4
Lady traveller heroines
In the 19th and early 20th century, amidst the confidence of a declared imperial heroic age when men set out from their homes to explore, claim and conquer territory that was new and foreign to them, a number of women decided that they did not want to miss out on the adventure. A group of western women were labelled lady travellers, a nod to their difference as women, and also to the affluent social status that enabled their movements. Feeling the call of the wild and unknown, they roamed far away from the call of marriage and motherhood duties. They escaped their everyday lives to explore and document what existed outside of their comfortable drawing rooms. The heroines’ adventures were widely reported. The general public in the women’s home countries marvelled at their stories in newspaper articles, travel books and at public lectures. How could women actually survive on their own in the great outdoors, they wondered? What sort of personalities did these heroines possess? Their stories provided excitement and escapism from the everyday. And in a modern way, heroines’ travels tapped into transnational myths and legends of journeying as a rite of passage through which men overcame challenges and found themselves.
To mention a few of an unintentional international club whose members preferred to step out on their own: Austrian Ida Pfeiffer travelled extensively, including to India, Egypt, Norway and Iceland; Belgian Carla Serena explored the Ottoman, Persian and Russian empires. British women Mary Kingsley went to West Africa to find out about the people and landscape of the region; Gertrude Bell was captivated by the Middle East, Arabia and Asia Minor and Isabella Bird by North America and Hawaii. Meanwhile, with naturalist intentions, Margaret Fountain chased butterflies and Marianne North searched for plants. Starting in the east, Lü Bicheng, stepped out on her own in China, working as a newspaper editor and opening and running a women’s school before heading to New York in 1918 to study, work as a correspondent for the Shanghai Times and then undertake extensive travel around the United States and Europe.1
Beyond their individual adventures, it was through their collective actions that these heroines threatened to radically shake up and transgress the prevailing ideology that a woman’s place was in the home. Instead, the world was a place where women could chart their own journeys of heroic daring and excitement. They could display a calling of confidence and courage usually reserved for men. These were modern women, symbolically fighting to be treated as capable equals of men.
The impressive travelling heroines, however, were not considered the equals of or the same as men. Instead, they were most often cast as fascinating exceptions and a sideshow to the norm of heroic male exploration that combined masculinity and adventure in the name of science, commerce and progress. Yet, like male travellers, they possessed a spirit of adventure and the strength to step out into the unknown. It was commented of Isabella Bird that as with Queen Elizabeth I she ‘carried in her bosom a man’s heart, and was never wanting in courage or resolution.’2
In the 21st century, ‘wanderlust’ – a strong desire to travel – is popular and accessible beyond the very rich. Radically changed modes of transportation and the advent of mass tourism have normalised explorations outside of comfort zones, to and from many corners of the world. It is vital to remember that the lady travellers were trailblazers, outrageous in their time for leaving home to see the world. Towards the end of the 20th century, travel could still be considered unconventional for women. Exceptionalism and a search for role models fuelled a continuing demand to learn about travelling heroines’ stories. For example, Taiwanese writer Sanmao’s 1976 publications on her adventures in the Sahara desert met with a wide and international readership.3
So what has motivated intrepid travelling heroines? What called them to explore, document and take considerable risks? Importantly these travellers were not moved by service or self-sacrifice. On the contrary: they were proudly selfish. They were called to travel by themselves, because they wanted to and available funds meant that they could. Their pursuit of happiness was a matter of personal choice and self-actualisation. Dea Birkett has written of lady travellers as ‘essentially gloriously selfish.’ She argues that
it was not for Queen and country that Mary Kingsley sailed to West Africa, it was not for missionary zeal that Marianne North painted the tropics, it was not for a spurned love that Ella Christie climbed to over 10,000 feet in Ladakh.4
Patriotism, patriarchy and God were side-lined in these heroines’ endeavours.
In contrast to the lady travellers, callings for heroines were traditionally and most often selfless and at the service of society. The feminine default position was to be called, often by a heroine’s God, to serve and help others, usually drawing upon women’s maternal and feminine attributes. Unsurprisingly then, the lady travellers most favoured were those cast as ‘Exploring the glory of God’s world.’5 A religious calling distanced them from selfish intentions and instead provided an appropriate justification for women straying far from home. In Japan, for example, female travel was regarded as undesirable and there was a perception that husbands should divorce a wife who travelled excessively. Nevertheless, the fact that women did travel, regardless of the social expectations, indicates the agency of Japanese women. Women might travel for religious pilgrimage, only to be prohibited from certain sacred places. In common with women travellers around the world, Japanese women’s travel accounts reveal how they struggled to place themselves outside of the confined household role.6
Modern nuns and mission women who travelled the world as part of religious orders were secure in their calling from God. As discussed in Chapter 2, their travel was also selfless, centred on service to others, and at the command of priests and husbands. There were rare exceptions, such as single woman Joanna Moore who became the first white woman missionary appointed by the American Baptist Home Mission Society. Moore was from a poor family of 13 children in Pennsylvania. Brought up as a liberal rather than evangelical Protestant, she joined the Baptist Church after attending a revival meeting in 1852. In 1863 she received her commission and headed south into the American Civil War where she worked with mainly Black communities and focused on education and welfare.7
A small number of women around the world had always travelled. The enduring and most appropriate way for women to travel was as part of a family, especially with a husband. From antiquity to the early 20th century, around the world wives and daughters from elite families travelled following male family members as ‘movable properties,’ to quote Elaine Chiao Ling Yang, Catheryn Khoo-Lattimore and Charles Arcodia. Another group of women who travelled with men on journeys were female courtesans whose part was to provide companionship and entertainment. For example, the poem of Ban Zhao, a Chinese historian and writer during the Han dynasty (206 BC–220 AD), produced one of the earliest Chinese women’s travel writings in a poem, Dong Zheng Fu (Travelling Eastward). It was written as she accompanied her son Cao Gu to a position as a magistrate in Chenliu County. It is a personal poem about coping with life changes.8
Even in modern times, women travelling for pleasure or alone remained rare and often considered endangered and inappropriate. To keep them safe from male advances and danger, single women travelling for emigration across the seas were increasingly chaperoned by matrons through the 19th and 20th centuries. As it served to emphasise the tragic hero who had gone missing, searching for missing husbands was an acceptable reason for women to travel. For example, Lady Jane Franklin’s travel to the Arctic saw her the first woman to receive the Patron’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society in 1876. Yet her work was justified because she was the widow of Sir John Franklin.9
