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.

_____________________________________________

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’              

_______________________________________

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

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.