Other Fighting Femmes of the Ancient World

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenobia

Marpesia, “The Snatcher,” was the ruler of the Scythian Amazons along with Lampedo. In frenzies, Maenads were fierce creatures, not to be toyed with, especially after a few nips of ritual new grape wine, Marpesia wrestled and tore off the head of her own son, Pentheus, in one of her ecstasies, mistaking him for a lion. She then paraded around proudly holding his decapitated head up for all to see. Her husband met a similar end in another rite. Agave was a Moon-Goddess and was in charge of some of the revelries that were the precedent for Dionysus’ cult. Euripides celebrated the ferocity of Agave and her fellow Maenads, Ino and Aunonoë, in his Bacchae, as soldiers report how “we by flight hardly escaped tearing to pieces at their hands” and further describe the shock of witnessing the semi-divine females tearing young bulls limb from limb with their terrible “knifeless fingers.” In his version, Pentheus died while trying to spy on the private ritual of the Maenads in transvestite disguise.

Aba was a warrior who ruled the city of Olbe in the nation of Tencer around 550 B.C. She got support from some very high places such as the likes of Cleopatra VII and Marc Anthony! Tencer remained a matriarchy after her rule, passing to her female descendants.

Abra was Artemesia’s (Queen of Caria and military advisor to Xerxes) sister and a warrior-queen (circa 334 B.C.) in her own right. The brilliant military strategist Alexander helped her regain her throne from her invasive brother. She led and triumphed in the siege of the capital’s acropolis, after which she was able to take the city. Her ferocity was aided by the intense emotions of
a cross-gender civil war within her family, “the siege having become a matter of anger and personal enmity,” according to Strabo.

Hercules was the fiercest, that is, until he ran up against Admete, aka “The Untamed,” who bested him and made him serve the Goddess Hera, the wife of Zeus who detested Hercules. Hera rewarded Admete for her loyalty and excellence by appointing her head priestess of the island refuge Samos; Admete, in turn honored by her Goddess with her evangelical fervor, expanding the territory of Hera’s woman cult to the far reaches of the ancient world.

Aëllopus was a Harpy who fought the Argonauts; her name means “Storm-Foot.”

Cratesipolis was Queen of Sicyon around 300 B.C. She stood in battles beside her husband, the famous Alexander the Great, and fought on even after he died. She ruled several important Greek cities very successfully and managed a vast army of soldier-mercenaries. She went on to take Corinth for Ptolemy and nearly married him, but the plans fizzled.

Larina was an Italian Amazon who accompanied Camilla in the Aeneid along with fellow comrades-in-arms, Tulia, Acca, and Tarpeia. According to Silver Latinist poet Virgil, “they were like Thracian Amazons when they make the waters of Thermodon tremble and make war with their ornate arms, either around Hippolyte or when warlike Penthesilea returns in her chariot and the female armies exult, with a great ringing cry and the clashing of crescent-shaped shield.”

Rhodogune, queen of ancient Parthia in 200 B.C., got word of a revolt when she was taking a bath. Vowing to end the uprising before her hair was dressed, she hopped on her horse and rushed to lead her army to defense. True to her word, she directed the entire, lengthy war without ever bathing or combing her hair. Portraits of Rhodogune always faithfully depict her dishevelment. (Another queen of the ancient world, Semiramis, also pulled herself from the bath to the battlefield act when her country needed a brave leader.)

Of the royal lineage of Cleopatra, Zenobia Septimus preferred the hunt to the bath and boudoir. She was queen of Syria for a quarter-century beginning in 250 A.D. and was quite a scholar, recording the history of her nation. She was famed for her excellence on safari, specializing in the rarified skill of hunting panthers and lions.

When the Romans came after Syria, Zenobia disgraced the empire’s army in battle, causing them to turn tail and run. This inspired Arabia, Armencia, and Periso to ally with her and she was named Mistress of Nations. The Romans licked their wounds and enlisted the help of the barbarians they conquered for a Roman army including Goths, Gauls, Vandals, and Franks who threatened to march against Zenobia’s league of nations. When Caesar Aurelius sent messengers requesting her surrender, she replied, “It is only by arms that the submission you require can be achieved. You forget that Cleopatra preferred death to servitude. When you see me in war, you will repent your insolent proposition.” And battle they did. Zenobia fought bravely, holding her city Palmyra against the mass of invaders for longer than anyone thought possible. Upon her capture, Zenobia was taken to Rome in chains, jewels, and her own chariot, and she was given her own villa in Rome where her daughters intermarried into prominent families who ruled Rome.

