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 ...
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, ...
Demeter
Demeter is the Greek goddess of agriculture and the bountiful earth. It is she who makes the crops grow---except for those months when her daughter Persephone is in the Underworld, for then Demeter weeps and leaves the earth bare. Together Demeter and Persephone represent the cycle of life and death, and their saga was the basis of the ...
Susan B. Anthony
Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) devoted her life to the cause of women's suffrage, toiling for over 50 years in the face of incredible opposition (not to mention ridicule). As the de facto "Napoleon" of the 19th century women's movement, she marshaled forces from all over the country into a huge national campaign. Sadly, she did not live to see ...
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 ...
Sojourner Truth
Sojourner Truth (1797-1883) was one of America's greatest heroines. Born into slavery in New York, she became a powerful voice for abolition and women's rights. Her most famous speech---“Ain't I A Woman?”---was delivered at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in 1851. For the next 30 years she remained a key participant in the ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