Given the strong current that heroines be called by God, it follows that heroines who posed a challenge through their forthright gloriously selfish intentions were recast to lessen their potential to threaten societal order. For example, in the case of the lady travellers, duty and domestication, akin to the intentions of the sisters in habits, were added in to tame their wild stories. One reviewer wrote of lady travellers in 1896 that ‘In no case has their travelling enthusiasm involved the sacrifice of obvious domestic duty’ and that they still possessed ‘the modesty, grace, and the gentleness that must always be regarded as the fitting ornaments of the sex.’10 In what would continue as common practice for 20th-century women’s magazines, in 1900 The Gentlewoman in its ‘Cosy Corner Chat’ wrote that Mary Kingsley may have strayed far from home, but it was contended that her father had made sure that she had accomplished the housewifery skills of ironing and starching before he allowed her to learn German. Furthermore, the suggestion was that she had gone to West Africa to continue her father’s work, diminishing her agency and significance.11
Domesticity was constructed as assisting in heroines’ world travels. Taking their considered gendered strengths and applying them to the world featured more generally in how women were becoming equal through the 19th century. It was common for their activities to be re-packaged and contained, their masculine feats carefully feminised. For example, Gertrude Bell possessed a ‘masculine vigour’ tempered, thankfully, by ‘feminine charms and a most romantic spirit,’ while according to the President of the British Royal Geographical Society, ‘She had all the charm of a woman combined with very many of the qualities that we associated with men.’12 Yet to contain them, the travelling heroines’ physical weaknesses were emphasised. Of Ida Pfeiffer, a journalist wrote ‘There was nothing of the Amazon about her.’ On the contrary, she was feminised as ‘a devoted mother, a warm friend, and a true-Christian.’13 Isabella Bird also had ‘nothing of the Amazon. She is small and fair, with a gentle yet penetrating voice.’14
Ultimately, the feats of lady travellers, however impressive, were considered second rate to those of men. Women pursuing other masculine careers faced similar treatment, with a common response being to work harder and to excel in order to be treated equally. In 1912 it was written in a British newspaper that ‘it cannot be said that any piece of actual exploration of the first importance has yet been accomplished by a woman.’15 In Travels in West Africa, Mary Kingsley wrote that ‘A great woman, either mentally or physically, will excel over an indifferent man, but no woman ever equals a really great man.’16
In 1903 Shan Shili published Guimao Lüxing Ji an account of her travels with her ambassador husband. As in the West, it was proper for elite women in a Confucian society to stay at home while their husbands travelled. Women in public risked being cast as courtesans and concubines. Shan Shili was in favour of women’s travel, education and equality, but all of these were definitely grounded in Confucian virtues. In common with western maternal feminism, women’s experiences would ultimately equip them for domestic roles as wives and mothers.17
Transculturally, it was often a matter of retrieving heroines from their wanderings and re-placing them in their homely feminine, domestic sphere. And if they were feminists, it paid to guard and deny such beliefs. These women were well aware that selflessness was an important trait for heroines, and part of their difference and allure. Their true thoughts often remained hidden behind carefully curated displays of their travels. Lady travellers were to remain fascinating through their novelty. They were not to be role models, but to be contained as unique and exceptional. ‘Ordinary’ women would not find a role model in them. In this sense they were icons and not role models. ‘I don’t recommend you do just what [Mary Kingsley] did,’ wrote a woman journalist in 1897 and ‘in fact, you couldn’t, and there’s an end of it.’18
Furthermore, the single women heroines leading unconventional lives risked being considered pitiable and unfulfilled. They had caught the boat to travel, but had missed the boat to women’s married fulfilment. Despite their massive adventures, these heroines were commonly cast as ultimately sad, tragic and weak. Margaret Fountaine was described by Norman Riley (a staff member at the British Museum) as a ‘tall, attractive, rather frail-looking, diffident, but determined middle-aged woman. The strongest impression she gave me was of great sadness.’19 Overall, trailblazing won out, both symbolically in being part of a movement of women into previously male careers, and in the dramatic late 20th-century growth of modern women journeying and backpacking off the beaten track.
Religious callings
In contrast to the gloriously selfish lady travellers of modern times, the majority of heroines in history have been called to action by their God. Religious callings, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Taoist or of any faith persuasion, have dominated the motivations of heroines. Of enduring importance across religions are heroic mother figures. A prominent example is the Virgin Mary. Mary received her call from Archangel Gabriel, who appeared and told her that she would conceive and become the mother of Jesus, the son of God. In the Annunciation Mary was called to and she responded with dutiful agreement. This set the tone for centuries of Christian spiritual heroines receiving their calling and obeying their God’s orders.
Religious callings, then, were central to heroines’ motivations across time and cultures prior to, and into modern times. Heroic spiritual mother figures received their callings and assumed their work. Generations of nuns, for example, were called to the convent and a life of service to their God. Along with their calling, nuns could be motivated to enter convents for the quality of life that it offered. In modern Europe, daughters of the high clergy and leisured classes were attracted by the promise of what Martha Vicinus has termed an ‘independent life.’20 Some convents operated a hierarchical system where servants were provided for the higher class. For the lower classes a convent lifestyle was a way to avoid domestic service, factory work or domestic marital chores.
Travelling the world as part of religious orders, called by God, was a way for women to step out with their selflessness and duty paramount. For example, Suzanne Aubert decided to become a nun in France, and was then able to travel to New Zealand in 1860, producing medicines and translating the Māori language and in 1892 forming the religious order of the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion. Australian-born Mary MacKillop’s order the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, founded in 1866, advanced the quality of all members, and focused on education and welfare. Members of both orders dedicated their adult years to the gendered feminine nun’s work of selfless nurturing and caring.21 Women were drawn to the orders as the work was similar to women’s true domestic, mothering and caregiving role at the time. In addition, young women were attracted to these orders because they might enjoy a career as a teacher or nurse. Later on in 1923 in New Zealand Kathleen Niccol entered a Sisters of Mercy convent, becoming Sister Mary Leo. Underpinning her famous music teaching achievements was a calling that involved sacrifice and selflessness. Like others, her calling to a religious life in the habit involved vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, a cutting off from family ties and the modern world and following a life of strict regimes.22 Unlike some other historical nuns, it was Niccol’s own calling and choice to enter the convent.
