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.

MUZOON ALMELLEHAN: CARRYING THE WORLD ON HER BACK

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

Learning that you must leave everything behind is a tough hurdle to overcome in life. Muzoon was told she had to flee her home in Syria when she was fourteen years old, and to only take what she could. She decided to fill her bag with books, knowing that even though it would be heavy to carry, it would be worth it to save her education. Living in the Jordanian refugee camps was difficult, but Muzoon let her passion for learning be a beacon of hope. The school in the camp was empty, and Muzoon found that it was due to all of the girls being married. She decided then and there to promote education and stand up for these girls’ rights despite the fear in everyone’s hearts and their attitudes toward arranged marriage. She worked to educate the girls’ parents to let them study, and let education be a powerful tool. She was then approached by UNICEF and began to expand her crusade. Muzoon proves that circumstances do not have to dictate the future, and the power of one can spark a movement of change.

“If young people are not educated, who will rebuild our country?”

—Muzoon Almellehan

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

SUSANNA CLARKE alternative history fantasist extraordinaire

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

Susanna Clarke, born All Saints’ Day, 1959, in Nottingham, England, is
best known for her debut novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004), an alternative history/fantasy novel involving competing ideas of magic that won the Hugo, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards, as well as being named Time magazine’s Best Novel of the Year. In 2015, a highly regarded BBC primetime television adaptation of the novel in seven parts was released in both the US and the UK. In the story, Clarke touches on the edges of reason vs. madness, what
it is to be English, and traditional fairy lore; the narrative draws on the styles of nineteenth-century writers like Wilde and Austen with its arch wit and scenes of society manners.

A minister’s daughter, Clarke earned a BA in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford in 1981. She worked in publishing for several years before teaching English in Italy and Spain for a couple of years. Upon returning to England in 1992, she went to live in a house looking out over the North
Sea; soon she began to work on her novel in her spare time while employed as
a cookbook editor for Simon & Schuster for ten years. To develop her writing skills, she took a five-day workshop with science fiction and fantasy authors Colin Greenland and Geoff Ryman. Participants were expected to bring an original short story; she extracted a section from her novel for the purpose. Greenland found “The Ladies of Grace Adieu” so inspiring that he secretly
sent it to noted fantasy author Neil Gaiman, who later said of it, “It was terrifying from my point of view to read this first short story that had so much assurance…. It was like watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time and she plays a sonata.” Clarke learned of this only when anthology editor Nielsen Hayden rang offering to publish the story in Starlight 1 (1996), alongside well-known F/SF writers. She agreed to it, and the anthology went
on to win a 1997 World Fantasy Award; she published two more original short fiction works in the next two Starlight anthologies.

Meanwhile, Clarke tried to keep to a daily schedule of rising at dawn to work on her novel for three hours before beginning her paid editorial labors, but it was a struggle. Along the way, she and Greenland fell in love and moved in together. Eight years on in her writing process, she was beginning to despair, but in 2001, after two rejections, her first literary agent sold the unfinished work to Bloomsbury and even managed to gain a million-pound advance for her. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell went on to sell over a million copies, spending eleven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. In 2006, she followed it up with The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, a collection of her short stories; as with her novel, they are set in an England full of real magic. But while the novel focuses on the relationship of the two male title characters, these stories focus on the power women gain through magic. Ill health has delayed new releases from Susanna Clarke, but as of this writing, there are reports that Clarke’s next work, expected in 2020, will be an otherworldly fantasy novel called Piranesi; the title character inhabits a House with a multitude of rooms—and secrets, some of which encompass “a watery labyrinth.”

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

SACRED SCRIBES THROUGHOUT THE AGES

tehzeebkazm on pixabay.com

In 1700 BCE, Amat-Mamu was an Assyrian priestess-scribe who for forty years made her living in a cloister of 140 other such women. The clay tablets on which they wrote have survived to this day. Three hundred years before she and her sisterhood were recording the spiritual beliefs of the day, the priestess Kubatum in Ur wrote and performed ritual enactments of holy erotic poetry such as the sweet—literally—lines incorporated into the Bible’s sexy Song of Solomon: “Lion, let me give you my caresses…wash me with honey.”

