Riot, editor of FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD, self-proclaimed “feminist killjoy” [see Kelly’s profile here]

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Jessica Spotswood is the author of the historical fantasy trilogy The Cahill Witch Chronicles and the upcoming contemporary novel WILD SWANS, as well as the editor of A TYRANNY OF PETTICOATS. She grew up in a tiny, one-stoplight town in Pennsylvania, where she could be found swimming, playing clarinet, memorizing lines for the school play, or-most often-with her nose in a book. Now she lives in Washington, DC where she can be found working as a children’s library associate for the DC Public Library, seeing theatre with her playwright husband, or-most often-with her nose in a book. Some things never change.

Website / Twitter /Facebook / Instagram

Don’t forget to enter Jessica’s giveaway!

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Do you know a Badass Lady who deserves a profile? Put suggestions in the ask box, or submit links to existing content here!

“Badass Ladies You Should Know” is brought to you by Kate Hart (kdhart), author of AFTER THE FALL, coming January 24, 2017 from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. If you add her book on Goodreads, she will love you forever.

yahighway:

Which Badass Lady Are You?

Take the quiz to find out which story from A TYRANNY OF PETTICOATS is right for you! (Then click over to Jessica Spotswood’s Badass Ladies You Should Know interview and enter to win the book and the poster!)

Badass Ladies You Should Know: 
Author and librarian Jessica Spotswood

Jessica Spotswood’s new anthology, A Tyranny of Petticoats, brings together a diverse group of authors and characters across several centuries of lady history, and the minute I saw the tagline – “15 Stories of Belles, Bank Robbers, and Other Badass Girls” – I knew she was a perfect fit for the Badass Ladies project. While I have my favorites in the short story collection, I’ll let you decide which to read first: Just take this fun quiz at YA Highway.

But first, find out more about the rad lady who made it all happen – and don’t forget to click through and enter the giveaway!