Globally, over the past 200 years the number of women joining convents has declined as educational opportunities for women in society have expanded.23 In addition, increasing secularisation, especially across Europe and the west during the second half of the 20th century, also led to lower numbers.24 Yet for some, a religious calling has remained as important as ever. As Mother Teresa of Calcutta commented ‘By blood I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world. As to my heart, I belong entirely to the Heart of Jesus.’25
Most women’s religious callings through history are silent, but a few exceptional heroines shed light on the underlying motivations. Born in 1839 in Charleston, South Carolina, Charlotte Levy was a Presbyterian until at the age of 14 she had spiritual visions and converted to the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). Charlotte’s calling led her to become a Black woman minister in the South, well before women were allowed to preach in most parts of the world. In 1894 and 1895 Julia A Forte and Mary J Small became the first two Black women officially ordained as deacons in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. Forte was 71 and had been quietly preaching for 50 years. Small was in her mid-40s and in 1898 she became the first woman, Black or White, to be ordained an elder. Both women ‘felt compelled by the Divine to serve others.’26
Normalising adventure: sea heroines
Especially where helping others was the central calling, lives of adventure did become more acceptable for women through the 19th and on into the 20th century. The stories of modern sea heroines capture this development. Around the world, tales of intriguing sea rescues enjoyed the popularity, fascination and intrigue along the lines of the lady travellers. Sea heroines were called to assist by people in distress. A first group came to the rescue by the default of there not being the manpower to assist. Most famously, there was Grace Darling off the coast of Northumbria in the North of England, who helped her father to rescue nine survivors of the modern steamship Forfarshire in 1838. Darling had six older brothers and sisters and one younger brother, but they were all away from the family lighthouse at the time of the rescue. One act made her widely celebrated as a heroine. According to stories that spread and made her legendary, she heard survivors from the wrecked ship calling out from a rock. Her father’s part in the rescue faded into the background, with Grace’s novelty as a young woman taking centre stage. A working-class heroine standing for family economy tradition at a time of industrialisation, she also became a role model in the Victorian age and beyond. Hugh Cunningham reconciles the feminine and masculine aspects of the Darling legend: ‘Grace Darling showed that women, particularly English or British women, had physical courage equal to any man’s, but in her behaviour that such courage was entirely consistent with a traditional womanly modesty and devotion to home and family.’27
Most commonly paired with Darling was Ida Lewis, born in 1842, the year Darling died. When her father became ill, Lewis and her mother took over running the lighthouse at Lime Rock, Newport, Rhode Island, New York.28 Over many years Ida was responsible for 18 rescues. There were many other women in reserve around America’s lighthouses. Those who came to attention for their heroism included Abbie Burgess of the Matinicus Rock Light in Maine, who aged 17 in 1856 was in charge of the light during a gale. There was Kate Moore of Black Rock Light, Connecticut, who started assisting with the lights at the age of 12 and remained at her post until 1878 when she was 84 years old. She is estimated to have saved at least 21 lives. In May 1890 14-year-old Maebelle Mason, the daughter of the keeper of Mamajuda Lighthouse in the Detroit River, rowed out into a strong current to save a drowning man.
Rather than living in lighthouses, a second group of sea heroines took part in random heroic acts expected to be men’s work, quite by chance. Off the northern coast of New Zealand’s South Island Huria Matenga saw and heard survivors on the Delaware, a 241-tonne brigantine, when it was driven onto the rocks of Whakapuaka Bay in 1863. Together with three men she assisted in rescuing 10 of the 11 people on board. Yet, as with other sea heroines and lady travellers, it was Huria’s exception as a woman doing considered men’s activities that made her shine more than the men, and she became the centre of the rescue.29
As with so many sea heroines, Huria’s story was told in relation to that of Grace Darling. She was attached to a British reference point as ‘the Grace Darling of New Zealand.’ The Star on her death in 1909 said that ‘Had Julia’s heroic work been done in Great Britain she would probably have figured as high in the world’s history as Grace Darling herself.’30 Unlike working-class Grace Darling, Huria was well-born with prominent Māori tribal affiliations. She was constructed in the colonial press as a ‘friendly Māori’ won over to peace, Christianity and British notions of citizenship. The reality was a strong and capable woman respected among her family for her dedication to Māori values, family and culture at a time when these were being eroded by a government policy of assimilation. The money from Governor George Grey’s Native Trust Fund and the watches awarded to Huria and the four men after the rescue hinted at the hopes for cultural coexistence. Huria was accorded a central place in the rescue; she received a gold pocket watch for her efforts, while the four men were awarded silver pocket watches.31
Another sea heroine thrust into fame by circumstance was Grace Bussell of western Australia. In 1876 16-year-old Bussell rode horseback to assist Aboriginal stockman Sam Isaacs, who had spotted a floundering steamship. Together they assisted between 40 and 50 people from the SS Georgette. There was already a line attached to the shore, and Grace rode out into the surf assisting passengers. In common with her counterparts around the world, Grace became central in the rescue, with Isaacs her helper. She received awards and medals. And she was considered in the mould of her namesake Grace Darling.32
Vocations and professions
In modern times there was growing momentum for women to have a vocation outside of the home and unpaid domesticity. Such change happened in the context of increasing spiritual significance being given to occupations. In general, vocations and professions were considered the secular means by which people came to play out their spiritual callings. The word ‘vocation’ comes from ‘vocare’, which means ‘to call,’ whereas ‘occupatio’ is a means of passing one’s time. As for a profession, ‘professio’ was a sacred oath taken in response to a call to ministry.33 This context helps to understand heroines’ callings. The relationship between being externally called, seeking personal meaning and advancing societal change through vocation were all present and evolving. For example, teaching and nursing developed as professions for women in the 19th century as vocational callings, and often with religious undercurrents and missionary intentions. In the United States many of the first wave feminists, including Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Susan B Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt were school teachers, a vocation that was advertised as a missionary activity.34 Because women were largely financially dependent upon men, what motivated heroines towards their work involved intrinsic worth and service to others as well as earning a living.
