That sucks and makes me sad, heebie. I had different splits than that one, but I totally understand what you're saying.
Yep. At a similar age, I just couldn't visualize how a possible romantic relationship would work with me in it. I knew I was straight, but the woman's role in any sort of romantic narrative seemed kind of absolutely alien.
Based on my constant viewing of old movies on Channel 9 on the weekends, I just assumed that all adult relationships consisted of people yelling at each other for awhile and then the next morning it was apparent that they had had sex. It was a cultural trope that would come to serve me well in later life as a guide to romance.
But seriously, that is fairly sad. I think I just tended to imagine myself as a sidekick or observer in those narratives.
This is a worry that I have w.r.t. small god-daughter; I am doing what I think a good godfather ought to and encouraging her via judicious birthday presents to do interesting stuff, have adventures, sail the seven seas, travel to the South Pole etc and she's totally buying into it, but she is starting to notice that all the people doing these things that she thinks are terrific are Scott, Shackleton, Hillary, Tensing and so on, in other words blokes, and is wondering where all the female adventurers are. Amelia Earhart is filling the gap, but there's only one of her. Suggestions?
5: there's that woman who keeps swimming to Cuba and so on.
I am not going to stop encouraging her to have adventures, sail the seven seas and so forth, because I view it as a vital counterbalance to her mother encouraging her to run a beauty salon for all her soft toys.
Didn't you actually have one of those astonishing Victorian world traveller women in your family? I'm forgetting the story precisely, but you mentioned someone along those lines, maybe in a thread where you also brought up the Ottoman math tutor.
And when you find a woman-adventurer, her lovelife is inevitably absent. She's not pined over, the way the male hero is assumed to be.
8: Great-aunt Florence. Yes, indeed. Good point. I can dredge up some of the family anecdotes about her...
Today's Google-doodle is Dian Fossey, who goes nicely with Jane Goodall.
9 is what I have been doing, but it's a bit unsatisfactory to say that back then girls weren't allowed to sail the seven seas but now they are, honest!
Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall would also be excellent ideas.
Sadly, I know nothing whatsoever about Grace O'Malley beyond the name and the profession, but knowing that there's precedent for piracy out there is something.
This list from Wikipedia is a good resource. Lady Hester Stanhope, for instance.
There's also Anne Bonney, and Amelia Earhart, and the historical Mulan, the playwright Aphra Behn who was probably also a spy...
Also, Heebie, I think we had the same childhood.
14 - See also the awesome Mary Read/Anne Bonny/Calico Jack Rackham love triangle. (Featuring what may be history's greatest blow-off line: "If you'd fought like a man, they wouldn't hang you like a dog.")
Sadly, I know nothing whatsoever about Grace O'Malley beyond the name and the profession, but knowing that there's precedent for piracy out there is something.
Oh, there were definitely female pirates: Anne Bonney and Mary Read come to mind (as indeed how could they not).
15: Lady Hay Drummond-Hay, the first woman to circumnavigate the world by zeppelin, wins that list hands down.
9 is what I have been doing, but it's a bit unsatisfactory to say that back then girls weren't allowed to sail the seven seas but now they are, honest!
Well, it's true. Also: Ellen MacArthur.
Multiply pwned on Anne Bonny. "Clearly not at her best first thing in the morning", remarks George MacDonald Fraser in The Pyrates.
ajay, it sounds like she's too old for this already, but there's a a really nice picture book about Jane Goodall that I'm pretty sure I learned about from others here.
Nelly Bly, Mary Kingsley, Emma Goldman.
I should really get Zardoz a framed copy of the picture of my great-grandmother in a gypsy costume smoking opium during the era she was working at Hull House. That's the kind of role model the kid needs.
13: Yeah, I considered adding a sadface emoticon.
You know what else is a bit unsatisfactory? Several thousand years of patriarchy. :(
If she's princess-inclined, you can always throw in a some interesting queens: Eleanor of Aquitaine has quite a lot of crusading/ruling/civil warring going on.