Boudicca’s name means “victorious” in the language of the Celts. She is the legendary warrior-queen of the Iceni of Norfolk who led a rebellion against the invading Romans in the year 61 A.D., and sacked the Roman’s settlements, including Verulamium and Londinium, which she put to the torch. She took the lives of 70,000 Romans in her battles and was reputed to be “tall of person, of a comely appearance, and appareled in a loose gown of many colors. About her neck she wore a chain of gold, and in her hand she bore a spear. She stood a while surveying her army and, being regarded with a reverential silence, she addressed them an eloquent and impassioned speech.” She died in battle at her own hand, taking poison rather than be killed by an enemy of the Celts. Many women fought to defend their land and culture; the Celtic army consisted of more women than men!

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

JANE LEAD Sophia’s prophet

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Jane Lead is one of those wonderful early women writers who are ripe for rescue from obscurity. She was born in 1624 in Norfolk to the Ward family, and, in her own words, was brought up and educated “like other girls.” Her difference emerged when she turned fifteen and a voice began instructing her during a Christmas celebration. This was her first mystical experience. Six years later, she married William Lead, an older, distant relative, and her religious devotions went on the back burner. The couple raised four daughters, and after her husband’s death in 1670, when Jane was forty-six years old, her interests returned strongly to the study of mysticism and a state she called “Spiritual Virginity.” Jane had a powerful vision of Sophia, meaning “wisdom,” a female aspect of God.

Jane Lead pored over the writings of the German theologian Jacob Boehme, who was widely regarded as radical in his spiritual beliefs. Jane’s convictions about the mystical way grew more fervent than ever, and she moved into the household of Dr. John Pordage, founder of an unorthodox religious sect. When Pordage passed away, Lead began to publish her own visions and beliefs with the help of a younger assistant, Dr. Francis Lee. Together they founded the Philadelphia Society, based on Boehme’s doctrine.

Her writing and the intelligence shown therein were astonishing. In 1681, she wrote The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking, followed by The Enochian Walks with God and the four-volume work A Fountain of Gardens, Watered by the Rivers
of Divine Pleasure. In a way similar to the work of other well-known writer- mystics, her work is not deliberately feminist; it is deliberately religious, but it does contain imagery of a female presence in the soul, imbued with the power to renew and redeem both men and women.

This is the great Wonder to come forth, as Women Clothed with the Sun…with the Glove of this world under her feet…with a Crown beset with stars, plainly declaring that to her is given the Command and Power.

Jane Lead

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

HILDA OF WHITBY patron saint

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_of_Whitby

An Englishwoman born in 614 CE, Hilda spent most of her life teaching
and creating a network of monasteries and abbeys across England. In 657, a patron gave her a piece of land in Whitby, Yorkshire, on which she established a monastery that would come to be an important breeding ground for the developing scholarship and literature of the age. Populated by both men and women who lived separately, Whitby attracted a wide group of intellectuals. Hilda herself taught the arts, medicine, grammar, music, and theology.

Old English historian the Venerable Bede writes about Hilda and her crucial role as advisor to kings, noblemen, and laypeople. But she also had a lasting effect on the world of letters. Whitby had a large library, and the scribes of the monastery produced the Life of Pope Gregory I, one of England’s earliest works of literature. Bede also tells of how the infinitely wise Abbess Hilda discovered the poetic potential of Caedmon, a lay brother who worked at the monastery, and encouraged him to write. As a result of her patronage, we have the earliest known examples of Christian poetry in Old English.

Originally a Celtic Christian, Hilda hosted the Synod of Whitby in 664, which was held to decide what direction Christianity would take. The synod voted to follow the Roman Catholic Church; independent though she was, Hilda went with the majority.

While most women were illiterate until relatively recently, the tenth- century Anglo-Saxon noblewoman Wynflaed actually willed her books upon her death to another woman, Æthelflaed.

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

BETTY FRIEDAN mother of modern feminism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Friedan

In 1956, young housewife Betty Friedan submitted her article about the frustrations women experience in their traditional roles as housewives and mothers. She received rejections from McCalls, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and every other publication she approached. The editors, all men in that day and age, were disapproving, going so far as to say any woman would have to be “sick” to not be completely satisfied in her rightful role!