Marie de France was a French poet and the first women to write in a European vernacular. Many scholars regard her as the greatest woman writer of the medieval era because of her religious writing and short fiction, which preceded Chaucer and Boccaccio. Her identity is enshrouded in mystery, perhaps for her own protection. We hope that a modern scholar-sleuth will find this enigma a potent lure and challenge and will make her works and her identity accessible to us all.

J is believed to have been a tenth-century female Israelite of noble descent
who wrote several narratives that are embedded in the Old Testament, though they were written six centuries before various scribes cobbled them together. The women she wrote about—King David’s lover Bathsheba, Rebecca, and Tamar—come alive in her stories. While “J” the person remains a cipher, and a very controversial one among biblical experts, her identity and authenticity have recently been recognized by such a noteworthy as Harold Bloom, and a volume of the J writings has been published.

Perpetua was an early Christian Carthaginian, citizen of the Holy Roman Empire, and member of the Montanist sect, which espoused equality for women. She converted her best friend, an African slave named Felicity, and both were jailed for soliciting their faith. In prison, Perpetua began to have visions and to write them down. Though facing death, she reaffirmed her faith in court and was executed by a combination of wild beasts and gladiators in a Roman circus. Her diary, a record of her trials and her unswerving faith, survives her.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a most practical mystic, wrote The Woman’s Bible,
no small feat. This powerful text is both a testament to and a feminist critique of the male bias in the Judeo-Christian tradition; some sentiments were echoed in the “Declaration of Sentiments” printed for the Seneca Falls suffragette convention of July 19, 1848. “Resolved, That woman is man’s equal—was intended to be so by the Creator, and the highest good of the race demands that she should be recognized as such.”

I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned, and reading passages some one long gone has called to my attention.

Helene Hanff, on the joys of secondhand books, from 84, Charing Cross Road

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

LIZZIE VELASQUEZ: BRAVE HEART

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_Vel%C3%A1squez

Lizzie Velasquez was born prematurely, weighing in at less than three pounds, in 1989 in Austin, Texas, and was diagnosed with a genetic disorder that leaves her unable to gain weight. To this day she has never weighed in at more 64 pounds, despite frequent and carefully timed intake of food. She is also blind in her right eye and vision-impaired in her left eye. In 2006, when she was 17, Lizzie was named the “World’s Ugliest Woman”; ever since then, she has been a spokesperson against bullying. In January 2014 she gave a TED talk titled, “How Do YOU Define Yourself”. Her YouTube channel has garnered 54 million views. Lizzie has also self-published a book with her mother called Lizzie Beautiful: The Lizzie Velasquez Story, and has also written two other books that offer personal stories and advice to teenagers. A documentary film about her life called A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story premiered at SXSW in 2015 and later aired on Lifetime. Lizzie continues to be a motivational speaker and author.

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

AMAL ALAMUDDIN CLOONEY: ADVOCATE FOR INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE

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

Amal was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1978; when she was two, the Alamuddin family left Lebanon for Buckinghamshire, England. In 1991 her father returned to Lebanon, while Amal and her three siblings stayed with their mother, a foreign editor of a Pan-Arab newspaper who also founded a PR company. Amal graduated with a degree in jurisprudence from Oxford in 2000, and continued to study law at New York University. While at NYU, she clerked for a semester in the office of Sonia Sotomayor, who was at the time a U.S. Court of Appeals judge for the Second Circuit, long before she rose to become an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. She went on to pass the bar in 2002 in the U.S. and in 2010 for England and Wales; she went on to a judicial clerkship at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, and continued at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former nation of Yugoslavia and at the Office of the Prosecutor at the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon. In 2010, Amal returned to Britain to practice in London as a barrister. In 2013, she was appointed to various UN commissions, both as an advisor to Special Envoy Kofi Annan on Syria, and as Counsel to UN human rights rapporteur Ben Emmerson on the 2013 Drone Inquiry into the use of drones in counter-terrorism operations. In the last few years, she has taught at schools including Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute, UNC– Chapel Hill, New York’s New School, The Hague Academy of International Law, and the University of London, on interesting subjects such as international criminal law and human rights litigation. Amal is a lawyer for the people and has worked on many cases, including the effort for recognition of the Armenian Genocide of 1915; she cares about speaking for the voiceless and fighting for what is fair. She also co-founded the Clooney Foundation for Justice in 2016 with her husband, actor George Clooney.