Lady Hay Drummond-Hay, the first woman to circumnavigate the world by zeppelin
For what it's worth, I'm swooning at this description alone.
You know what else is a bit unsatisfactory? Several thousand years of patriarchy. :(
Yes, true, but I am doing my best to end it one small god-daughter at a time.
23: Yes, definitely for that age! As a complement, there was an Imax movie, Born to be Wild about women "fostering" baby animals that my girls also loved when we got the dvd from the library.
It seems like there's room for someone to write a true adventure stories for girls book. There certainly are enough women who've done cool adventurey stuff out there (often dressing up as men). Of course, having written that my mind is completely blank on any names or details. Anne Bonny! there's one. A pirate!
26: Fortunately she has shown no signs of being princessy yet. That kicks in around age 7, doesn't it?
Sacajawea may be a bit American for a kid in the UK, but that's certainly an adventury story.
My eleven year old is writing a 'book' - a Percy Jackson knock-off - and her (female) Mary Sue main character is a total BAMF. She does like a boy, but she's definitely the leader of their gang.
Again, going back to things you've said about your own family, but didn't you have a grandmother or something codebreaking at Bletchley Park?
38: she was at BP, but in a fairly junior capacity, not being aristocratic enough to be trusted with the real high-grade stuff.
Margaret Mead? Maybe especially if the god-daughter's family is Anglican?
5. Kathleen Kenyon; Gertrude Caton-Thompson, Semni Karouzou -you can mine this site for a while.
39: Still, it's a personal link to the right kind of story.
Go ahead and post the story, heebie. Are you waiting for us to beg?
My kid seems to be going for some bizarre combo of being obsessed with girls stuff (she annoyingly refuses to ever wear pants) and being the Ndamukong Suh of the playground, so we'll see where things end up.
44: I actually meant to bring it to work and post some excerpts. I left it at home, though.
We also have a Lego Boadicea (OK, it's a princess figure who came with a chariot, and I told her the story) and the kid seems pretty into her.
Boadicea, being from Europe, not only refused to ever wear trousers, she was also enlightenedly topless.
It's not a Boudicca unless the chariot has scythes.
I mean, you could add the scythes.
32: In our experience princesses started being a big deal around age 4, and by 7 we were growing out of them. By 8 we were definitely angry that we had to dress up as Belle for the Ice Show, when some of the other girls got to be Hermione.
(that said, there's really nothing more girly than an ice show, and that's still happening).
Picture book: Miss Rumphius (fulfills adventure and making a better world and friendship, but sadly not romance)
Chapter books/people:
- Sybil Ludington, Revolutionary War hero
- Elizabeth Van Lew, Union spy (I know there is a children's biography of her but it may not be in print)
- Beryl Markham (West With the Night is her autobiography)
- Mae Jemison, astronaut
- I was obsessed with The White Lions of Timbavati as a child, mostly because of the color photos of the lions, but also because it was a husband-and-wife team of naturalists and IIRC they actually had their kids and kept working in the field.
i always found Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and the orangutan lady to be somewhat sad reading, precisely becuase they seemed to have no meaningful personal lives outside their obsessive work. (Goodall came the closest, but IIRC she married the one and only man sent out to do work with her in the field, they had one son and the marriage didn't last).
I could go on and on....
There's a number of fantasy books out there that would be good--Tamora Pierce in particular, for younger readers.
Hawaii went to her first ballet class yesterday, and is hopelessly enthralled. It is precisely the blend of orderliness, rules, Victorian trappings, and femininity that Hawaii adores. The instructor was both stern and loving.
Ahead of time, when we were waiting in the lobby, I said, "C'mere. If you peek in this room, you can see some of the costumes." (The door was open.) Hawaii peeked nervously and then sat right back down saying "If someone saw us peek, we can just say we were passing by and weren't really looking." This child.
she was also enlightenedly topless.
In bloody Norfolk? I don't think so.
And re: bodice-rippers, there's the Clan of the Cave Bear books. Well, after the first one. Female protagonist invents civilization, and has lots of sex!