The founder and heroine of the modern nursing profession had a religious calling. Florence Nightingale kept many diaries and wrote many letters.35 On 7 February 1837, just before she turned 17, she wrote in one of her diaries ‘God spoke and called me to his service.’36 That service was to be nursing the sick and needy. Nightingale was very clear about her calling being a vocation. As a woman she sought liberation from a dull life. She expressed her yearning in her semi-fictitious novella, Cassandra. In it, she talks about women becoming conscious in their lives, through experiencing an awaking. She writes ‘Awake all ye that sleep awake’ … ‘This time has come when women must do something more than tend the domestic hearth.’37 This rallying cry was against what she perceived as the forced idleness of upper class Victorian women. She rejected the belief that women had to live for others, were inferior to men and had to serve them.38
In the mid-19th century it was a radical concept for an elite young woman to have a vocation and Nightingale’s family was unsurprisingly opposed to her plans. Realising, however, that his daughter was serious, determined and likely unstoppable, her father gave Florence a substantial annual income of 500 pounds a year so that she could pursue her dreams. With no nurses’ training available in Britain, Nightingale went straight to work in a London ladies’ hospital. Seeking to follow through on her calling, from 1849–50 she went to Kaiserworth in Germany where there was a system of training for nurses. In Europe nursing as a fledgling profession grew out of women’s religious orders and Kaiserworth was the home of Protestant deaconesses.39 The potency of nursing as a profession was that it combined a centuries-long tradition of women’s religious calling as nuns with modern women like Nightingale’s motivation to form a vocational service. And in the modern development of nursing, despite the new professionalism, it was appealingly and firmly located in women’s ideological sphere of care, nurture and domesticity, and couched in selfless terms. Service and helping others were central and outwardly selfless.
It was the Crimean War (1853–6) that catapulted Nightingale to heroic status. Representations often favour her as the heroic lady with a lamp, hair neat, wearing a clean and crisp white apron, moving from bed to bed in the Crimean peninsula nursing men. Nightingale was 33 years old and working at the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London when war broke out. Nightingale experienced a calling to assist in the Crimea. Although as a woman she was unable to become a doctor or join the military, she felt compelled to intervene and clean up the makeshift and disease-ridden hospitals, as well as to introduce a nursing service at the war front. Connections at the War Office to Sidney Herbert meant that she was able to get to the Crimea and go about her work.40 Then after the war she was able to establish a modern system of training for nurses. Nightingale was inclusive in her vision and insisted that all women could become nurses regardless of faith and economic circumstances.41 Nursing was on a course to becoming a respectable profession for women.
The angelic images of Nightingale, however, were far from reality and she herself was subjected to sanitisation. Powerful, focused and driven, her calling involved medical and sanitary reform, of which nursing was a part. Such reforms were usually done by men in public space, with Queen Victoria commenting to her that it was a pity that Nightingale was not a man because she would be in the War Office.42 Nightingale was a keen statistician, but being a woman she was unable to become one at the time, and her scholarly papers were read out for her at conferences. Despite the restrictions, Nightingale managed to conduct her work, with the image of being the lady with the lamp continuing to fuel the mythology surrounding her. In reality, she was a keen medical reformer and an enabler of women’s independent lives and careers.
A generation later, heroine of World War One Edith Cavell did not receive her calling to be a nurse until she was 30 years old. Cavell had lived in Brussels after her schooling, working as a governess through connections between Belgium and her former school mistress. The mistress appreciated Cavell’s talent for the French language. It was when she returned to England to care for her sick father that Cavell was called to nursing. She was also likely inspired by her appropriately named sister Florence, who was a nurse. While caring for others was central to her career aspirations, Cavell was mature and knew her own mind when she entered nursing. Like Nightingale, her calling involved dedication to quality care and medical advances, particularly in the area of obstetrics.43
As a devout Anglican, Cavell had a strong sense of duty and service. When she was asked to assist Allied soldiers escaping from German-occupied Belgium during World War I her religious and professional duties combined to answer the call and Cavell became an important part of a resistance network. Her last famous words ‘I know now that patriotism is not enough. It is not enough to love ones own people: one must love all men and hate none’ sum up her calm, dutiful and religious calling.44
Reaching high: sky heroines
A little later on in the 20th century a new group of heroines emerged. This time, the calling for these women was mediated through the new technology of aeroplanes. These aviatrices continued the spirit of adventure of the lady travellers and sea heroines. And likewise, they were mostly not religiously motivated. Instead, seeking excitement and adventure became central, as did a new focus on competition: both between women and against men. Heroines such as Li Xiaqing from China, Amy Johnson from England, Gaby Angelini from Italy and Elly Beinhorn from Germany were compelled to journey into the sky.
Aviatrices shared the ability to pinpoint the moment when they received a calling to fly. It was attending a 1928 lecture by aviator Hermann Köhl, who had completed the first Trans-Atlantic flight from east to west, that Beinhorn received her calling. Beinhorn was born in Hannover, Germany in 1907, the only child of a merchant family. After hearing Köhl’s lecture she enthusiastically began training as a pilot, going on to fly across many continents in record times. Beinhorn also met her idol, American pilot Amelia Earhart, arguably the most famous and legendary of aviatrices.45 Li Xiaqing was listening to her great grandmother’s fairy tales of female spirit apsaras ‘flying magically through the air to avenge the oppressed’ when she decided to ‘become a winged avenger and take to the skies, punishing tyrants and caring for the weak and vulnerable.’46 Along with fellow Chinese aviatrices such as Jessie Hanying Zheng, along with the thrill of flying, her calling involved saving the Chinese nation from Japanese invaders, specifically through raising funds in North America.47
When Amelia Earhart was a young woman living in California Frank Hawks took her for an aeroplane ride and she had an epiphany that flying was her calling. It was a potent, gloriously selfish calling involving a massive attraction towards flying. Earhart knew that she wanted to learn to fly and to compete and set records in the sky.48 Earhart’s calling always involved underlying feminist intentions and she sought out Neta Snook, a female flying instructor.49 Her mother Amy was a feminist who followed the ideas of Amelia Bloomer and encouraged Earhart and her sister Muriel to wear divided skirts. Such dress encouraged the girls to be adventurous and to become active in outdoor male pursuits. In a 1928 magazine article Earhart was quoted as saying that as a girl she ‘knew there was more fun and excitement in life than I would have time to enjoy.’50 It was in her personality to live life to the full. Prior to her calling to the skies, Earhart hoped to become a doctor and after working during World War One in a military hospital in Toronto she enrolled at Columbia University New York but left a medical pursuit to re-join her parents in California.51 In 1922 an LA newspaper ran a story with a two-column picture of her in a leather coat with goggles headed ‘air student aviatrix to drop in for study.’52 Visiting women’s educational institutions as a role model went along with her support of advancing women’s status in society.
