Thanks to our ever-growing band of valued Maverick Monologues presenters, we have been able to bring to life the following extraordinary women, whose lives are available for you to read – or listen to – on our main Maverick Monologues page.
Our heroines’ lives span roughly 3,680 years and represent at least 15 nations (birth countries are given below as a rule, though work and lives were lived out in a far wider range of countries). Their areas of expertise and dedication were legion, but we have listed some of the categories below.
In the collective Heroica belief that any definitions both confine and ‘unsing’ our heroines and can only thinly glance past the breadth of their lives and work, we add in the last column a short descriptor of the heroine’s ONLY as a guide to your interests, not as an accurate summation of what these women truly were. For our observations on this subject, we invite you to read Anna Carlisle’s reflections at the bottom of this page.
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Those heroines who have been the subject of a Heroica Theatre Company production are named in bold.
dates u.k. = dates unknown
The century category is applied to when the bulk of the woman’s working life was lived.
BCE (c1400):
Rahab the Harlot dates u.k. Jordan ‘pagan whore’ and harbourer
15th CENTURY
Anne Neville 1456-85 England wife of King Richard III
16th CENTURY
Grace O'Malley 1530-1603 Ireland sailor, pirate and clan leader
17th CENTURY
Lady Anne Clifford 1590-1676 England landowner, traveller and restorer of castles
Margaret Fell 1614-1702 England first woman Quaker
Christian Fletcher 1619-1691 Scotland self-appointed saver and custodian of Scotland’s Honours
18th CENTURY
Catherina Linck 1687-1721 Prussia cross-gender soldier
Susanna Wesley 1669-1742 England ‘mother of Methodism’
‘Henriette’ dates u.k. France cross-dressing lover of Casanova
Elizabeth Blackwell 1707-58 Scotland botanical artist
Teresa Cornelys 1723-97 Italy impresario and soprano
Elizabeth Wilding 1747-1800 England lighthouse keeper
Fanny Burney 1752-1840 England novelist
Sophie Blanchard 1778-1819 France hot-air balloonist
19th CENTURY
Anon: first woman
to see Antarctica) ? -1839 England/NZ sealer and seafarer
Anne Lister 1791-1840 England landowner and diarist
Martha Crossley 1775-1854 England carpet manufacturer and social reformer
Caroline Norton 1808-1877 England author and social reformer
Mary Parsons Rosse 1813-1885 England astronomer, architect, designer and pioneering photographer
Charlotte Guest 1812-95 England publisher and linguist
Rosa Bonheur 1822-99 France landscape and animal painter
Josephine Butler 1828-1906 England suffragist, feminist and social reformer
Victoria Woodhull 1838-1927 America social reformer, suffragist and politician
Marie Owens 1853-1927 America police officer
Marie Bashkirtseff 1858-84 Russia painter
Daisy Bates 1859-1951 Australia journalist and social reformer and activist
Edith Mary Bigland 1862-1951 England Quaker and social activist
Enid Stacy 1868-1903 England social activist and reformer
Gertrude Bell 1868-1926 England writer, traveller and archaeologist
EARLY 20th CENTURY
Annie Wilson 1862-1946 England teacher
Mary Gilmour 1865-1962 Australia writer, journalist and poet
Annie Malone 1869-1957 America businesswoman, inventor and philanthropist
Emma Appleby 1870-1954 England wartime wife and mother
Charlotte Dod 1871-1960 England multi-sports athlete and tennis player
Sara Josephine Baker 1873-1945 America physician and social reformer
Janey Greenwood 1875-? England actress
Alice Emily Ray 1876-1971 England wartime wife and mother
Lavena Saltonstall 1881-1957 England weaver and suffragette
Katherine Houghton
Hepburn 1878-1951 America social reformer
Hilda Doolittle 1886-1961 America novelist, poet and memoirist