Samantha Smith is inspiring but also a bummer. Who wants to read about a 13-year-old who dies in a plane crash?
Oh! Eugenie Clark! I read Lady with a Spear over and over again, and not just because I was into sharks.
Lots of completely badass contemporary women are Patagonia "ambassadors".
I don't remember sweating this sort of thing too much with Sally -- we didn't ban Disney or anything, just sort of did what came naturally. What with being a big strong girl, and the rugby, and the general level of simmering inter-sibling violence (Newt is still physically outclassed, but is game enough that fights do turn physical), while she's really a very kind, gentle kid generally, her snap reactions are all in the turning toward rather than away from physical conflict.
She was having a bit of a crisis of confidence about this the other day -- noting that being delicately pixieish was clearly not something that was ever going to happen, and feeling a bit weird about a hockey game in gym class where she realized after the fact that she'd been body-checking people with a certain amount of reckless abandon (to a level explicitly approved by the gym teacher; she's not injuring people or anything). I'm not sure how helpful I was in reassuring her -- I told her that if you're playing a sport, aggression (within the rules) is how it's supposed to work, that she's actually doing it right. And in terms of being attractive, she's absolutely right that delicately pixieish is not a way anyone is ever going to describe her, but that being a big strong healthy animal is a perfectly workable way of being attractive.
"Eleanor of Aquitaine has quite a lot of crusading/ruling/civil warring going on."
I'm all for active role models for girls but the crusading is kind of a problem.
Florence Nightingale had some adventures. I just read her wikipedia entry and was surprised to learn that aside from the front-line medical care, she was also a statistician! Though she seems to have had some anti-women beliefs going on herself, judging by the "Relationships" section.
Well, piracy is also a problem, if we're worried about the morals of it all. If you're going to be looking at anyone doing anything adventury in a historical context, it's going to be very hard to avoid immoral conduct.
62: Also, Soviet snipers. (Who I am unable not to think of as "hotsy-totsy soviet snipers" after Alameida described them as such in a WWII re-enactment discussion.)
Obviously they're not Sir Edmund, but there are some fairly inspirational female climbers around who lecture, are online, etc. Kitty Calhoun and Steph Davis are a couple of badass contemporary US climbers who seem like OK people too (Davis wrote an interesting memoir). There's an argument that Lynn Hill may be the best rock climber of either gender ever (also wrote an autobio). I'm out of touch with British climbing but back in the day people like Louise Thomas, Kath Pyke, and the late Alison Hargreaves were doing amazing things.
65 I was just about to mention Lyudmila Pavlichenko.
Also Aleksandra Samusenko has a very interesting story.
her snap reactions are all in the turning toward rather than away from physical conflict.
Just ask the gingerbread housing authority.
64: axiomatically, "I'm not saying we aren't fun, but fun or not, pirates are still the baddies."
Arya Stark.
Well, obviously. But five may be a bit young for "Game of Thrones".
Possibly a real-life equivalent like Black Agnes Randolph of Dunbar. "Salisbury began the siege with a bombardment by catapults, sending huge rocks and lead shot against the ramparts of Dunbar. Lady Agnes responded by having her maids dress in their Sunday best; she then led them to the outer walls, where with their handkerchiefs they nonchalantly and slightingly dusted away the damage from the bombardment... According to one story, at one point during the siege, the English captured Agnes's brother John Randolph, 3rd Earl of Moray, and paraded him in front of the castle with a rope round his neck, threatening to hang him if she did not surrender. She told them to go ahead, as she would then inherit the earldom."
I impressed by LB's knowledge of the archives (and ajay's family tree) at the beginning of the thread.
And don't forget the Powerpuff Girls! Buttercup is especially badass!
67: Lydia Litvyak is better, because her story involves a tragic doomed love affair and is thus 80% more Russian. Also because she used to drive her male colleagues nuts by always putting bouquets of flowers in the cockpit of her Yak-1, which they would then heave out in disgust when it was their turn to fly it.