But Betty knew that she and the millions of women like her were not sick,
just stifled. Betty had put aside her dream of being a psychologist for fear of becoming a spinster, instead choosing to marry and work for a small newspaper. She was fired from her job when she got pregnant for the second time and began, like most middle-class women of her day and age, to devote herself full- time to the work of running a home and family, what she called “the dream life, supposedly, of American women at that time.”

But, after a decade of such devotion, she still wasn’t happy and theorized that she wasn’t alone. A graduate of Smith College, she decided to poll her fellow alumnae. Most of her classmates who had given up promising careers to devote themselves to their families felt incomplete; many were deeply depressed. They felt guilty for not being completely content sacrificing their individual dreams for their families, each woman certain that her dissatisfaction was a personal failing. Betty called this “the problem that has no name,” and she gave it one, “the feminine mystique.”

Over the next five years, her rejected article evolved into a book as she interviewed hundreds of women around the country. The Feminine Mystique explored the issue of women’s lives in depth, criticizing American advertisers’ exclusively domestic portrayal of women and issuing a call to action for women to say no to the housewife role and adopt “a new life plan” in which they could have both families and careers. With its publication in 1963, The Feminine Mystique hit America like a thunderbolt; publisher W.W. Norton had printed only two thousand copies, never anticipating the sale of three million hardcover copies alone.

Unintentionally, Betty had started a revolution. She was flooded with letters from women saying her book had given them the courage to change their lives and advocate for equal access to employment opportunities and other equality issues. Ultimately, the response to Betty’s challenge created the momentum that led to the formalization of the second wave of the US women’s movement in 1966 with the formation of NOW, the National Organization for Women.

Betty was NOW’s first president and took her role as a leader in the women’s movement seriously, traveling to give lectures and take part in campaigns for change, engendering many of the freedoms women now enjoy. She pushed for equal pay for equal work, equal job opportunities, and access to birth control and legalized abortion. In 1970, she quit NOW to fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, and in 1975, was named Humanist of the Year. Of her, author Barbara Seaman wrote, “Betty Friedan is to the women’s movement what Martin Luther King was to blacks.”

In 1981, responding to critics who claimed feminism ignored the importance of relationships and families to most women, she penned The Second Stage,
in which she called on men and women to work together to make the home and the workplace havens for both genders. Betty made another revolution with her 2006 book, The Fountain of Age, raising consciousness about society’s stereotypes about aging decades after she had, as futurist Alvin Toffler so aptly put it, “pulled the trigger of history” with The Feminine Mystique. And she didn’t stop there, but went on to advocate for better balance between work and family life with her book Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family, as well as finding time to pen a memoir, Life So Far. Betty passed away at home in 2006 due to a heart attack on her eighty-fifth birthday, but her life continues to inspire women the world over.

It’s been a lot of fun making the revolution.

Betty Friedan

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women Writers by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

EMMA GOLDMAN: RADICAL RHETORICIAN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Goldman

Teenage immigrant Emma Goldman had escaped from Russia in 1885 after witnessing the wholesale slaughter of the idealist political rebel anarchists who called themselves the Nihilists. Two years later in America, the young woman “born to ride the whirlwinds” as someone once said, saw it happen again with the new trial and killings of the Haymarket anarchists who had opposed Chicago’s power elite. Rather than scare her off the politics of idealism forever, young Emma was drawn even more toward the kind of political passion that risked death for principles. She “devoured every line on anarchism I could get,” she notes in her autobiography Living My Life, “and headed for New York City, command central in the 1890s for radicals of many stripes.”

In New York, Emma met one of the anarchists whose writing she’d been devouring, Johann Most, who encouraged her to develop her gift for public speaking. Emma worked as a practical nurse in New York’s ghettos where she saw the price women paid for want of any birth control. Soon she was taking to the soapbox to air her views on this lack of available contraception and the resulting reliance on back-room abortions: “Thanks to this Puritan tyranny, the majority of women soon find themselves at the ebb of their physical resources. Ill and worn, they are utterly unable to give their children even elementary care. That, added to economic pressure, forces many women to risk utmost danger rather than continue to bring forth life.” Her campaign reached the ears of Margaret Sanger and influenced the development of a national birth control campaign.

But birth control was only one of her bailiwicks; what she was really advocating was anarchism: a classless, governmentless society made up of small groups in free, humanistic cooperation with one another. She had a tremendous gift for verbal rhetoric. Nicknamed “Red Emma,” she traveled the United States lecturing—often six months of the year, five nights a week—making frequent stops at Mabel Dodge’s infamous salon, and publishing her monthly magazine, Mother Earth, a vehicle for her twin concerns of women’s liberation and the rights of the working class. Reporter Nellie Bly was delighted to note that “Red Emma” was very pretty “with a saucy turned up nose and very expressive blue-gray eyes…(brown hair) falling loosely over her forehead, full lips, strong white teeth, a mild, pleasant voice, with a fetching accent.”

