Science and Nature news
Women. They are much tougher than many give them credit for. History has known some incredibly tough and unbelievably valiant women. Just think of the names that come to mind: Joan of Arc, Amelia Earhart, Rosa Parks, and Florence Nightingale. The list goes on, too, with modern-day tough women, including the likes of athletic heroes like Diana Nyad and activists like Malala Yousafzai. The list keeps growing, too. And each woman on it shows toughness and resilience in her own impressive way.
But what about the women who don’t get all the credit? In this list, we’ll take a look at ten unbelievably badass women from history who don’t always get the accolades they deserve. Frankly, they have earned far more respect and notoriety than history has granted them. And when you read their stories below, we have no doubt that you’ll agree!
Related: Top 10 Amazing Women of the Crusades
10 Mary Read
The pirate who disguised herself as a man
There weren’t many women sailing the high seas during the Golden Age of Piracy ((1690-1730). So it was all the more notable that Mary Read did it so well. The tomboy push started early for her, too. After her half-brother died young, her mother passed her off as a boy in order to continue to receive child support from her late husband’s relatives.
Soon enough, Read had joined the British Navy and fought in battle. Eventually, she moved on to find work as a sailor. And one day in the early 18th century, her ship was raided by a group of pirates. Whether voluntarily or by force, she joined them. But very quickly, she had raised the stakes as a successful pirate queen.
She got on with the buccaneer crew of pirate John “Calico Jack” Rackham. To do so, she dressed and acted like a man—even though she was a woman. And with fellow pirate queen Anne Bonny on the ship, too, Read became a legend. For one, she got into a romantic relationship with the ship’s carpenter at one point. He got into an unrelated quarrel with another sailor, and legend has it that Read shot down the troublemaker herself. Badass!
Things ended badly for Read, but she didn’t go down without a fight. In 1720, she and Bonny both earned their spots on the list of enemies of the crown of Britain thanks to their prolific and violent piracy. One day that year, the British Navy managed to overtake their pirate ship. Calico Jack surrendered pretty quickly. Read fought tenaciously, on the other hand, but was eventually captured.
The male pirates were all sentenced to hang, and that would have been Read’s fate, too, but she was pregnant. So her hanging was postponed, and she was instead shipped off to prison. She died there in 1721 after falling ill. But her legend lives on, along with Bonny, as one of the two vicious pirate women who tried to take Britain down from the high seas.[1]
9 Frances Clayton
Women Civil War Soldiers -Educational short
When the Civil War broke out, Frances Clayton joined the Union Army so that she could fight alongside her husband. Interestingly, she was far from the only woman to fight in the Civil War. With lax record keeping, a desperate need for warm bodies to go to the front lines, and baggy uniforms that made it possible to hide one’s true identity, a decent number of women enlisted secretly and joined the battle.
However, she was one of the most vicious of them all. And she lasted the longest in battle before being outed for who she was. She fought under the name “Jack Williams” with the 4th Missouri Artillery division alongside her husband. According to later claims, Clayton fought in as many as 18 battles and was wounded in three different incidents. Unfortunately for her, Clayton’s husband died in the Battle of Stones River. Not long after that, she was outed as a woman fighting secretly and discharged from the army.
Her story bubbled up in newspapers across the country at that point. She became a minor celebrity as Union supporters and sympathizers rallied around her cause as a woman fighting for freedom. She gave a handful of newspaper interviews that helped fan those flames as well. But interestingly, after 1863, the tale of what happened to her life goes strangely cold.
One man, an Officer Rand, later told the Fort Wayne Daily Gazette that Clayton had told him about how she was thinking of doing a lecture tour about her war experiences. Those tours were incredibly lucrative in the late 19th century and would have netted her a pretty payday. But nobody ever heard from her again—at least, not under the name Frances Clayton—and it’s unclear what became of her.[2]
8 The Night Witches
The Russian Night Witches of World War II
The so-called “Night Witches” were some of the toughest women who ever lived. That was the name the Germans gave to a group of Russian women who served in the secret, all-female military division of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment during World War II. Women were officially banned from combat during the war, but that didn’t stop a woman named Marina Raskova from rising to the rank of major in Russia’s powerful army.
Raskova then turned around and convinced her superiors to allow other women to fight on behalf of the Soviet cause against the Nazis. In the end, Russian leader Joseph Stalin decided to form female combat units. And the first one created was the bomber women, who would become known as the “Night Witches.” The women were called that because they used their airplanes in a very ingenious way.
