I was scrolling through my Facebook feed the other day when I happened across a viral video of a woman I had never heard of before: Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Fascinated, I clicked on the video and proceeded to watch one[…]
The Angel of Santo Tomas: Fe Del Mundo
Today I give a nod to my own heritage by highlighting one of the most badass Filipina ladies in recent history: Dr. Fe del Mundo. Fe was born in Manila (the capital city of the Philippines) in 1911, and when[…]
Lady Death: Lyudmila Pavlichenko
So I know this blog is quickly becoming a women of WWII blog, but there are just so many amazing, badass, well-documented gal heroes from this era that I simply cannot resist the temptation to cover more (sorry not sorry).[…]
Chief Wilma Mankiller
The name says it all, does it not? Wilma Mankiller became the first woman to ever lead a major Native American tribe when she became the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation in 1985. Her surname was passed down from[…]
The White Mouse: Nancy Wake
This badass French Resistance spy killed Nazis with her bare hands, guided hundreds of wounded Allied soldiers out of occupied French territory to safety, and played a crucial role in smuggling information back and forth between the Allied forces and the[…]
Empress Theodora
Let me start off by saying that I have THE BIGGEST historical badass lady crush on Empress Theodora. Honestly, if I could travel back in time, murder Emperor Justinian, and take his place, I wouldn’t think twice. Now that we’ve[…]
Yuri Kochiyama
Born in 1921 in San Pedro, CA as the daughter of two affluent Japanese immigrants, Yuri Kochiyama (born Mary Yuriko Nakahara) had her whole world turned upside down on December 7, 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. At 20-years-old she[…]
The Unsung Heroines of Stonewall: Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera
Important Terms: Transgender: (adj.) denoting or relating to a person whose self-identity does not conform unambiguously to conventional notions of male or female gender. Transvestite: (n.) a person, typically a man, who derives pleasure from dressing in clothes traditionally worn by the opposite sex.[…]
The Warrior Queen Boudica
Cassius Dio, the ancient Roman historian, described the ancient Celtic warrior queen Boudica as being “in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce, and her voice was harsh: a great mass of the tawniest hair fell to[…]
Mother Seacole
Born in 1805 as the daughter of a black Jamaican hotel owner and a Scottish soldier, Mary Seacole was a woman of many contradictions. She inherited an entrepreneurial spirit from her mother, and had a sharp mind for quickly seizing[…]