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

ASIEH AMINI: TAKING ACTION FOR A CAUSE

Photograph by Koos Breukel for The New Yorker

Asieh Amini is a renowned expatriate Iranian poet and journalist living in Norway. From her birth in 1973 until 1979, she lived a fairly privileged life, as her landed-gentry family was well-to-do and employed servants; but they lost much of their wealth during the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Besides adapting to her family becoming no more than middle class, young Amini despised the fact that females now had to wear the mandatory black hijab covering. As a child, she thought the hijab was ugly and would cry when she was required to wear it like other girls. In 1993, Amini started journalism school at Tabataba’i University in Teheran. While still just a freshman, she started writing for the hardline daily Kayhan, then wrote for Iran, a larger newspaper. Iran started publishing a youth supplement and tapped Amini to be the cultural editor of the 28-page section; this was an unusually high position for a woman to have in Iran, and there was pushback from male staff who didn’t like her being in charge of men as a section editor – men older than she was, no less. She refused to give in and focused on working hard, up to 14 hours a day.

As the political winds shifted in Iran, censorship relaxed somewhat, and more young women started to work in the field of journalism. Amini worked at a paper that covered women’s affairs, though she opposed the concept of separating news by gender; then she became a freelancer, covering Kurdish demonstrations and a Shirazi earthquake. In 2006, she started investigating killings of young women after learning of the horrific execution of a 16-year-old girl. She worked to publish what she discovered, but lost a job at one newspaper and was turned down by various others. The editor-in-chief who fired her said it was impossible for their paper to publish the story, since she was fighting Sharia law and the Iranian judicial system. Finally a women’s journal agreed to publish an abridged version of the story. Amini soon learned of a 19-year-old young woman named Leyla with the mental age of an 8-year-old child who had been abused as well as prostituted by her mother since childhood and was sentenced to die by hanging. Amini wrote about and advocated for her, gaining international attention, which at last led to a new trial for Leyla and after that a safe place for Leyla to live and be cared for. In the course of what she then thought of as organizing for children’s rights, Amini learned about stonings, which were still going on in secret even though they had been officially illegal since 2002.

When she discovered that the most hardline judges in Iran were continuing to sentence women and others to death by stoning because they thought they answered to a higher authority than the law of the land, Amini co- created the “Stop Stoning Forever” campaign in 2006. Her role was to amass evidence that stonings were still taking place. She worked ceaselessly with her group and managed to find 14 people who had been sentenced to be stoned; then they reached out for international support, even going so far as smuggling facts to Amnesty International, which put the information into the public eye, even back in Iran. In 2007 she was detained in prison for five days following a silent women’s rights sit-in at a courthouse; after that, it became clear that she was under surveillance. At last she fled with her daughter to Sweden in 2009 after a warning that several female prisoners had been interrogated about her and that she would likely soon be among the many “disappeared”. She moved to Norway and pursued her longtime interest in writing poetry, and she is presently working on a new documentary book while completing a Master’s degree in Equality and Diversity at NTNU.

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

HILDA SOLIS: PIONEERING POLITICIAN

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

Hilda Solis was born in 1957 and raised in La Puente, CA; her Nicaraguan and Mexican immigrant parents had met in citizenship class and married in 1953. Her father had been a Teamsters shop steward in Mexico; he again organized for the union at the Quemetco battery recycling plant, but his efforts for the workers did not prevent him from being poisoned there by lead. Hilda’s mother was also active in the union during her years working at Mattel once all the children were in school.

