I turned angrily from their narrow vision and their well-meant path of higher education. It was decades before I saw the learning (as valid when enrolled in the university life as well as in more traditional institutions) would set me free, free to become whatever I set my mind to be.
Over the years, as I made my way as a writer and researcher, many of the sheroes in this book became my personal sheroes, too. The lives and deeds of women like Mary Leakey, Karen Silkwood, Margaret Mead, Rachel Carson, and Eleanor Roosevelt moved me deeply and helped me grow. As a thirtysomething college reporter, for instance, I got to write my first news story about Billie Jean King’s rout of Bobby Riggs—and in so doing, the sheer audacity of Billie Jean’s actions struck home. The Book of Awesome Women brings all of my favorite women, and hundreds more, to luminous life—a brilliant and encyclopedic achievement for one book.
Of late, I’ve been thinking a lot about just how and why the jigsaw of our whole human history came to have so many female pieces missing. Since 1995, the publication date of Uppity Women of Ancient Times, my first book about real-life female achievements of long ago, I have given hundreds of lectures, workshops, and talks to audiences about the frisky, risk-it-all women from our ancient, medieval, and Renaissance past. I point out that many of these trailblazers were famous—or infamous—in their own day. Invariably, someone in the audience asks: “If these women were household words, how and why did they become invisible?”
At this point, I mention a trio of female names and say: “What do these names mean to you?” After having given this pop quiz to several thousand people now (many of them well-read women whose educations far exceed my own), I regret to say that no one has known the answers. No one. Not one person has identified three key women who I selected at random from our own, very recent American history.
This response—or lack of one—leads me to my most telling point. “You see? Even in the late twentieth century, the historical invisibility process often begins immediately—in a woman’s own lifetime.”
The Book of Awesome Women, is a perfect antidote to that process, a bold and colorful portrait of women who dared to pursue their dreams. In that pursuit, they themselves become raw material, the idea matrix for other women’s dreams. They become, in a word, sheroes—a word, and a notion, whose constituency is going to grow ever more clamorous in the brave new second millennium.
—Vicki Leon, author of the Uppity Women in history series, published by Conari Press.
P.S. Take my “invisible women” quiz yourself and see how well you do. Identify the following twentieth century women: Junko Tabei, Sally Louisa Tompkins, and Gerti Cori.
Answers: Junko Tabei—first woman to climb Mount Everest, on May 16, 1975. This housewife led an all-woman Japanese team to the top. Sally Louisa Tompkins—only woman to be named an officer in the Confederate Army, where she ran the hospital she’d already established (at her own expense) with the lowest mortality rate of any soldier’s hospital in the South. Gerti Cori—first female doctor to win a Nobel prize; awarded in physiology and medicine in 1947 and shared with her husband.
Women have always been powerful. So much so, in fact, that several millennia of oppression have only made us stronger. And no amount of witch burnings, stiletto heels, and lack of basic human rights can stop the blossoming forth of the boldest, bravest wave of women and girlpower ever, here at the dawn of the new millennium.
Women have always been heroes. But, it is no longer enough to say so. As we shake off the last traces of a major patriarchal hangover, women need a new language, a new dialect, and a freshly forged paradigm to express an untrammeled femininity that has nothing to do with bondage—unless, of course, that’s your bag. Women of courage, in addition to taking back their power, must have a name of their own. Any wise woman can tell you that words have power. As Rumpelstiltskin knew, the naming of a person or thing is to have ownership and power over the named. He was quaking in his leathery dwarf boots for fear that the princess he had imprisoned (so she could spin straw into gold for his moldering coffers) would figure out his name. Sure enough, our girl psyched it out with good, old-fashioned women’s intuition and his game was up. As sheroes, all women can fully embrace and embody all their fiery fempower and celebrate the unique potency of our gender-tribe. By taking, telling, and proudly touting the title and banner of sheroes, women can identify with the traits of strength, courage, and no-holds-barred individuality, thus sharing and spreading the power around. Taking back power doesn’t necessarily mean that power has to be taken away from someone else; there is enough for all. No need to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Power. Share it; it grows!
Packing estrogen, and, not infrequently, a pen and a sword, awesome women come in every imaginable shape, size, and color, and manifest their sheroism in infinite ways. Our sheroic foremothers of the past centuries paved the way for the cybersheroes and screen goddesses of today at a time when women were relegated to the status of second-class citizens, if they were fortunate enough to be citizens at all. Their accomplishments are stunning in light of the fact that there was, for all practical purposes, a tacit caste system with one gender on top. Battling exclusion and seclusion, these incredible women risked it all to create the freedom we enjoy and uphold today. Women warriors, they didn’t take no for an answer and went to the head of the class without passing go, oftentimes through a gauntlet of disapproval, bad press, and all other odds against them.
The Shero’s Journey
Heroes and their trips have gotten plenty of air time thanks to the erudite scholarship of the late mythographer Joseph Campbell, who popularized the genre. His delineation of the hero’s journey begins with restlessness and hearing the call to action; it moves to the middle road of dragon slaying and an underground passage through hell and back where the hero faces death, to the culmination of the visionary quest in self-awareness and the return home.
The heroic archetype was brought to the world’s attention when George Lucas extrapolated Campbell’s explication of the hero’s journey in the Star Wars trilogy. It is important to bear in mind that not every would-be hero who sets upon the path to greatness succeeds. In fact, the most promising candidates may fall—look at Lancelot, the flower of France and the finest knight in King Arthur’s court, who betrayed his liege lord and lost his honor. Heroism is no guarantee! The question for us to consider here is how a shero’s journey differs, if at all, from the hero’s journey. Having been obsessed with this very question for the better part of a year, I have concluded that it is, indeed, different.
Interestingly, Campbell himself never tackled the subject, but commented that the question always came up after his lectures. (Can’t you just see Sarah Lawrence women giving him the business?) His position was that “if a woman engages in the man’s task of achievement, then her mythology will be essentially the same as that of the male hero.”
Aside from the fact that achievement in and of itself is not the true hallmark of a human’s psychospiritual evolution, women have been achieving great things since women took primitive society from hunting and gathering to agricultural-based communities. For that matter, we might as well go back to the beginning, to Eve, who would’ve burned her bra if she’d had one, and her predecessors among the first femmes, including the first feminist Lilith, whom Yahweh attempted to hook up with the utterly human Adam. Lilith, being semidivine, would have none of this mundane
