Baba Yaga
Baba Yaga is the legendary witch of Slavic folklore, particularly Russian fairy tales. She lives on the edge of the forest in a hut that stands and moves on chicken legs. Baba Yaga herself fills the hut from end to end, stretched out on her stove with her nose growing into the ceiling. She travels through the air in a mortar, pushing herself along ...
Nefertiti
Her face is one of the most famous in the world. Nefertiti (ca. 1370–1330 BCE) was the Great Royal Wife of the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten, and her sublime portrait bust is one of the glories of ancient Egyptian art. The woman herself is still a mystery, although the clues about her are tantalizing. Her prominence during the Amarna Period is ...
Ada Lovelace
Ada Byron Lovelace (1815-1852) was one of the most remarkable visionaries in the history of science. Her friend Charles Babbage invented the Analytical Engine to crunch numbers; it was Ada who realized that it could do much more. She saw that a mechanical device---a computer, if you will---could solve all kinds of analytical problems, as long as ...
Anne Bonny/Mary Read
Pirates of the Caribbean! Real pirates, that is: Anne Bonny (1690s-?) and Mary Read (1690s-1721). They sailed the high seas with the infamous Calico Jack, and so much has been written about the three of them that we can't possibly squeeze it in here. We need all the space just to talk about the costumes, since we're doing both of them on this ...
Nzinga
Nzinga (1582-1663) was the queen of Ndongo and Matamba, historical states in what is now Angola. This altogether remarkable woman seized the throne and held it for 40 years, successfully resisting Portuguese colonialism. She also created a crack army, waged war and fomented rebellion, played the European powers off against each other, kept male ...
Elizabeth I
When Elizabeth I (1535-1603) became queen, people didn't expect much. "Get yourself married as soon as possible," she was told, "and lean on your husband for support." Elizabeth had other ideas. For 45 years she ruled in glorious solitude, steering England with a sure hand and a steely will. She was, quite simply, the greatest monarch in ...
Hatshepsut
Hatshepsut (ca. 1508-1458 BCE) was an extremely successful pharaoh whose reign was full of accomplishments: important trade missions, gorgeous architecture, a booming economy. But the thing she's most famous for, at least nowadays, is that she had herself depicted as male on her monuments. There she is, King Hatshepsut, striding across the ...
Sor Juana
In the relentlessly patriarchal society of New Spain, there was no place for a girl genius. Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) was a prodigy: she could read and write by the age of three, was fluent in Latin by the age of ten, and by her late teens was famous for her brilliance in mathematics, theology, Greek logic, and history. Yet there was ...
Trung Sisters
In ancient Vietnam, before the Chinese came, women were clan rulers and queens. Society was built on what seems to have been a gender-equal footing, and women routinely wielded political power, went to war, ran homes and businesses, and even took multiple husbands if they could afford it. This was the civilization that produced the Trung Sisters ...
Grace Hopper
If it weren't for Admiral Grace Hopper (1906-1992), you wouldn't be reading this. There wouldn't be an Internet to read it on. There wouldn't be personal computers or word processors or any of the other digital wonders that we now take for granted. That's because before Grace Hopper---"Amazing Grace," mathematician and computer pioneer ...
Catherine the Great
Catherine the Great (1729-1796) was probably the best tsar Russia ever had. She arrived in the country as a teenaged German bride, and eventually took the throne in a coup that deposed her idiot husband. For 34 years she reigned as Empress and Autocrat of All the Russias, expanding the nation’s borders and turning it into an international ...
Artemis
Ah, Artemis! Goddess of the wilderness, mistress of the moon, patron of untrammeled womanhood. She races through the hills with her beloved animals, fleet-footed and shining. Artemis is one of the most venerated deities in all of Greek mythology, not to mention one of the most complex. She may be descended from a Neolithic Great Goddess, which ...
Freyja
Poor Freyja! More than any other goddess, she's been subjected to the strippers-with-swords treatment in contemporary art. But those deformed creatures with giant implants and chainmail bikinis bear little resemblance to the great Freyja, Lady of the Vanir, chief goddess of the Norse pantheon. Freyja is certainly very beautiful---she is, among ...
Marie Laveau
Marie Laveau (1801?-1881), better known as the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, is one of the most mysterious figures in American history. Almost all the facts of her life are shrouded in legend and confusion, beginning with the date of her birth (popular sources often cite 1794, but the records indicate 1801). All we can really be sure of is that ...
Esther
The Book of Esther is a subversive feminist tract masquerading as a Bible story. Okay, that probably isn't true, but by golly, it feels true. Esther, the eponymous heroine, is a courageous young Jewish girl who becomes the wife of the Persian king Ahasuerus (a total schmuck, in more ways than one) and risks her own life to save her people from ...