In 1893, she was jailed for a year for exhorting a crowd of unemployed men who believed “it was their sacred right” to take bread if they were starving. Later she came to believe that the ends do not always justify the means, and she repudiated violence as a tool to create change. She continued to mesmerize crowds with her impassioned speeches until 1917 when her opposition to World War I led to a two-year imprisonment. She was subsequently deported, the Justice Department fearful of allowing her to continue her antiwar campaign: “She is womanly, a remarkable orator, tremendously sincere, and carries conviction. If she is allowed to continue here she cannot help but have great influence.”

She continued to exercise influence from abroad; in 1922 Nation magazine proclaimed that she was one of “the twelve greatest living women.” She was allowed back into the country after her death when the government decided that her silenced corpse posed no risk, and she was buried in Chicago with the Haymarket martyrs.

“The more opposition I encountered, the more I was in my element and the more caustic I became with my opponents.”

— Emma Goldman

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

MICHELLE OBAMA: FEARLESS FLOTUS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Obama

Michelle Obama not only served as the 44th First Lady of the United States of America, but is also an American lawyer, writer, and the founder of Let’s Move!, an initiative towards the prevention of child obesity, as well as an advocate of civil rights for women and LGBT people.

Michelle Robinson was born in Chicago in 1964. In 1985 she graduated from Princeton, and in 1988 she completed a law degree at the prestigious Harvard Law School, after which she worked at Sidley Austin, a Chicago corporate law firm of high repute. Though Sidley didn’t usually take on first-year law students as associates, in 1989 they asked Michelle to mentor a summer associate named Barack Obama. When he finished his term as an associate and returned to Harvard, their relationship continued long distance, and in 1992 they married. At the same time, Michelle was evaluating in those years whether a career in corporate law was really what she wanted. Corporate law, while lucrative, was not what she’d intended when she started college. She lost her father to kidney complications in 1991, which furthered her process of reflection; she was later quoted saying by the New York Times, “I wanted to have a career motivated by passion and not just money.” She left Sidley Austin and went to work for Chicago, first for the Mayor and then providing her expertise to Valerie Jarrett, the head of the planning and development department. In that position she was working for job creation and to bring new life to Chicago’s neighborhoods, and after this turning point, she never looked back.

After spending a few years working in hospital administration for the University of Chicago Hospitals, Michelle became First Lady of the United States when her husband won the presidential election of 2008. In this role, she advocated for military families, working women balancing family with career, and arts and arts education. Michelle also supported LGBT civil rights, working with her husband for the passage of the Employment Non- Discrimination Act and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. In 2010, she began to take steps to create a healthier lifestyle for the youth of America with the “Let’s Move” campaign to prevent child obesity. These are just a few of many of her accomplishments as the first African American First Lady in the White House. Now that she has left it, she is preparing to continue her advocacy work and write a planned memoir as she and the Obama family settle into their new residence in Washington, D.C., where they will remain until daughter Sasha Obama finishes high school.

“There are still many causes worth sacrificing for, so much history yet to be made.”

— Michelle Obama

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

DAISY BATES: FIGHTING THE SYSTEM AND WINNING!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_Bates_(activist)

The image of an eight-year-old black girl in her perfectly starched blouse and skirt walking through a gauntlet of hatred to go to school was etched in the minds of every American in the sixties. Everyone was touched by the grace and dignity shown by the young girl who was spat at and heckled, as cameras shoved in her face recorded it for all posterity. Activists for integration won a huge victory that day and with an even greater strength and resolve went on to flatten every segregation wall that presented itself.

Daisy Bates was one of the civil rights warriors who were first called into action in the fight for desegregation. Born in 1920, Daisy was adopted into a loving family in Little Rock, Arkansas, and never knew what happened to her birth mother until the taunts of schoolchildren made the eight-year-old question her adoptive mother. On that day, she found out that her mother had been raped and murdered by three white men who then dumped her body in a pond. Her father left town to escape having the crime pinned on him.