At La Puente High School, students were not necessarily expected to try to better themselves through higher education; one of Hilda’s guidance counselors told her mother, “Your daughter is not college material. Maybe she should follow the career of her older sister and become a secretary.” Fortunately, another counselor supported Hilda’s applying to college, and went so far as to visit her at her house to help her fill out a college application. Hilda earned a bachelor’s in political science from California State Polytechnic University and went on to obtain a Master’s in public administration at USC.

Solis interned and edited a newsletter in the Carter Administration’s White House Office of Hispanic Affairs. In Washington, DC, she met her future husband, Sam Sayyad. She returned to the west coast, and in 1982 became the Director of the California Student Opportunity and Access Program, which helped disadvantaged young people prepare for college. Friends urged her to consider running for elective office, and after a successful run in 1985, she served for some years on the Rio Hondo Community College District. Solis also became State Senator Art Torres’ chief of staff. In 1992 she ran for the California State Assembly and won with the support of Barbara Boxer, Gloria Molina, and her mother, who notably fed her campaign volunteers on homemade burritos.

In 1994, Art Torres was nominated to a statewide position as insurance commissioner, and Solis ran for and won the State Senate seat he vacated. She was the first woman of Hispanic descent ever to serve in the State Senate as well as the youngest member of the Senate at the time. She authored domestic violence prevention bills, and she stood up for workers with a bill to raise the minimum wage from $4.25 to $5.75, which was massively opposed by business and vetoed by Governor Pete Wilson. Solis didn’t let that stop her; she successfully led a ballot initiative drive, using $50,000 from her own campaign money. When the initiative passed, others knew that she was someone to be reckoned with. Similar initiatives were enacted in other states on the wave of this victory.

Solis worked to enact an environmental justice law to protect low-income and minority neighborhoods from being repeatedly targeted for new landfills and pollution sources, and in 2000, she received the JFK Library Profile in Courage Award for this work, the first woman ever to win it. She also called out garment sweatshop operators for their violations of labor conditions, and was an advocate for the people on education and health care issues; 2000 was also the year that she successfully ran for Congress. In 2008, she became the first Hispanic woman to serve in the U.S. Cabinet when President Obama tapped her for the position of Labor Secretary. After serving for the duration of his first term, she decided to resign and returned to California, where she is presently an L.A. County Supervisor.

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

ANITA HILL: WE ALWAYS BELIEVED YOU

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

Nobody could have guessed that the televised Senate hearings on the nominations of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court would be the top-rated show of 1991. America’s collective mouth hung open in amazement
at the brouhaha that brewed up around Judge Thomas’ worthiness based on the charges of sexual harassment by one Anita Hill. The hearings catapulted the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace into the most hotly debated and analyzed topic of the day, one that still reverberates years later. Prior to Anita’s brave stand, sexual harassment was mainly swept under the industrial gray carpeting of most offices, but she singlehandedly forced it to the very center of the national agenda.

The nation and, indeed, the world, watched transfixed as the incredibly poised Anita revealed her experiences with Clarence Thomas as a coworker. With great dignity, she testified that Thomas kept after her to go out with him, referred to himself as “an individual who had a very large penis and…used a name…in pornographic material,” and asked her to see “this woman (who) has this kind of breasts that measure this size,” in a seemingly endless barrage of ludicrous and lugubrious insults to her as a fellow professional. Senate hearings, usually desert dry and devoid of tabloid titillation, suddenly featured long discussions including the terms “penis” and “pubic hair.”