Jean Batten outlined her calling to aviation in her book Alone in the Sky. Batten emphasised her love of geography, travel and the natural environment that she believed stemmed from growing up in the New Zealand tourist spa geothermal area of Rotorua.53 At boarding school her favourite subject was geography.54 Like Beinhorn and Earhart, Batten was inspired by male pilots. She recalled being born six weeks after Blériot’s flight across the English Channel. It was Charles Kingsford Smith, responsible for the first trans-Tasman flight between Australia and New Zealand, who inspired Batten to become a pilot. Somehow, in a display of the determination that was part of her personality, Jean managed to meet Kingsford Smith in 1929. Furthermore, he offered to take her on a flight, and she found her calling.55 Unsurprisingly, Batten’s father thought that flying was dangerous and expensive. Jean, however, was not to be deterred, and also enjoyed the considerable support of her mother. While there were several flying clubs in New Zealand in 1930, the family piano, symbol of feminine domestic accomplishment was sold, and Jean and her mother headed to England. In London, she joined the London Aeroplane Club and commenced her training.56 She was on a mission and went on to become incredibly successful as an aviatrix through the 1930s. Batten considered herself to be an incredibly determined person. As Batten described herself ‘Once my mind was set on anything it was quite useless to attempt to swerve me from my purpose or dampen my enthusiasm in any way.’57 Her list of achievements shows her to be very successful and she won races and set many records; not without the considerable risk, hazards and crashes that accompanied all aviatrices at the time.
Technology calling
Marie Curie epitomised technological heroines whose callings were careers in science. Curie was a lapsed Catholic who became agnostic and devoted to science. She was an unrelenting and dedicated champion of science. With husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, Curie received the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of radioactivity in 1903. Marie was the first woman to get a Nobel Prize in Physics. As humble and alternative people, the Curies were overwhelmed when they received the Nobel Prize. At this point they could have taken out patents and become very wealthy. They could have left France and had their pick of laboratories in other countries of the world. But they refused all lucrative offers and claimed no royalties and instead continued to dedicate themselves to their lifetime scientific calling. They chose to remain in France and gave free advice to all those who wanted it.58 It was this behaviour that led Albert Einstein to declare that ‘Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted.’59
Curie was called to develop science’s capacity for the greater good. She worked for healing, well-being and towards a cure for cancer. During World War I she pioneered X-rays. She worked for safety standards for workers handling radioactive substances. As vice president of the International Commission for Intellectual Cooperation she worked to increase the number of international postgraduate scholarships.60 The legacy of her calling to science continues through initiatives she started like the Marie Curie Institute for Medical Treatment and Advances.
Radical callings
Callings for radical political heroines were found in their activism. Harriet Tubman, known as ‘the Moses of her people,’ was the most famous ‘conductor’ of the early to mid-19th century American ‘Underground Railroad,’ a network that assisted African American slaves to escape to free states and Canada. Tubman was called to deliver her people out of slavery.61 Working outside of mainstream institutions and establishments these women actively sought to implement their alternative beliefs through changing society. As reformers, they were often reacting to what they had witnessed and experienced. For example, born to middle-class Jewish parents in Zamosc, Poland, Rosa Luxemburg was captivated by Polish socialism as a child. She was called to address inequity in society and at the age of 16 joined Poland’s illegal revolutionary party. Two years later she fled to Zurich and university study led her to a passion for economics.62 She discovered and immersed herself in the works of Karl Marx and went on to become a major contributor to Marxism. Luxemburg was called to seek revolution for oppressed peoples. Published in 1913, her greatest work The Accumulation of Capital extended Marxist models into the developing world. Luxemburg was an international socialist who was unafraid to criticise her own. She wrote articles, addressed meetings and urged workers to strike for better conditions and to topple the established order.63
Ideology and speaking out was also important to Frida Kahlo. She was a supporter of Marxism and pacifism, and counted among her friends the exiled Russian communist Leon Trotsky, who was assassinated in 1940. Frida’s calling, however, was deeply embodied and personal. She was called to paint her pain after polio illness and a road accident as a child that left her with ongoing health difficulties.64 Her art called out as therapy and a way of coping. She has become a heroine as much for painting out of her ordeal as for her political beliefs. Significantly, at a time when women were not taken seriously as painters, and were not expected to be political, she demonstrated that the personal was political – an adamant activist that politics should incorporate women’s lives and emotions.
Sometimes, radical heroines were called to perform one famous act of rebellion. This was the case with Rosa Parks, an anti-racism activist in the USA who refused to give up her seat in a ‘coloured section’ to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery Alabama in December 1955. Her actions led to a year-long boycott by Black Americans of the bus system and Parks became an icon for the Civil Rights Movement. The beliefs that made up her calling as an activist drove her action. She was an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP).65 Parks was not alone in her efforts. Preceding Parks by nine months the less famous Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger.66 Along with her beliefs, it was the timing of Parks’ action, as well as her representation as a respectable non-political female citizen, that combined to create her iconic status.
Rigoberta Menchú is a radical heroine called to seek justice in the late 20th century and on into the 21st. Like Rosa Luxemburg, her childhood experiences called her to action. As an indigenous person in Guatemala her family was part of the workforce on coffee plantations and were subject to terrible working conditions, including child labour, exposure to pesticides and having only sheds for sleeping quarters. Those who spoke out were punished and Menchú witnessed the torture and death of her 16-year-old brother. Her father was burned in a protest and her mother was kidnapped, raped and left to die. She fled to Mexico where she wrote a book about her experiences, and called for education and social justice. In 1992 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.67
Another heroine called to improve worker relations was Mary Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones. Named ‘Mother’ by the workers whose rights she fought for, she was an unconventional labour leader, trade unionist and organiser of the United Mine Workers and Western Federation of Mine Workers. Mother Jones believed that a woman’s place was in the home, but she had lost her home and her family in tragic circumstances and so took on a surrogate family of mine workers. Born in Ireland, Mother Jones had moved to North America, married and had four children before her husband and children all died in an 1867 Tennessee yellow fever epidemic. She moved to Chicago and worked as a seamstress, but it was in 1871, after she lost everything she owned in a fire, that she became a dedicated unionist. When referred to as an humanitarian, she said ‘Get it right. I’m not a humanitarian. I’m a hell-raiser.’68 Setting up unions was risky, and she needed to be staunch. Mother Jones was sent to prison in 1908 after a company guard was killed in revenge in West Virginia where workers were attempting to set up a union. She was released after public protest argued her trial was unfair. In 1913 when she was 83 she was sent to prison in Colorado for saying that workers should have the right to unionise. She sought decent lives for all, and workers especially. Jones was called to her work by experiencing such adverse circumstances and loss herself. When she died at the age of 93 in 1930 she was buried alongside miners, ‘her boys,’ and over 20,000 admirers attended her funeral.69
FIGURE 4.1 Rosa Parks sitting on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, 1956.