When Daisy was twenty-one, she married L.C. Bates, a black man who had been educated as a journalist. Together, they took over a Little Rock newspaper, the Arkansas State Press, and turned it into a platform for “the people,” reporting crimes committed against blacks that the white paper ignored. Daisy worked as a reporter, covering with complete honesty, for example, the cold- blooded murder of a black soldier by military police. The white business community was outraged over the State Press’ coverage: They feared the army would leave their town and withdraw all advertising. However, the Bates’ brave courage in the face of brutality to blacks curtailed these crimes, and Little Rock became a more liberated town despite itself.

Then the movement toward desegregation heated up, with Daisy Bates right in the thick of things. The Supreme Court had declared segregation of schools unconstitutional in May of 1954, giving Southern schools the chance to describe how and when they would make the required changes. The local school board had responded by saying that they would take on the notion of integration “gradually.” Little Rock’s black community was up in arms about the foot dragging and after butting their heads in the many stony-faced meetings, they opted to take matters into their own hands. The state and local NAACP decided that they would try to enroll the students into the segregated schools and build up cases of denied admission in order to create a true challenge to the policy of gradualism. Daisy Bates, as president of the NAACP in Little Rock, worked with the State Press and other papers to publicize this flouting of the Supreme Court’s ruling. Finally, in 1957, they decided to integrate the high school, come hell or high water. The children who would put their bodies on the line would become famous overnight as “Daisy’s children” and suffer personal agony for the cause of racial injustice.

When nine children were selected to attend the “whites only” Central High School, Daisy acted as their escort and protector. Answering a poll screened by school officials, the group of young heroes and sheroes consisted of: Carlotta Walls, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Ernest Green, Terrence Roberts, Gloria Ray, Minnijean Brown, Jefferson Thomas, and Elizabeth Eckford. When Little Rock school superintendent Virgil Blossom decreed that no adults could accompany the black students, Daisy called all of their homes and told them there would be a change of plans.

Elizabeth Eckford’s family had no telephone, so she showed up on opening day—to be faced by an angry white mob who also attacked the reporters and photographers. The mob siege lasted seventeen days until 1,000 paratroopers showed up in response to orders from the White House to carry through the order of legal integration of the school.

However, the students were on their own once inside, prey to taunts, shoving, and threats of violence. Daisy Bates continued to protect and advise the children throughout the ordeal, accompanying them to every meeting with a school official when racial incidents happened. The struggle at Little Rock was only the first in a round of actions that ultimately led to full legal desegregation. Though difficult, the victory was entirely to Daisy and her “children” who showed the nation that you could stand up to hatred and ignorance with honesty and dignity. You can fight a losing battle and win.

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

YOLANDA KING AND ATTALLAH SHABAZZ: PASSING ON THE TORCH

https://dl.library.ucla.edu/islandora/object/edu.ucla.library.specialCollections.latimes:2258

The daughters of two very different civil rights warriors, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, have recently paired up to represent the next generation of activism. Although Yolanda King and Attallah (Arabic for gift of god) Shabazz were raised in different faiths and from different philosophical points of view, the commonalities override the dissimilarities. Both lost their fathers to assassins as children under the public eye, and both desired to escape the attention and live their own lives. Yolanda and Attallah grew into two creative spirits for whom the arts provide release, solace, and strength. They were wary of each other upon meeting in New York City where they were both trying to start acting careers. It wasn’t long, however, before a bond was forged and they started working on a play together, “Stepping into Tomorrow,” a musical dramedy with a powerful message of empowerment for youth. The play began a career of collaboration and activism in which both Yolanda and Attallah travel extensively lecturing on civil rights, the importance of the arts, and the legacy of their fathers. In Yolanda King’s words, “I see these responsibilities not as a burden, but as an extension of who I am.”

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

BARBARA MCCLINTOCK: GENE GENIE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock

When geneticist Barbara McClintock presented her findings about morphing genes in 1951 after a ten-year scientific study, the result was what is commonly known as a “roof job.” Her peers just didn’t get it; it went right over their heads. A pack of rabid Darwinists, her colleagues preferred to keep to the accepted notions of the day, that genetic change was random in the evolution of a species. Undeterred, Barbara went back to the drawing board and the sixty-hour-a-week lab schedule she set for herself. She preferred the relative peace of her lab to people, preferred corn to fruit flies (the research subject du jour) and she preferred to not publish her work, figuring it would be too much for her uptight colleagues to handle. As it turns out, Barbara McClintock was right an awful lot of the time.