The prelude to the media circus took place when the president announced his choice of “black Horatio Alger” Clarence Thomas as the Supreme Court replacement for the retiring Thurgood Marshall. Anita Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, contacted Harriet Grant, the Judiciary Committee’s nominations counsel. She told Grant that Thomas had harassed her in a sexual and inappropriate manner when she had worked as his assistant at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She had, in fact, quit the EEOC because of his behavior and gone into academia. Grant cc’d the senatorial committee on the allegations, but the Senate whipped through the approval process with nary a word about Hill’s report and prepared to vote for confirmation of Thomas. Then journalist shero Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio and New York Newsday’s Timothy Phelps broke the story wide open to a shocked public. Seven women from the House of Representatives marched in protest to the Senate building, demanding of the sheepish Senate committee to know why the committee had ignored Hill’s complaint.

Nothing in Hill’s background could have prepared her for the media onslaught. Born in 1956 as the youngest of thirteen children, she was raised in rural Oklahoma in a deeply religious family. An outstanding student, she graduated as valedictorian of her integrated high school, earned top honors in college, and was one of only eleven black students out of a class of 160 at Yale University Law School.

Even through Anita Hill had been promised immunity and total confidentiality, she appeared before the committee in a special session before the scrutiny of the nation. The Judiciary Committee was dismissive, as only Old Boys can be, of Anita Hill and her testimony, even going so far as to ask her if she was taking her revenge as the “woman scorned,” and they suggested that she was a patsy for radical liberals and feminists. While Anita’s allegations were ultimately disregarded and Clarence Thomas was voted in, Anita’s grace under pressure won many admirers who protested the Thomas appointment. The controversy remained headline news for months; polls of public opinion showed Anita Hill gaining and Bush losing points as I Believe You Anita! bumper stickers appeared on thousands of cars across America. For her outspokenness, she was awarded the Ida B. Wells Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women and named one of Glamour’s Ten Women of the Year in 1991.

Anita Hill’s courage of conviction made her a shero of the late twentieth century. In her words, “I felt I had to tell the truth. I could not keep silent.”

“You just have to tell the truth and that’s the most anyone can expect from you and if you get that opportunity, you will have accomplished something.”

— Anita Hill

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

ESTHER IBANGA: THE PEACEMAKER

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

Esther Ibanga is a Nigerian pastor and dedicated community organizer for peace in conflict-ridden regions who has received the Niwano Peace Prize for her advocacy of peace and unity in Jos, Nigeria. She was born in 1961
in Kagbu, Nigeria, the seventh of ten children, eight of them girls. Both of her parents were very religious; her father was a policeman who won awards for his honesty and bravery, and her mother went on many mission trips as part of her involvement with her church. Ibanga earned a degree in business administration in 1983 from Ahmadu Bello University, and after serving the mandatory year in the National Youth Service Corps, she went to work for
the Central Bank of Nigeria, where she eventually gained a position as a manager. She left the bank to become the first female church leader in the city of Jos, Nigeria, in 1995.

In 2010, Pastor Ibanga founded the Women Without Walls Initiative in response to the constant state of crisis in Plateau State Nigeria since 2000. WoWWI is an NGO that includes Nigerian women from all walks of life and provides advocacy, training for women in building peace, mediation between warring parties, help for people displaced within Nigeria, assistance to the poor, empowerment of women and youth, and development projects in underprivileged areas to prevent grievances from sparking violent conflicts. Her hard work and dedication has helped to restore peace between Christian and Muslim communities in Jos North, a potentially volatile flashpoint. Her approach is to empower women, both inside and outside of Nigeria, to successfully strive to advance the status of women and children of all ethnicities, religions, and political leanings – to allow women to realize themselves as “natural agents of change”.

Pastor Ibanga was the leader of a march in February 2010 to the Jos government house in protest of the Dogon Nahawa ethno-religious crisis, in which many lives, including those of women and children, had been lost; more than 100,000 women dressed in black participated. When 276 teenaged girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram terrorists from their school in Chibok, Nigeria, WoWWI joined in the Bring Back Our Girls campaign with other women leaders. Rallies crossing religious and cultural lines were held to demand that the government expedite the girls’ release. Pastor Ibanga continues to campaign for the freeing of the 113 girls who are still held captive and speaks internationally on the issue.

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