70: I'm not saying I could retype the archives from memory...
Khutulun of Mongolia, niece of Kublai Khan, warrior and athlete. She defeated all comers at wrestling and won ten thousand horses.
Posts like this are also a good time to remind everyone that Get Mortified is hilarious.
71:Of course there are tons of examples in anime of female action/adventure protagonists with or without male or female romantic attachments and or sidekicks.
The seinen seem to actually prefer that setup, as do I.
The details and nuances of how relationships play out performatively can be complicated and nuanced, with varying degrees of sexist or role reproduction.
Simoun. The Third. Claymore.
Endless, actually.
Zenobia, come to think of it. Queen of a one horse state in the Syrian desert who took on the Romans, conquered Egypt and held out for about five years. There's even an optional semi-happy ending.
Beryl Markham is very ladylike about not letting on in her autobiography that she was banging the hell out of most of the men mentioned positively. A good role model in our Facebook/Twitter/Jezebel/LenaDunhamLenaDunhamLenaDunham Era.
77: I was thinking about Zenobia, and then thought, nah, too obscure. But a good one.
Frankly at this point I'm looking for ways to tone down or channel the girl power, not to amp it up.
79 77: I was thinking about Zenobia, and then thought, nah, too obscure.
I thought it was one of the more recognizable names in the thread. But I guess I'm woefully underinformed about historical ass-kicking and/or exploring women.
Eleanor of Aquitaine has quite a lot of crusading/ruling/civil warring going on.
Although The Lion in Winter could be a little heavy for a child, depending on the age.
Frankly at this point I'm looking for ways to tone down or channel the girl power, not to amp it up.
Jane Eyre?
77, 79 Very good. And not just for the action adventure but she was very highly educated as well.
83: Everyone's probably already seen it on facebook, but The Toast had a hilarious How To Tell If You Are In A Bronte Novel.
The new Lara Croft character design is notably more human looking than predecessors, and she adventures/hunts/climbs/fights like a house on fire.
There's also Kahina aka Dihya, the Berber Sorceress Queen.
Laura Dekker, that 14 year old girl who sailed around the world recently.
53.penultimate -- But Goodall got to go to on a Tanzanian adventure with her mom, which makes up for a lot.
A woman just became the first person to ride a bike from the ocean to the South Pole.
The new Lara Croft character design is notably more human looking than predecessors, and she adventures/hunts/climbs/fights like a house on fire.
Most of the time in a house on fire, too.
Forget female role models, what I find interesting is that heebie describes her parents' house as "home".
I bet that's heavily driven by having moved to a different region. I wouldn't dream of calling Mom's apartment 'home', despite having grown up there. But if I was living in another city, I think I would then.
93: That, and having lived in the same place for a long time (and being able to go back to it now). I moved around so much before college that there's no one place I think of as "home", and even if there were I couldn't go there now.
I'd still have expected that a marriage, multiple children, and a major home renovation would have put a dent in that, though.
there are some fairly inspirational female climbers around who lecture, are online, etc
Sasha DiGiulian is climbing sick routes and is only 20.
I wonder if Japanese women are different because they grew up on Princess Knight
"Sapphire also dons a Zorro-style mask at night and fights crime as the Phantom Knight, as well as foiling Duke Duralumon's schemes to take over the kingdom and his attempts to prove that Sapphire is really a girl (and thus discredit her as the heir to the throne)."
"Prince Frank is the young prince of neighboring Goldland and Sapphire's love interest. Obviously, their relationship is complicated. Prince Frank is familiar with Sapphire as three entirely different people, and has different feelings toward each. He is good friends with Prince Sapphire, in love with the unnamed princess, and despises the Phantom Knight, whom he mistakenly believes is a rival for the Princess's affection. Because of their similar upbringings, Frank has many of the same skills as Sapphire (such as swordsmanship), although Sapphire is usually a bit better. Tezuka, who was unsatisfied with the original manga series, added some improvements in story and characters to the TV series. He cast the recurrent character Rock as Prince Frank while adding more depth and improving his abilities."
