Nzinga (1582-1663) was the queen of Ndongo and Matamba, historical states in what is now Angola. This altogether remarkable woman seized the throne and held it for 40 years, successfully resisting Portuguese colonialism. She also created a crack army, waged war and fomented rebellion, played the European powers off against each other, kept male ...
Ada Byron Lovelace (1815-1852) was one of the most remarkable visionaries in the history of science. Her friend Charles Babbage invented the Analytical Engine to crunch numbers; it was Ada who realized that it could do much more. She saw that a mechanical device---a computer, if you will---could solve all kinds of analytical problems, as long as ...
Chalchiuhtlicue, whose name means "She of the Jade Skirt," is the Aztec goddess of rivers, lakes, seas, springs, and all running water. She is traditionally depicted as an elegant woman in blue-green clothes, with her skirt flowing out to form the river of life---and of death, for Chalchiuhtlicue also presided over the fourth sun of creation, ...
The pop culture image of Jezebel bears almost no resemblance to the woman who was queen of Israel in the 9th century BCE. There is nothing remotely sexy about Jezebel in the Bible; she's just mean. By the same token, the biblical account was written by people who utterly loathed Jezebel and everything she stood for (Baal, Astarte, foreigners, ...
Poor Freyja! More than any other goddess, she's been subjected to the strippers-with-swords treatment in contemporary art. But those deformed creatures with giant implants and chainmail bikinis bear little resemblance to the great Freyja, Lady of the Vanir, chief goddess of the Norse pantheon. Freyja is certainly very beautiful---she is, among ...
Persephone was a pre-Greek goddess who got drafted into the Olympic pantheon along with her mother Demeter. It's a fair bet that she was the Queen of the Underworld long before the Greeks, with their usual penchant for male supremacy, added Hades to the mix and changed the story around. The Greek version is of course familiar: Persephone is the ...
Boudicca (first century; died around 61 CE) was one tough lady. This British queen fought a war of resistance against the Romans, and though she lost, her heroism has echoed down through the ages. The two costume plates in our main illustration are based on ancient descriptions of her appearance, and that's what we're using for our design. The ...
Madam C.J. Walker (1867-1919) was America's first great female entrepreneur. Her rags-to-riches story still mesmerizes: born Sarah Breedlove, the daughter of slaves, she built a business empire by developing and marketing a line of hair care products for African-American women. (She did not invent the hot comb or chemical straighteners, as is ...
Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is quite possibly the most celebrated female artist in history. The elements of her personal style have become iconic: long skirt, Mexican blouse, rebozo, flowers on her head. (Unibrow and faint moustache, too, but it's up to you whether you want to include that.) For the costume, we decided to use the colors she's ...
Athena is easily the best-known and most popular Greek goddess. Yet none of the so-called "Athena" costumes for sale out there look remotely like her. Come on, people! She's Athena! Helmet! Shield! Spear! There were two very important statues of Athena on the acropolis in ancient Athens. The colossal statue inside the Parthenon was 38 feet ...
Isis is the Egyptian goddess of magic and motherhood, but putting it that way rather understates the case. Isis is simply one of the all-time great goddesses of world civilization. Worshiped by the Egyptians for thousands of years, she also became supremely important in the Hellenistic world. She was everything: mother, savior, redeemer, ...
The Queen of Sheba (ca. 950 BCE?) is claimed by both Ethiopia and Yemen. It’s not impossible that both are right; the ancient realm of Saba (Sheba) may have spanned the Red Sea. Or perhaps she was really the Queen of Meroë, and the name "Sheba" referred to something else entirely. The chronology is also rather difficult...but then again, ...
Demeter is the Greek goddess of agriculture and the bountiful earth. It is she who makes the crops grow---except for those months when her daughter Persephone is in the Underworld, for then Demeter weeps and leaves the earth bare. Together Demeter and Persephone represent the cycle of life and death, and their saga was the basis of the ...
Mama Quilla is the Inca goddess of the moon. Married to Inti, the sun god, she is the female half of the divine equation. Before the Spaniards got to work smashing and melting things, Mama Quilla was worshipped in temples with walls of pure silver. Silver is her metal: in Inca mythology, silver is the "rain of the moon" (or tears of the moon), ...
Pele is the living, breathing volcano goddess of Hawaii. Her home is Kilauea, which is also her body. The name "Pele" means molten lava; the mountain's flanks are her flanks, the drops of airborne lava are her tears, and the shreds of volcanic glass that form are the strands of her hair. The red-blossomed ohia, which is one of the first plants ...