Ching Shih
Ching Shih, or Madame Ching (1775-1844), has been called the most successful pirate in history. For one thing, there was the sheer size of her operation: her Red Flag Fleet consisted of at least 40,000 pirates, with some estimates ranging as high as 80,000. In terms of power, she was unprecedented: the navies of China, Britain, and Portugal ...
Morrigan
Of all the great bird goddesses in world mythology, the Morrigan is surely one of the birdiest. This Irish goddess typically appears as a crow or raven hovering over the battlefield, feasting on the corpses of the slain. She's a carrion bird, basically; the Celts, like their Germanic neighbors, saw these birds as she-demons or goddesses who ...
Inanna-Ishtar
Long ago, before Venus or Aphrodite, before Artemis or Athena, before Demeter or Persephone, there was Inanna. She was the great Mesopotamian Queen of Heaven and Earth, the goddess of love, fertility, and war. Inanna was what the Sumerians called her; their Semitic neighbors, the Akkadians, called her Ishtar. As time went on the Sumerian language ...
LaSiren
LaSiren, also spelled La Sirène, is the Haitian mermaid goddess of the sea. Her mythological pedigree is impressive: enslaved Africans brought with them the memory of a great female water spirit, combined it with existing Taino legends about a sea creature, and added European mermaid imagery. The result was La Sirène, the reigning queen of ...
Eleanor of Aquitaine
Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) was the greatest lady of medieval Europe. In her own right she was Duchess of Aquitaine and Countess of Poitiers, ruling over a large chunk of what is now France. By marriage she was also Queen of France, at least for the 15 years of her union with Louis VII; a high point was when she rode at the head of the ...
Madam Walker
Madam C.J. Walker (1867-1919) was America's first great female entrepreneur. Her rags-to-riches story still mesmerizes: born Sarah Breedlove, the daughter of slaves, she built a business empire by developing and marketing a line of hair care products for African American women. (She did not invent the hot comb or chemical straighteners, as is ...
Fu Hao
Before Mulan, there was Fu Hao (ca. 1200 BCE). This Shang Dynasty queen was a remarkable figure: not only was she King Wu Ding's wife and the mother of his children, but she was also his chief military commander. It seems to us like a strange combination, but Fu Hao was a very successful general, personally leading thousands of troops into ...
Carlota of Mexico
Empress Carlota (1840-1927) is one of the most intriguing and tragic figures in Mexican history. Born Charlotte of Belgium, she married Archduke Maximilian of Austria when she was only seventeen years old. In 1863 the young couple were invited to become Emperor and Empress of Mexico. Unfortunately, the person doing the inviting was Napoleon III ...
Isis
Isis is the Egyptian goddess of magic and motherhood, but putting it that way rather understates the case. Isis is simply one of the all-time great goddesses of world civilization. Worshiped by the Egyptians for thousands of years, she also became supremely important in the Hellenistic world. She was everything: mother, savior, redeemer, ...
Christina of Sweden
If you're unfamiliar with Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689), you might wonder why there are so many pictures of men in our main illustration. It's because Christina liked to dress as a man---not all the time, but often enough that she was famous for it. Unfortunately there are no nice paintings of her in masculine attire, so we're using ...
Empress Theodora
How great was Empress Theodora (500-548)? This great: she outlawed wife-killing, banned sex trafficking and sex slavery, expanded women's property rights, gave mothers the right to raise their own children, and generally endowed women with higher legal status than they'd ever had in the entire history of the Roman Empire. Yay, Theodora! She ...
Maria Makiling
Maria Makiling is the most widely known and beloved diwata (fairy or nymph) of the Philippines. As the guardian spirit of Mount Makiling, she is depicted as a beautiful young woman in radiant white clothing, surrounded by the natural flora and fauna. Her long black hair is adorned with the fragrant white flowers of the pomelo tree. Maria is shy ...
Jezebel
The pop culture image of Jezebel bears almost no resemblance to the woman who was queen of Israel in the 9th century BCE. There is nothing remotely sexy about Jezebel in the Bible; she's just mean. By the same token, the biblical account was written by people who utterly loathed Jezebel and everything she stood for (Baal, Astarte, foreigners, ...
Rosalind Franklin
In May 1952, Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) made a photograph. It wasn't just any photograph: it was an X-ray diffraction image of the DNA molecule. Labeled "Photo 51," it would prove to be the crucial piece of data in unraveling the double helix structure of DNA. Unfortunately, Franklin never got the credit she deserved. Her resentful male ...
Lise Meitner
You would think that the person who discovered nuclear fission would be one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century. You would think she'd be a household name. But unless you're a geek or a history buff, it's possible that you've never even heard of Lise Meitner (1878-1968). Meitner was born in Austria at a time when it was ...
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