Lotte Hahm 1890-1967 Germany transvestite and lesbian activist
Ruth B Drown 1891-1965 America alternative medicine practitioner (radionics) and chiropractor
Gertrude Beasley 1892-1955 America journalist and memoirist
Marion Richardson 1892-1946 England educator and author (penmanship and handwriting)
Wanny Wolstad 1893-1959 Norway hunter and trapper
Nan Shepherd 1893-1981 Scotland writer, poet and mountain walker
Claude Cahun 1894-1954 France photographer, sculptor and writer
Florence Rainford 1895-1978 England teacher
Dorothy Lawrence 1896-1964 England journalist and cross-dressing soldier
Noor Inayat Kahn 1914-1944 Russia British wartime resistance agent
MID-20th CENTURY
Anon author:
(A Woman in Berlin) dates u.k. Germany wartime memoirist
Margaret Morris 1891-1980 England dancer, teacher and health-and-wellbeing practitioner
Dame Janet Vaughan 1899-1993 England physiologist, academic and university college principal
Margaret Harris 1904-2000 England theatre and opera costume and scenic designer
Lily Parr 1905-1978 England football player
Liao Hongying 1905-1998 China agricultural chemist and teacher
Mary Stott 1907-2002 England journalist and activist
Alice Longstaff 1907-1992 England photographer and studio proprietor
Audrey Walker 1910-96 Scotland violinist and photographer
Irena Sendler 1910-2008 Poland nurse, aid/resistance worker and humanitarian
Jean Smith 1912-94 England teacher
Jacqueline Tenenbaum 1913-2005 France pharmacist and local councillor
‘Henriette’ dates u.k. France cross-dressing lover of Casanova
Molly Dobbin 1914-65 England wartime nurse
Prunella Stack 1914-2010 England fitness pioneer and social activist
Matron Vivian
Bullwinkel 1915-2000 Australia wartime nurse/matron
Evelyn Lyle Kalças 1915-98 Turkey journalist, writer and traveller
Marion Campbell 1919-2000 Scotland archaeologist and historian
Lois Smith 1919-2016 England social worker, patron and painter/collagist
Joan Eardley 1921-63 Scotland painter of sea- and landscapes and Glasgow children
Dorothy Monroe 1922-86 England wartime wife and mother
Jean Dearden 1922-2017 England wartime coding operator at Bletchley Park
Maggie Bury 1922-c2000 England theatre school founder and director
Alice Miller 1923-2010 Poland child psychologist
Lavinia Ponsonby 1924-20- ? England wartime diplomatic worker and Arctic traveller
Angela Morley
(Wally Stott) 1924-2009 England composer and conductor
Jenny Darlington 1924-2017 America Antarctic expeditionist
Mary Bole 1925-2005 Scotland wartime coding operator at Bletchley Park
Wendy Law 1926-2012 Australia expeditioner, traveller (cyclist) and author
Rosemary Tonks 1928-2014 England poet and author
Barbara 1930-97 France chanteuse and composer
Pat Douthwaite 1934-2002 Scotland painter
Sheila Shulman 1936-2014 America rabbi, activist and feminist publisher
Ann Moss 1938-2008 England scholar, mother and ‘friend of Christ’
Junko Tabei 1939-2016 Japan mountaineer
M J Long 1939-2018 America architect, lecturer and author
LATE 20th CENTURY – 21st CENTURY
Christa McAuliffe 1948-86 America astronaut
Atsuko Betchaku 1960-2017 Japan pacifist, teacher and origami crane-maker
GM Sutherland: 1958-2019 Scotland martial arts master and teacher
‘The Miss’
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The Quiet Achievers. A reflection by Anna Carlisle.
At Heroica Theatre Company, both in our major productions and in our now-regular Maverick Monologues events, we honour both women who operated, successfully or less successfully, in the public sphere and also all the ‘ordinary’ women that we know/knew, whom we are proud to have called mother or grandmother or aunt or friend, and at whom we marvelled for their more private achievements in eras when their place was generally deemed to be ‘in the home’.
