History

History Holds the Key to Understanding the Present

Most of the time, when you sit down with a book of history, you are going to be reading about men. Men who win wars and men who lose wars. Men who create empires, and men who destroy empires. Men who author great works and design great machines that change the course of the world.

The thing is, half the people in the world are women. What about them? Women have also done a lot of creating, and destroying, authoring, and designing, right alongside the men; but unless they were queens, like Elizabeth I of England, or Catherine the Great of Russia, or notorious villainesses like Jezebel or Mata Hari, you don’t hear as much about them. Nevertheless, women have been there all along, doing things that made a difference.

This book is about eight of those women who were born and lived in the time between the beginning of the Industrial Revolution until the present day:

• Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), whose short life rode the leading edge of a wave of change, and who can rightfully be called the world’s first feminist.


• Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), a mathematician whose father was poet/adventurer George Gordon Lord Byron, who called her approach to formal thinking “poetical science,” and who is credited with writing the world’s first computer program.


• Harriet Tubman (ca. 1822-1913), the fifth of nine children born to plantation slaves in Maryland, who risked her life to gain freedom for herself and her family, who fought and spied for the Union during the American Civil War, and whose image will soon grace the American $20 bill.


• Margaret Knight (1838-1914), who had to drop out of school when she was twelve years old, and never went back, and yet became one of the most successful inventors of her age.


• Nancy Wake (1912-2011), who once said that when men have to go off to war, “I don’t see why we woman should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas.” So during World War Two she learned to shoot, and spy, and fight hand to hand, and then jumped out of an airplane into


• The Mirabal Sisters: Patria (1924-1960), Minerva (1926-1960) and Maria Teresa (1935-1960). Some stories don’t get to have a happy ending. This is one of them.

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