They would wait to attack German strongholds until night fell. Then, once in the sky, they’d idle their engines as they soared over their target. Thus, there was only wind noise to indicate their presence, rather than engines. And the Germans couldn’t hear them coming to defend themselves. The Nazis grew so frustrated by the swishing sound of the wind against the planes that they took to calling the women “Night Witches.” They flew in low, bombed quietly, and got the hell out of there. The swishing made it sound like they were flying around on broomsticks![3]
7 Lyudmila Pavlichenko
Lady Death: The World’s Most Deadly Female Sniper (Lyudmila Pavlichenko)
The Night Witches weren’t the only badass Russian women involved in World War II. Take the story of Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who came to be known as “Lady Death” during her day, as proof of that. Pavlichenko wasn’t content with working as a nurse or a factory drone to support the war effort. Instead, she wanted to kill Nazis. So, the Soviets found a place for her as a member of the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division.
In her role as a sniper for that crew, Pavlichenko is credited with 309 confirmed kills of Nazi soldiers and their allies during World War II. More than 300 Nazis dead at the hand of a single Russian woman! By the end of the war, she’d been promoted twice and ended her career as a lieutenant. In turn, she became the most feared female sniper in the history of battle. Yikes!
Near the end of the war, Pavlichenko traveled to the United States as a hero and even visited the White House. In doing so, she became the first-ever Soviet citizen honored by the Americans. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt welcomed her with open arms. She then went with Eleanor on a goodwill trip across the country. But not everybody was so enthralled with her!
Some people complained, crazily enough, that she didn’t wear enough makeup to their liking. But at a rally in Chicago, Pavlichenko shut down all that talk with one of the most badass quotes ever: “I am 25 years old, and I have killed 309 fascist occupants by now. Don’t you think, gentlemen, that you have been hiding behind my back for too long?” Can’t argue with that![4]
6 Manuela Sáenz
Manuela Saenz: The TRUE Story Behind The Revolutionary Heroine of South America!
Manuela Sáenz de Vergara y Aizpuru was an Ecuadorian woman who became the unlikely face of revolution in South America after getting involved with the legendary Simón Bolivar in the middle of the 19th century. She came to be known as one of the toughest women on the continent during her life. It all started in the most unlikely of ways, too.
She married an English doctor in 1817 and set out to become a socialite in Lima, Peru. But as revolution came knocking on her door, she was quick to give up the good life and fight for independence as South American colonies and territories moved to throw Spain off their backs. By 1822, she had left her husband. Over the next eight years, she took on a romantic relationship and a revolutionary allyship with Bolivar himself.
Manuela was a complete madwoman for revolution, to put it mildly. She fought viciously—and literally—for Latin American independence. She wore a colonel’s uniform in public, which was a completely unheard-of and scandalous act at the time. She had a pet bear with whom she spent a lot of time, apparently fearlessly. She fomented revolt and led violent revolutionary clashes in her free time. And she once legendarily saved Bolivar from a sure assassination.
Bolivar was so thankful that Manuela had personally snuffed out the plot on his life that he began to publicly call her the “Libertadora del libertador,” which translates to the “liberator of the liberator.” Unfortunately for her, Bolivar ended up dying in 1830, and her role in the revolution was lessened from there. But modern-day historians have finally come to realize just how important (and tough!) she was during that period of South American history.[5]
5 Ina Ramirez Perez
Woman Who Performed Caesarean Section On Herself And Survived!
Let’s go off the beaten path a bit for our next badass woman. Her name was Ina Ramirez Perez, and she wasn’t famous or remarkable in really any way. Except that she performed a cesarean section on herself, then both she and the baby lived to tell about it. Wait, WHAT?!
It was March 2000, and Perez was in a rural place in Mexico when she went into labor. She didn’t have access to a phone to contact her husband to get her to a doctor, so she did the next best thing: She decided to deliver the baby on her own. But then, the s**t really hit the fan when she realized that the baby wasn’t going to come out the natural way, and she needed to instead cut open her belly to remove her child.
After 12 hours of excruciating labor and horrific pain, she managed to cut into her own abdomen to remove the baby. Amazingly, before she lost consciousness, she somehow got the baby out of her womb. She passed out for a time from the unimaginable pain, but the baby was alive and healthy. And when Perez woke up, she was, too.
One of her young children had run a long distance into town to get help, and healthcare workers finally sprung into action. They sewed up a seven-inch incision in Perez’s stomach and then took her to the nearest hospital, which was eight hours away. At the hospital, doctors further operated on Perez to ensure that she would recover from the self-surgery.