Credit: Alamy stock photo Image ID DYF4AD: https://www.alamy.com/rosa-parks-sitting-on-a-bus-in-montgomery-alabama-1956-image68559525.html
For a series of feminist heroines, improving women’s status in society was their shared and enduring central calling. We know about some of these women through their writings and activism. They became conscious of what they wanted to improve for women and then wrote books that outlined their calls. Among the most famous was Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication on the Rights of Women. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B Anthony, Abigail Scott Duniway and the Pankhursts were all reformers with a shared feminist calling. All lived and experienced inequality and sought a fairer world. Feminist intentions as a calling remained strong for a new second wave of feminist heroines in the mid-20th century. They included Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem and the women discussed in detail in Chapter 7.
FIGURE 4.2 Malala Yousafzai in Mexico City, August 2017.
Credit: Alamy stock photo Image ID K36M68: https://www.alamy.com/mexico-city-mexico-31st-aug-2017-pakistani-activist-and-nobel-peace-image156884848.html
In the early 21st century Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan emerged as a heroine of girls’ rights, especially in education. On 9 October 2012 she was singled out and shot at point-blank range on her way home in a school bus because of her beliefs and writing on girls’ decreasing educational opportunities. Malala is Muslim, but as the Taliban gained influence in her region, extreme Purdah was demanded of girls and women. Malala was inspired by her father, a school principal who wanted girls to be able to access education and basic human rights, rather than being confined to the home and with only restricted access to the world. From January 2009 Malala began writing an anonymous diary for the BBC Urdu website about life under the Taliban.70 Malala was called to her work and took the name Gul Makai, meaning cornflower and also the name of a heroine in a Pashtun folk story. That October a New York Times documentary called Class Dismissed featured Malala and her father. Even after her identity was revealed she continued to speak out and was interviewed on television about the closure of girls’ schools.71 In continuity with traditional heroines, Malala’s calling was from God. She believes in moderate and inclusive religion and holds interfaith hopes. At the age of 17 her peaceful protest for girls’ rights saw her become the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, its youngest ever recipient.72
Calls to arms
Significantly, activism for these modern heroines was largely peaceful, and even the raucous Mother Jones, who was caught up in violent union actions was considered unthreatening in appearance. Calls to arms from heroines through history do exist. Legendary in British history and reappearing in modern times is the call to arms of warrior heroine Boadicea. As discussed in Chapter 3, it was outrage and avenging the rape of her daughters and the plunder of her kingdom that called Boadicea to arms. Also continuing to resonate through modern times with many mentioning her as an inspiration, such as French nuns at the turn of the 20th century, was warrior heroine, Joan of Arc. Joan was called to action by voices that she heard from the age of 13. She later identified the voices as those of Saint Margaret, Saint Katherine and Saint Michael the Archangel.73 At the time of her trial it became vital to determine if those voices were divinely inspired or heretical. Much rested on discrediting the voices so that she was not divinely inspired.74
While Joan of Arc was a peasant, callings for heroines in positions of power due to heredity status were likewise centrally concerned with duty and destiny. In Britain, Elizabeth I’s 1559 and Elizabeth II’s 1953 coronation oaths may be separated by nearly 400 years, but their shared calling was to rule and serve their people by default of there being no suitable male heir to be king. Regal heroines were subject to strictly prescribed callings, but there was opportunity to be creative within their roles. For example, in 12th century Europe Eleanor of Aquitaine used her wealth to become a patron of the Arts, introducing troubadours into her court and advancing notions of courtly love. Her calling became to support and encourage the arts as well as perform duties as a Queen and mother.
In a text intended for her gravestone (that was not followed), Catherine the Great of Russia suggests that she was called to do good works and perform service rather than being idle. Her text referenced her unfulfilled marriage to Louis, commenting that ‘Eighteen years of boredom and solitude caused her to read many books. When she ascended the throne of Russia, she wished to do good and tried to bring happiness, freedom and prosperity to her subjects.’75
Called home to service
Regal heroines could be called back to their people to set about the life course that would lead to their heroic status. For example, in New Zealand, Princess Te Puea Hērangi was a well-born Māori woman. Her mother was the daughter of Tāwhiao Te Wherowhero, the second indigenous Māori king.76 Between 1895 and 1898 she was sent away to receive an education. These were youthful exuberant years for Te Puea and she was effectively cut off from her people. It was her uncle Mahuta, who had picked her out during childhood and who was passing on his knowledge to her, who called her back to her people in the village of Mangatāwhiri. So she returned to the place where she had spent some of her childhood and embarked on a leadership trajectory where health, welfare and family values would become her life’s work. During World War I Te Puea was guided by Tāwhiao her ancestor and Māori prophet of the Māori King movement. In 1881 when he made peace with the Crown, Tāwhiao had turned to pacifism and had forbidden the people of the Waikato from taking up arms again. His beliefs and sayings were with Te Puea as she spoke up against Māori men serving in World War I and led the opposition to the New Zealand Government’s conscription policy. Te Puea did not want Māori fighting for a government that had invaded and occupied their territory and then had confiscated their land. When Māori from her region were conscripted in 1918, Te Puea gathered them together at her pā. The men were arrested and held in a training camp and refused conscientious objector status. Te Puea travelled to the camp and sat outside, calling to them, and providing strength and encouragement.77
Another heroine called back by her people is Aung San Suu Kyi, daughter of former Burmese independence leader Aung San who was assassinated in 1947. Suu Kyi did not intend to be a political heroine and had lived in England for nearly 20 years, married and with two sons, when she was called back to Myanmar. At 50 years of age, she returned in 1988 to nurse her mother. It happened to be when General Ne Win, who had been in power for 26 years, resigned and promised elections. When the National League for Democracy was formed Suu Kyi was asked to take on the mantle of her father. Her people called to her, and she had a strong sense of dynastic duty, although she paid a huge price subsequently being under house arrest for many years. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.78
Unlike heredity rulers, modern democratically elected politicians are usually considered to have chosen their career. On the contrary, the first elected women world leaders displayed continuity with the past through the importance of family dynasties. Aung San Suu Kyi and a cluster of elected women world leaders were called to their work after the assassination of a politically active husband or father. This was the case for Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka. Her husband was Prime Minister S W R D Bandaranaike and it was after his assassination that Sirimavo became the first elected woman prime minister in the world. In the Philippines, Corazon Aquino had a politician husband, congressman father and two senator grandfathers. According to Antonia Fraser, as the grieving widow of an assassinated opposition Filipino leader, ‘her symbolic presence heading a political party, at the time when her remarkable personal qualities were largely unknown, provided the spark to sweep away President Marcos in 1986.’79 Both Violeta Chamorro, who became president of Nicaragua in 1990, and Khaleda Zia, who became prime minister of Bangladesh in 1991 had husbands who were assassinated. Chamorro’s husband was a politician at the time of his assassination and Zia’s husband was prime minister when he was shot in 1981.80
Assassination of a father is in the histories of Indira Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto. Benazir Bhutto was the daughter of Zulfikar Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan until his arrest in 1977 and execution in 1979 by General Zia. Bhutto saw her calling as to take on her father’s mantle and lead Pakistan from the grasp of dictatorship to the freedom of democracy. There was also a religious aspect to her calling. Of her brother Shah’s death in 1985 she wrote ‘Another Bhutto dead for his political beliefs. Another activist silenced. We go on, of course. Grief will not drive us from the political field or from our pursuit of democracy. We believe in God and leave justice to Him.’81 Bhutto became Prime Minister of Pakistan in November 1988 at the age of 35 and, in doing so, the first woman to lead a Muslim nation in modern times.