Over the years, we have become completely wedded to the belief that almost ANY woman born before the post-War years, was ‘heroic’: sometimes simply for what she had to silence in herself, sacrifice in herself and suppress in herself. Like untold numbers of women from previous decades, most women who came before us endured differentiation and discrimination in their study choices, prejudice in the workplace, and no doubt an uneven distribution of duties in the home. They have borne – unevenly - the responsibilities of childcare, divorce and care for aged parents.
So they have not made it into the annals of what we might call ‘success’. Their commitment has lain elsewhere from ‘community’ and wider society: they did not work in industry or academia or scientific research or the artistic world – because they simply did not have those opportunities - and their ‘expertise’ is not measurable by any other standards than very immediate, human ones. They are ‘inspiring’ to their own small circles only.
In the countless decades where the expected destiny for women was to head, perhaps via a nice little job, into marriage and child-birth, a vast number were likely to have genuinely felt the loss – felt thwarted in their ambitions, cheated at their potential careers being cut short and helpless to avoid the inevitable shift in their own priorities – as they moved instead into circles where they were, despite the ‘nobility’ of their lives, likely to remain unsung.
If we look closely at the structure of societies before the twenty-first century, we meet women abounding whose talents and skills lay unused, for whom openings and opportunities were dashed and who met, if in any way successful, a very unlevel working-field where inequalities and discrimination were endemic. At best, good qualifications and jobs were surrendered on marriage; careers were put on hold or relinquished for the traditional expected role. At worst, personal aspirations were not even talked about, hoped for or dreamed of.
As recently as the 1960s, certainly in my country Australia, girls, if ‘smart’, were trained for teaching or nursing, if ‘ultra-smart’, for medicine, if ‘not bright’, for secretarial work, but hardly featured at all in law, engineering or even the sciences. Just for example, in 1970 at Melbourne University, one girl only was enrolled in the Engineering degree course and she had no easy time of it.
Our school teachers were mostly ‘Miss’ and whispered to have been unlucky in love or ‘her fiancé died in the War’ or, at best, ‘devoted to her charges’. Our mothers were at home when we got back there at the end of the day and were rarely, very rarely in the workplace. The workplace for our mothers, in fact, was mostly past tense and ‘BM’ (‘before marriage’) or a shameful symptom of financial difficulties. Or it was the place only for the unwed aunt who was somewhat scornfully dismissed as having ‘no responsibilities to anyone but herself’.
Or very, very occasionally … they were complete mavericks, flying in the face of all convention and expectation. Brazen and unbridled artists or designers, ill-behaved actresses and singers. Dazzling their world but leaving disapproval aplenty in their wake. Yet such women were extremely few and seldom held up as paragons. And as a result, many of us found ourselves cast into an arid desert of acceptable role models.
Yet there were role models but did we see? Did we know? What our female forebears in previous decades and centuries had endured? What they had managed to achieve instead or notwithstanding? Our mothers and grandmothers were just under our noses, but they didn’t seem to count. Perhaps to us they were ‘heroic’ in their martyrdom only, yet in many cases they were not resentful or embittered: no, they pushed us on where they had not been able to go: urged us to live out our ambitions and dreams; to enjoy and savour all the new freedoms which had not been available to them; and gave way - and hope – to the next generation.
Of course, many of our female forebears WROTE: committed things to paper in a way that the people in the new millennium do not: and we are the beneficiaries. Perhaps they waited until there were fewer relations and friends left to offend with their very subjective perspectives, until their recollections of their lives would not clash with siblings’ or colleagues’ differing versions. But thank goodness they wrote, in some cases voice-recorded. But equally many, we recall, wrote nothing. Said ‘Ssh, now. Don’t make a fuss. That was just the way things were.’ Or ’Oh, I have nothing special to say. Nothing really ever happened to me.’ Oh, but it did!
In this generation where letters are no longer common currency, where diary writers are a dying breed, where there is little permanence to what we commit to our screens, let us treasure what we are privileged to unearth about our local, family heroines. Who knows what extraordinary contributions and nobility of character we may uncover. And to which we will be able proudly to say: ‘I am her heir!’
Anna Carlisle (Angie Cairns), April 2022
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