Joan of Arc
Joan of Arc (1412-1431) was one of the most brilliant generals in history. She was probably the only brilliant general in history to be burned at the stake for, essentially, refusing to wear women's clothes. And she is definitely the only brilliant general in history whose military genius has been dismissed by generations of scholars as the ...
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 ...
Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is quite possibly the most celebrated female artist in history. The elements of her personal style have become iconic: long skirt, Mexican blouse, rebozo, flowers on her head. (Unibrow and faint moustache, too, but it's up to you whether you want to include that.) For the costume, we decided to use the colors she's ...
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 ...
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 ...
Baba Yaga
Baba Yaga is the legendary witch of Slavic folklore, especially 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 ...
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 ...
Lasiren
Lasiren, also spelled La Sirène, is the Haitian mermaid goddess of the sea. Her mythological pedigree is impressive: African slaves 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 the ...
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 ...