Indira Gandhi was the daughter of Nehru, first prime minister of India, and was herself prime minister of India from 1966–77 and from 1980–4. From a Kashmiri Brahmin family Indira Gandhi was in a sense ‘born to rule.’ As the only child of Nehru there were no males to head the family. Indira Gandhi became president of the Congress Party in 1959, but resigned after less than a year in favour of her maternal duties. She became prime minister of India when Lal Bahadour Shastri died suddenly in office. The chants ‘long live Indira and long live Nehru’ captured the importance of family dynasty. Furthermore, Indira Gandhi evoked ‘the mother’ image that is deeply embedded in Hindu consciousness.82 A large proportion of the first women world leaders have come to power perceived as delivering their states out of hard times, or shortly after independence, with the considerable power of a mother figure to ‘give birth’ to a nation. When combined with the importance of family dynasty, such an argument offers an explanation for the concentration of the first women world leaders in South Asia. Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are all countries that have experienced the oft-times turbulent process of devolution from British rule.
Transforming business
It might be assumed that the calling for women in business was financial profit. Anita Roddick, founder of skin and health care company The Body Shop was called to ethical business and became a heroine of moral leadership. For Roddick, business should be about responsibility and the public good, and not private greed. Her new model for business involved ethical responsibility and accountability without sacrificing good business sense and profit margins. She sought to harness business to fair trade, environmentalism and human rights and to make beauty empowering. Roddick reflected that she wanted to ‘nurture a revolution in kindness’ for the business world. Roddick grew up steeped in her family’s café business. After training as a history teacher, and married with young children, she was drawn to the idea of nine to five hours that a shop afforded. She researched the skincare industry and settled on non-elitist and earthy body products that rode a new age wave and focused on refilling, recycling and rejecting animal testing. Roddick nudged business in a new direction and changed it from within rather than radically altering or dismantling it. For example, Roddick stated in 2000 that
We’ve got a strict dress code – no nose studs, no tattoos, no sweat-stained T-shirts, no bad breath and absolutely no smoking. I just don’t want the shops diminished by staff who look as if they have dressed for a night out on the town.83
Ultimately, it was about playing the business game and in 2007 L’Oréal bought The Body Shop: what was once an alternative business was bought by a large mainstream beauty company. Roddick proved that there was profit to be made in ethical ideals and along the way helped women to be taken seriously in business.
Conclusion
Callings are a necessary occurrence for all heroines in history. Analysing them, and how they change over time cuts to the heart of what it means to be a heroine. Even for elite women it is the selfless callings that dominate through history and remain important in modern times. Over the past two centuries personal outwardly selfish and vocational callings have emerged as incredibly important and connected to women’s advancing status in society. For heroines who pursued new careers, retaining some femininity and a dedication to serving others while being true to oneself was often at the centre of breaking out of the private sphere of the home. But the gloriously selfish lady travellers beat a different drum, mimicking masculine behaviour and being personally motivated. Yet while it appeared to be all about their individual adventures, through their actions they became role models for women becoming agents of their own lives, stepping out around the world.
Notes
1 Grace S Fong, ‘Alternative Modernities, or a Classical Woman of Modern China: The Challenging Trajectory of Lü Bicheng’s (1883–1943) Life and Song Lyrics’ in Grace S Fong, Nanxiu Qian and Harriet T Zurndorfer (eds), Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Gender, Genre and Cosmopolitanism in Late Qing China (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2004), 12–59.
2 Adams, Celebrated Women Travellers, 433, in Dea Birkett, Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989), 192.
3 Sanmao, Stories of the Sahara (London: Bloomsbury, 1976/2020).
4 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 186.
5 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 199.
6 Keiko Shiba, trasnl Motoko Ezaki, Literary Creations on the Road: Women’s Travel Diaries in Early Modern Japan (Lanham: University Press of America, 2012).
7 Anthea D Butler, ‘“Only a Woman Would Do”: Bible Reading and African American Women’s Organizing Work’ in R. Marie Griffith and Barbara Dianne Savage (eds), Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, Performance (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 155–78, 58–68.
8 Elaine Chiao Ling Yang, Catheryn Khoo-Lattimore and Charles Arcodia, ‘A Narrative Review of Asian Female Travellers: Looking into the future through the past,’ Current Issues in Tourism, June (2016), 1008–27.
9 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 188.
10 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 187.
11 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 187.
12 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 193.
13 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 190.
14 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 190.
15 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 194.
16 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 201.
17 Ellen Widmer, ‘Foreign Travel Through a Woman’s Eyes: Shan Shili’s Guimao Lüxing Ji in Local and Global Perspective,’ The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 64, No. 4 (2006), 763–91.
18 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 186.
19 Birkett, Spinsters Abroad, 191.
20 Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (London: Virago, 1985).
21 See Katie Pickles, ‘Colonial Sainthood in Australasia,’ National Identities, Vol. 7, No. 4 (2005), 389–408.
22 Margaret Lovell-Smith, The Enigma of Sister Mary Leo: The Story Behind New Zealand’s Most Famous Singing Teacher (Auckland: Reed, 1998), 44.
23 Helen Rose Ebaugh, ‘Research Note: The Growth and Decline of Catholic Religious Orders of Women Worldwide: The Impact of Women’s Opportunity Structures,’ Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 31, No. 1, March 1993, 68–75.
24 Sonja Bezjak, ‘Catholic Women Religious Vocations in the Twentieth Century: The Slovenian Case,’ Rev Relig Res (2012), 54, 157–74.