Even as a young child, Barbara McClintock was content in her own company, pursuing her own interests. An avid reader, she was also quite a tomboy, preferring cards and engines to dolls and pots and pans, having no truck with other little girls and the sugar and spice routine. She quickly found her thing—science—and pursued it with a single-minded relentlessness that served her well through the years. Despite the displeasure of her parents, Barbara chose agricultural science as her field of study at Cornell. She performed brilliantly and was asked to stay on for the graduate program in genetics, where she earned a PhD.

She then began to teach and do research, so far ahead of the pack that she became one of only a handful of scientists in the world to first realize chromosomes were the foundation of heredity and to work from this vantage point and understanding. Indeed, she was the scientist to discover the nucleolar organizer within the structure of the chromosome that was the indicator of order during cell division. It would be thirty years after her discovery before science was able to explain her finding in terms of molecular biology. Despite this remarkable beginning to her career and an outstanding record as a genetic researcher, Barbara was never given a promotion while at Cornell. She left for Cold Harbor Laboratory, where her work so impressed everyone that she was elected to the national Academy of Sciences in 1944 and went on to become president of the Genetics Society of America. The first woman to do so!

Not one to rest on her laurels, Barbara McClintock continued with her groundbreaking work, racking up all kinds of awards, prizes, and firsts. She became the first woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine, and has been called the most important geneticist of the late twentieth century. She worked at Cold Harbor until her death in 1983 in the lab where she discovered what everyone wasn’t ready to see.

It might seem unfair to reward a person for having so much fun over the years.”

— Barbara McClintock

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.

KAREN HORNEY: FACING THE FATHER COMPLEX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Horney

Freud frequently tarried overlong on theories of hysteria and other so-called female neuroses. The first critic to respond to these theories was Karen Horney who challenged his bias against women, stressing the social rather than the biological factors in feminine psychology. She also argued that neurosis is not inevitable, but arises from childhood situations that are preventable. She met with much opposition for her sensitivity toward the plight of the patient, and her peers were appalled at her cheek in daring to criticize the “Big Daddy” of psychoanalysis.

But she was no stranger to making her own way. Born in Germany in 1885, Karen Danielson surprised her blustery and abusive Norse sea-captain father by insisting on not only seeking higher education, but studying medicine, whether he liked it or not. At university, Karen met a law student, Oscar Horney, and they married in 1909. While earning her medical degree from the rigorous University of Berlin—her thesis was on traumatic psychoses—she had three daughters in four years.

Undergoing psychoanalytic training from 1914 to 1918, she first opened a private practice while a faculty member at the Berlin Institute, where she applied a special affinity for trauma victims while working with shell-shocked veterans of World War I. Beginning around this time, Karen sought to overturn Freud’s theory of penis envy, a tired theory at best, reasoning that it is not the penis women envy, but the privilege modern society accords men in contrast to the suppression of women. Horney posited an alternate theory: the castration complex in young girls is brought on by their inability to follow their father’s path, when doors open for men are slammed shut for women. Her theory was fairly well received and established her as a force to be reckoned with.

Karen’s independent streak didn’t end with her neo- Freudian theorizing; she divorced her husband in 1926 and emigrating to Chicago, cofounding the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute was next on her plate where she taught, did clinical research, and began a career as an author, publishing The Neurotic Personality of Our Time to high praise and Our Inner Conflict, a book about denial of pain that sounds like it would do fine in the popular self-help world we live in today. Karen Horney refused to agree with the accepted psychoanalytic gospel of the day and continued to emphasize the effect of environment upon the psyche. “There is no such thing as a normal psychology that holds for all people,” she proclaimed.

Perhaps Horney’s optimism was the biggest division between her and the rest of the psychoanalytic pack. She believed people could help themselves. She had a severe parting of the ways with her peers when she suggested that patients need not live a life of pain, a Freudian notion, and that people can work out of their neuroses. She was booted out of the New York Psychoanalysis Society and Institute in 1941 upon the publication of her book, New Ways in Psychoanalysis, which laid out a series of refutations and refinements of Freud’s doctrine. Undaunted, she founded her own institute, taking several other free-thinkers with her.

Karen Horney was way ahead of her time. Had she lived fifty more years, she would be safely ensconced in a comfy chair across from Oprah Winfrey, where her self-help positivity would be fully embraced. Psychoanalytic pioneer and humanist, Karen Horney shows us that even the most sacred of cows need to be led off to pasture, especially if they’re wrong! Here’s to the shero who deep-sixed penis envy!

“Life itself still remains a very effective therapist.”

— Karen Horney

This excerpt is from The Book of Awesome Women by Becca Anderson, which is available now through Amazon and Mango Media.