'Each time a girl opens a book and reads a womanless history, she learns she is worth less.'- Myra Pollack Sadker
Choosing a female icon is hard work, there are many extraordinary women throughout history and women such as 'Mrs Zigzag', Marie Stopes and Emily Wilding Davison continue to inspire people, even today. With so many figures to choose from, how do you narrow your choice of heroine down to just one?
Here at The History Press office, we are big fans of women's history and so we put our heads together and came up with a potted history of our favourite female icons below. All you have to do is decide who we have missed off the list...
Dorothy Elizabeth Levitt (1882/3 – 1922).
‘ The details of an engine may sound complicated and look "horrid", but an engine is easily mastered.’
A renowned pioneer of female independence, Levitt is the most successful competitor of Great Britain and holds the water speed record and the Ladies World Land speed record.
She was a well-known race car driver and her book, The Woman and the Car: A chatty little handbook for all women who motor or want to motor is notable for recommending women carry a little hand-mirror while driving for looking behind in traffic – inventing the rear view mirror before it was introduced by manufacturers in 1914.
Her success as a race car driver is noteworthy due to the prevalent attitude of the time that female motorists were unnatural and mannish. She also lived a bachelor-type lifestyle unusual for a woman in the Edwardian era, living with friends and waited on by servants in the West End of London.
When driving she took her dog Dodo with her with barked at the competitors; disgruntled male drivers responded by having dog toys on their bonnets during the races.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797)
‘Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.’
An English writer, Wollstonecraft went against what many believe women should do; such as encouraging her severely depressed sister Eliza to leave her unhappy marriage and her new baby for which she received much criticism.
After a school she founded collapsed, she became a governess for the daughters of Lord and Lady Kingsborough. It was her loathing of Lady Kingsborough, who came to stand for all that was wrong with women in Wollstonecraft’s eyes, that developed her feminist philosophy.
When the radical London publisher Joseph Johnson took her on as an editorial assistant it was the start of her new life. Becoming more sure of her own intellectualism, amongst her short career Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792. In this she argued that women were not naturally inferior to men, but that the current education system made it so, and that with the same opportunities as men, women would be just very capable working life as well as domestic. She suggested this change would benefit all of society.
Mary died at the age of 38, due to complications in giving birth to her second child. The child grew to be Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.
Her husband published her radical novel as well a memoir of her life when she died. This revealed she had not been married whilst having a sexual relationship with a previous lover which diminished her reputation to that of a prostitute. Few later feminists would dare admit to her influence.
Eleanor of Aquitaine (c. 1122 – 1204)
‘Pitiful and pitied by no one, why have I come to the ignominy of this detestable old age, who was ruler of two kingdoms, mother of two kings?’
Arguably the most powerful woman in twelfth-century Europe, Eleanor inherited one of the largest domains in France (even larger than the French King). She married the heir to French throne in 1137, Louis VI, and became Queen of France. In this position she held considerably influence, including over the king, for the next 15 years and bore two daughters.
The failure of the Second Crusade deteriorated their already poor relationship and the marriage was annulled in 1152, in which Eleanor regained her inherited land. Two months later she married the future Henry II, King of England and had five sons and three daughters with her new husband, including Richard the Lionheart and John Lackland, who became king in 1199.
She played various roles in ruling: travelling between their English and French territories as Henry’s Queen, in government with Richard I and as regent in England when Richard went to join the Third Crusade.
She died in 1204 and was buried next to Henry II.
George Eliot (1819 – 1880)
‘It is never too late to be what you might have been.’
George Eliot was the pen name for Mary Ann Evans, one of the leading novelists of the nineteenth century. A writer who developed the method of psychological analysis characteristic of modern fiction, she used a male name so her works were taken seriously in an era when female novelists were mostly romance novelists.
Her major works include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876).
The popularity of her novels made society more acceptable of her cohabiting with a married man, and their house even became a meeting place for writers and intellectuals.
Boudicca
Boudicca was queen of the Iceni people of Eastern England. When Boudicca’s husband died with no male heir, he left his wealth to his daughters and the Roman emperor Nero, thinking this would win imperial protection for his family. He was wrong. The Romans robbed his chief tribesmen, annexed his kingdom, stripped and flogged Boudicca and raped his daughters. Boudicca raised a rebellion through East Anglia, burning many locations and massacring an alleged 70,000 Romans and pro-Roman Britons.
When the provincial governor Suetonius Paulinus returned a desperate battle ensured, thought to be on Watling Street. The Romans emerged victorious and Boudicca is thought to have killed herself with poison to avoid capture.
Mary Seacole (1805 – 1881)
‘Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?’
Born in 1905 on the Caribbean island of Jamaica, Mary Seacole faced racial prejudice through her life – her and her family were not allowed to vote, hold public office or enter the professions. She learnt her nursing skills from her mother who kept a boarding house for invalid soldiers.