25 http://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20031019_madre-teresa_en.html (Date last accessed 4 June 2019).
26 Melbourne S Cummings and Judi Moore Latta, ‘When They Honor the Voice: Centering African American Women’s Call Stories,’ Journal of Black Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4, March 2010, 666–82, 667.
27 Hugh Cunningham, Grace Darling: Victorian Heroine (London and New York: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), 105.
28 Margaret C Adler, ‘To the Rescue: Picturing Ida Lewis,’ Winterthur Portfolio 48, No. 1 (2014): 75–104, 82.
29 See Katie Pickles and Angela Wanhalla, ‘Embodying the Colonial Encounter: Explaining New Zealand’s “Grace Darling” Huria Matenga,’ Gender and History, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2010), 361–81.
30 The Star, 26 April 1909, 1.
31 Pickles and Wanhalla, ‘Embodying the Colonial Encounter,’ 361.
32 https://web.archive.org/web/20080718183224/http://www.susangeason.com/nonfiction.html#a (Date last accessed 22 June 2021).
33 Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1985), Bryan J Dik and Ryan D Duffy, ‘Calling and Vocation at Work,’ The Counselling Psychologist, Vol. 37, No. 3 (2009), 424–50, 426–8.
34 Keith E Melder, ‘Woman’s High Calling: The Teaching Profession in America, 1830–1860,’ American Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2 (1972), 19–32.
35 For example, Lynn McDonald’s Collected Works of Florence Nightingale is 16 volumes long. https://cwfn.uoguelph.ca/ (Date of last access 4 October 2021).
36 While in Egypt in 1849 Nightingale wrote in her diary ‘as I sat in the large dull room waiting for the letters, God told me that a privilege he had reserved for me…and how I had been blind to it. If I were never thinking of the reputation how I should be better able to see what God intends for me.’ F B Smith, Florence Nightingale: Reputation and Power (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1982), 21. Christ appeared to her five times. See also Martha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard (eds), Ever Yours: Florence Nightingale Selected Letters (London, Virago, 1989), 17.
37 Florence Nightingale, Cassandra: An Essay (New York: Feminist Press, 1979), 13.
38 Florence Nightingale, Cassandra and other Selections from Suggestions for Thought, Mary Poovey (ed) (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1991).
39 Vicinus and Nergaard, Ever Yours, 4.
40 Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians: The Illustrated Edition (London: Bloomsbury, 1918/1988), 76.
41 Vicinus and Nergaard, Ever Yours, 5.
42 Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 98.
43 Katie Pickles, Transnational Outrage: the Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007/2015), 95–100.
44 Pickles, Transnational Outrage, 40.
45 https://www.ninety-nines.org/elly-beinhorn.htm (Date last accessed 4 October 2021).
46 Patti Gully, Sisters of Heaven: China’s Barnstorming Aviatrixes (San Francisco: Long River Press, 2007), 116.
47 Gully, Sisters of Heaven, 4, 181.
48 Jane Anderson, ‘Amelia Earhart’ in Sara Hunt (ed), Heroines: Remarkable and Inspiring Women (Glasgow: Saraband, 1995), 110-11, 110.
49 Doris L Rich, Amelia Earhart A Biography (New York: Laurel, 1989), 26.
50 Rich, Amelia Earhart, 4.
51 Anderson, Amelia Earhart, in Hunt, Heroines, 110.
52 Rich, Amelia Earhart, 35.
53 Jean Batten, Alone in the Sky (England: Airlife Publishing, 1938/1979). 1938 edition was called My Life, 15–6.
54 Jean Batten, Alone in the Sky, 21.
55 Jean Batten, Alone in the Sky, 22–3.
56 Jean Batten, Alone in the Sky, 23.
57 Jean Batten, Alone in the Sky, 29.
58 Eleni Stylianou, ‘Marie Curie’ in Hunt, Heroines, 86–7.
59 Eve Curie, Madam Curie (London and Toronto: William Heineman, 1938), xi.
60 Stylianou, ‘Marie Curie,’ 87.
61 Bonnie Tsui, She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers of the Civil War (Guilford Connecticut: The Globe Pequot Press, 2003), 104, 106.
62 Cathy Porter, ‘Rosa Luxemburg’ in Hunt, Heroines, 94–5.
63 See Mary-Alice Waters (ed), Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (New York and London: Pathfinder, 1970/1994).
64 Maria Costantino, ‘Frida Kahlo’ in Hunt, Heroines, 115–17.
65 Brenda Wilkinson, ‘Rosa Parks’ in Hunt, Heroines, 124–5.
66 https://www.npr.org/2009/03/15/101719889/before-rosa-parks-there-was-claudette-colvin (Date last accessed 10 October 2021).
67 Ellen Williams and Annie Roberts, ‘Rigoberta Menchú and Aung San Suu Kyi’ in Hunt, Heroines, 156–8.
68 Holly Lloyd, ‘“Mother” Jones’ in Hunt, Heroines, 88–9.
69 Lloyd, ‘“Mother” Jones,’ Heroines, 88–9.
70 Malala Yousafzai with Patricia McCormick, I am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up For Education and Changed the World (London: Indigo, 2015), 63–4.
71 Yousafzai, I am Malala, 68–9.
72 Yousafzai, I am Malala, 155.
73 Warner, Joan of Arc, 16, 122.
74 Andrea Hopkins, ‘Joan of Arc’ in Hunt, Heroines, 33–7.
75 Katharine Anthony, Catherine the Great (London: Cape, 1926), 309.
76 Ann Parsonson, ‘Hērangi, Te Kirihaehae Te Puea,’ Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published 1996, Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3h17/herangi-te-kirihaehae-te-puea (Date last accessed 3 October 2021).
77 Ann Parsonson, ‘Hērangi, Te Kirihaehae Te Puea,’ Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published 1996, Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealandhttps://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3h17/herangi-te-kirihaehae-te-puea (Date last accessed 3 October 2021).
78 Williams and Roberts, ‘Rigoberta Menchú and Aung San Suu Kyi,’ 159.
79 Antonia Fraser, The Warrior Queens (London: Penguin, 1990), 308.
80 Katie Pickles, ‘Exceptions to the Rule: Explaining the World’s First Women Presidents and Prime Ministers,’ History Now, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2001), 13–18, 14.
81 Benazir Bhutto, Daughter of the East: An Autobiography (London: Arrow, 1988/1997), 307.
82 Fraser, The Warrior Queens, 308.
83 Anita Roddick, Business as Unusual: The triumph of Anita Roddick (London: Thorsons, 2000), 45.