Hatshepsut (ca. 1508-1458 BCE) was an extremely successful pharaoh whose reign was full of accomplishments: important trade missions, gorgeous architecture, a booming economy. But the thing she's most famous for, at least nowadays, is that she had herself depicted as male on her monuments. There she is, King Hatshepsut, striding across the ...
Tin Hinan (4th century) was the legendary queen of the Tuareg people, the matrilineal desert-dwelling Berbers who are famous for their blue clothing---and for the fact that it's their men, rather than their women, who wear face veils. Tin Hinan is credited as the first leader and founding matriarch of the tribe, and is revered by the Tuareg today ...
You would think that the person who discovered nuclear fission would be one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century. You would think she'd be a household name. But unless you're a geek or a history buff, it's possible that you've never even heard of Lise Meitner (1878-1968). Meitner was born in Austria at a time when it was ...
Before Mulan, there was Fu Hao (ca. 1200 BCE). This Shang Dynasty queen was a remarkable figure: not only was she King Wu Ding's wife and the mother of his children, but she was also his chief military commander. It seems to us like a strange combination, but Fu Hao was a very successful general, personally leading thousands of troops into ...
Enheduanna (ca. 2300 BCE) has been called the Shakespeare of Sumerian literature. It might be more accurate to call Shakespeare the Enheduanna of English literature. Enheduanna is the earliest known author in the history of human civilization. She is the first author whose name has come down to us, the first author to write in the first ...
Why yes, that is a snake on her head. Ixchel is the Maya goddess of the moon, with powers over fertility, water, medicine, midwifery, and weaving. Her name may have originally meant something like "Lady Rainbow," reflecting the way the ancient Maya associated the moon with life-giving rainwater. The snake in her hair is the cosmic serpent, ...
Empress Carlota (1840-1927) is one of the most intriguing and tragic figures in Mexican history. Born Charlotte of Belgium, she married Archduke Maximilian of Austria when she was only seventeen years old. In 1863 the young couple were invited to become Emperor and Empress of Mexico. Unfortunately, the person doing the inviting was Napoleon III ...
Himiko (3rd century) was the first recorded ruler of Japan. The Chinese chroniclers described her as a great shaman queen who united 30 warring clans, established the imperial throne, sent diplomatic envoys to China, and ruled over her people with the aid of "magic and sorcery." It seems that male dominance had not yet come to Japan. The ...
There's bling and then there's bling. And then there's Queen Puabi (ca. 2600 BCE). When Leonard Woolley excavated her tomb at Ur in the 1920s, the world gasped. So much gold! So many jewels! Her headdress became legendary: a massive thing of gold leaves and flowers and ribbons, all covering what was apparently an enormous bouffant wig. And ...
In the relentlessly patriarchal society of New Spain, there was no place for a girl genius. Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) was a prodigy: she could read and write by the age of three, was fluent in Latin by the age of ten, and by her late teens was famous for her brilliance in mathematics, theology, Greek logic, and history. Yet there was ...
Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 973-1014) was one of the world's great literary geniuses. She wrote the first novel in history---The Tale of Genji---and with it created not only a timeless masterpiece of Japanese literature, but an entirely new art form. The photos above show performers garbed as Murasaki: the style is elaborate Heian period court ...
Eleanor of Aquitaine is famed for her great patronage of the arts, and one of the finest poets at her court may have been her own sister-in-law. Marie de France (ca. 1130-1200) was a high-ranking Anglo-Norman noblewoman whose precise identity is unknown. She referred to herself briefly in her poems ("My name is Marie and I am from France"), but ...
Lady Six Monkey (11th century) was a Mixtec warrior queen whose story is known from the Mixtec Group Codices. She and her arch nemesis, Lord Eight Deer, loomed large in the legends of Oaxaca for many centuries. (People were named after their birthdates, by the way.) Mixtec society was remarkably gender-equal, and both males and females could ...
We don't know her name. And unless somebody deciphers Linear A, we probably never will. All we know is that she existed, and that her world was beautiful. The centerpiece of our main illustration is an artist's recreation of life in the queen's apartments at the Palace of Knossos around 1500 BCE (bottom center). Note, however, that we've had ...
"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution." Did Emma Goldman (1869-1940) really say that? In a word, no. The sentiment was certainly hers, and in her memoirs she told of being admonished for dancing when she was a young radical; but the actual words? No. The quote (or rather, misquote) is best thought of as a paraphrase of ...
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