With a love of travelling, Seacole visited other parts of the Caribbean where she expanded her skills by exploring European medical ideas. Best known for her work in the Crimean War (a trip she funded herself after the War Office refused her as an army nurse) where she established the British Hotel for sick officers and frequently visited the battlefield (under fire) to nurse the wounded. The soldiers called her Mother Seacole and her reputation rivalled Florence Nightingale
When she returned to England after the war she was destitute and in ill health. Her troubles got in the press and a benefits festivals was organised for her, attracting thousands of people.
Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962)
‘A woman is like a tea bag - you can't tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.’
As the wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 32nd President of the United States, she was America’s First Lady (1933-45). She taught herself many aspects of politics, partly in order to help with husband’s political career but also as she recognised it as an important cause. She became a member of the Legislative Affairs Committee of the League of Women’s Voters and began to study the Congressional Record to understand how to evaluate voting records and debates.
As First Lady she understood social conditions and transformed the role of First Lady. She entertained, gave lecturers and radio broadcasts and instituted regular White House press conferences for women correspondents – forcing many companies to employ a woman that could attend in case they missed anything. As her husband, the president, grew more ill she became more involved in public outings and tours in order to report to him.
Roosevelt showed particular interest in child welfare, housing reform and equal rights for women and racial minorities. This helped bring previously excluded groups into government. She had not supported the Equal Rights Amendment, worried it would take protective legislated from women, but eventually approved of it.
Margot Asquith (1864 – 1945)
‘Lord Birkenhead is very clever but sometimes his brains go to his head’
The equivalent of a late Victorian and Edwardian celebrity, Asquith was one of society’s leading ladies. Fashionable, outspoken, witty she had no fear of defying gender conventions – she smoked, swore, flirted and even held midnight meetings in her bedroom with mixed company.
Though she was always mixed into the word of politics – her father was an MP and she married Herbert Henry Asquith – she did not get involved in the politics of the day. The women’s suffrage movement is a notably example on which she had very little to say, though her husband was strongly against it.
After the war she wrote her autobiography based on her diary which offended many of her friends with her brutally honest descriptions of them. Other books she wrote included Places and Persons (1925), Lay Sermons (1927), More Memories (1933), Myself when Young (1938) and Off the Record (1943).
Mary Kingsley
‘I feel certain that a black man is no more an undeveloped white man than a rabbit is an undeveloped hare’
Kingsley’s mother was an invalid so Kingsley was expected to stay at home to look after her – which left her with little formal schooling but plenty to time to peruse her father’s library of travel books.
Her father returned from a travel on rheumatic fever and died in 1892. With her mother’s death a few weeks after, and an income of £500 a year, Mary was able to travel. She travelled to Africa to finish her father’s book on their culture, and offered to collect tropical fish for the British Museum while she was touring.
Having lived with the locals to learn the skills necessary for survival, she went off alone to search the mangrove swamps in search of rare specimens, adventures which include a crocodile attack and a tornado. She journeyed through forests filled with poisonous animals, met cannibal tribes and was the first European to climb Mount Cameroon. She found being identified not foremost as woman, but as white, to be liberating.
Her adventurers made her famous and she toured the country giving lectures and disputing the popular notion of Africans as savages. She updated the Church of England for criticising the missionaries that tried to change them and suggested they try to live with them to understand. Perhaps surprisingly, she argued against women being given the vote in parliamentary elections as there were already enough poorly informed voters and women were unfit for parliament, with their expertise better suited to local elections.
The book on her travels, Travels in West Africa (1897) was a best seller and the government’s Colonial Secretary even wrote asking her advice (albeit secretly, given Kingsley’s controversy). She volunteered as a nurse during the Boer War where she died, and was buried at sea as per her request.
Elizabeth I (1553 - 1603)
‘And, in the end, this shall be for me sufficient, that a marble stone shall declare that a queen, having reigned such a time, lived and died a virgin’
Elizabeth I, also called ‘The Virgin Queen’, ‘Gloriana’ and ‘Good Queen Bess’ was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty. Her mother, Anne Boleyn, was executed when she was young and she was known as ‘Lady Elizabeth’ rather than princess. Despite this, she was one of the best educated women in her generation.
Declared illegitimate by the Pope, Elizabeth’s life was threatened with several conspiracies – all happily thwarted with her minister’s secret service. She is associated with the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, one of the greatest military victories in English histories. Elizabeth defied expectations and never married to produce an heir, despite numerous courtship attempts. The reason for this is still speculated; she could have known she was infertile, an earlier romance had dissuade her, or she was reluctant to lose part of her power to her husband. Elizabeth claimed she instead married to her kingdom and subjects.
Elizabeth’s long (44 year) reign was a welcome change to a nation that had been subjected to many short reigns from monarchs with radically different views. The importance of her to the nation is part of her rule being called Elizabethan – not many monarchs can claim such personality!
Who is your female icon?