Uhh, from fucking 1953
Also the genderbenders Rose of Versailles 70s and Revolutionary Girl Utena 90s
also...also...also
I named my cat Zenobia! Though I got the name from Wodehouse, where a so-named character had the nickname "Nobby", which I use preferentially.
63: I'm all for active role models for girls but the crusading is kind of a problem.
Well, it's not like Eleanor was launching the crusade by herself - she just invited herself along on a crusade her then husband was going on anyway. The crusades were problematic, but it was a problem common to most of Western European nobility at the time.
My favorite detail about Eleanor was from The Plantagenets, which I read recently. After the annulment of her marriage to Louis VII, she set out on a fast horse back to Aquitaine, evading a couple of parties on the way that had been sent out by various noblemen to waylay her and force her into marriage. Quickly deciding that Henry of Anjou was her best option, she sent word to him to meet her in Poitiers for purposes of matrimony (they had previously met at the French court). Henry was just about to launch an invasion of England in an effort to claim his throne, but decided that he would have better luck later with Eleanor's money behind him. So he dashed off to Poitiers, and after a whirlwind courtship, they were married. Adventure!
Also, wasn't he fifteen or so at the time?
There's always Caterina Sforza if you're looking for strong women in the Renaissance. I have to admit I came across her in the relatively soapy Blood & Beauty but she made an impression.
re: climbing
There was a BBC documentary on the north face of the Eiger, a couple of days ago. And they had footage of Ueli Steck doing is speed climb of it. Completely ridiculous. It doesn't even look human. Under 3 hours. When people used to take literally days to climb it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Btb8QuL6vuo
He literally runs up a sheer rock face. I don't know what kind of CV fitness you need to do that [on top of the climbing chops] but I'd bet there's very few people better.
100: According to Wikipedia, he was born 5 March 1133, and they were married on 18 May 1152, so he had just turned 19. She was nine years older. He might have been 15 when they first met.
Right, not much use to you lot but I must definitley buy this graphic novel for my clutch of nieces
http://www.leabhar.com/grainne-mhaol.htm
(Gráinne Mhaol / Granuaile / Grace O' Malley)
She was married a few times but the ships were her dowry so they went with her in the divorce(s). Brehon law, not exactly enlightened but better than coverture.
but I'd bet there's very few people better
It's a pretty elite club for sure. Steck along with his climbing partner Alex Honnold, Dean Potter and Tommy Caldwell here in the U.S., Hans Florine, and a few others. One of Potters ascents up El Capitan a few years back shaved like five days off the old time. I check out Florine's site from time to time just to check out the sheer lunacy of the times being posted these days on huge ascents.
Late to the party, but: Harriet Tubman, Ann Bancroft, Nuita Teitelboim, Subcomandante Elisa, Comandante Ramona, Assata Shakur
It's probably weird that my Jewishness makes it harder to write off the crusades, since I'm not that Jewish. But it does. I can picture telling my future daughter tales of a pirate or even a Soviet sniper, but I don't think I'd ever praise someone who was involved in killing tens of thousands of Jews.
I could gender-swap nearly everything I read, but I couldn't make it not matter that I'm not blond/e.
I don't have juvenilia, which is as well, as I'm pretty sure my authorial insert always died. (Heroically, with Someone realizing her worth too late. I should check my stupider habits for the leftovers of that.)
72: and she had a faithful, greasy-fingered lady mechanic bestie! who went back for years looking for the crash site in the hope of getting her Hero of the Soviet Union awarded at last!
110: also true. My favourite bit remains the irritation of the male pilots at their fighter aircraft continually looking all girly. "She's hoovered in here, hasn't she?"
Mrs. Ching! Most successful lady pirate of them all--ruled a consortium of pirates in the South Asian Seas numbered around 50,000. Never defeated! Neither the British nor the Chinese could defeat her.
She died oldish, rich, and retired, which is spectacular success.