There are still so many fascinating women whose stories remain unsung.
Women are too often history’s silent partners, the shadows lingering behind “every great man.” Pop culture may finally have woken up to the potential offered by their unmined adventures and achievements — think Florence Foster Jenkins, Mary Queen of Scots, and Harriet Tubman — but there are still so many fascinating women whose stories remain unsung.
From a legendary pirate queen to a 19th-century journalistic sleuth to an actress-turned-ancient Empress, these are just a few examples of women whose lives defied imagination, and who we’d love to see Netflix/Amazon/HBO devote a juicy biopic to ASAP.
Freddie Oversteegen, the Nazi-killing kid
She sounds like the hero of a far-reaching slasher series, but Freddie Oversteegen was all too real. Born September 6, 1925, in the Dutch city of Haarlem, Oversteegen was just seven when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. She was still a young girl when her iconoclastic mother began sheltering Jews, dissidents, and gay people as they fled Nazi rule during the 1930s.
Her mother’s passion clearly rubbed off. Oversteegen joined the Dutch resistance when she was just 14 years old, and together with her older sister Truus carried out a pitiless campaign of sabotage against the Nazis. Looking still younger than her years with her hair in braids, Oversteegen carried a gun in her bicycle basket and shot dead an untold number of German soldiers and their Dutch collaborators. On at least one occasion, Truus seduced an SS officer and lured him into the woods so that someone from the resistance could shoot him.
“We also glued warnings across German posters in the street calling men to work in Germany,” Oversteegen later recalled. “And then we’d hurry off, on our bikes.”
Ida B. Wells, the unbelievably badass slave-turned-activist
It’s not a competition, but if it were, Ida B. Wells would leave most activists of her era in the dust. Born a slave in Mississippi in 1862, Wells became a formidable voice for change as a teacher, journalist, campaigner, and researcher after the Civil War.
In a move that predated Rosa Parks’ bus rebellion by 71 years, Wells filed an 1884 lawsuit claiming unfair treatment by a Memphis train car company. A conductor had thrown her off a first-class train, even though she had a ticket (she later wrote she’d “fastened her teeth on the back of his hand”). She won the case locally, but the ruling was eventually overturned in federal court. When three of her friends were savagely lynched in 1892, Wells redirected her energies to expose white mob violence.
Wells set out to interrogate the stated motivation behind the lynchings of Black men. Many white supporters falsely maintained that lynchings only targeted criminals, in particular, Black men who they claimed had raped white women. Throughout the 1890s Wells investigated hundreds of cases and documented her findings in articles as well as her own pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in all its Phases. An exposé she published in 1892 so enraged locals that she was driven out of Memphis, while the newspaper office she left behind was sacked and burned.
In 1895, Wells married the reputed African American lawyer Ferdinand Barnett. She remained an active campaigner while she raised their four children, calling out the white suffrage movement for their erasure of Black suffering.
Zheng Yi Sao, the pirate queen
Like so many women of her era, Zheng Yi Sao, who was born in 1775, took over her husband’s business when he died. It just so happened that her husband was a pirate. Scarcely older than 30, she took up his mantle in 1807, and for the next three years, dominated the China seas. She quickly amassed an enormous fleet of around 400 ships and came to blows with the British East India Company, as well as the Portuguese and Chinese governments. Yi Sao also found time to spark a romantic relationship with her late husband’s adoptive son Zhang Bao, who she later married.
After several years of energetic marauding, Yi Sao negotiated a surrender to the Qing authorities in 1810. This allowed her and her new beau to retain a substantial fleet — and, crucially, swerve prosecution. By the time of her surrender, Yi Sao personally commanded 24 ships and over 1400 pirates. She died in 1844 at around 68 years old, having enjoyed a peaceful life post-piracy.
Kitty Genovese, the murder victim “no one tried to save”
Kitty Genovese was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1935. Her mother moved the family to New Canaan, Connecticut, after witnessing a murder on the streets, but Genovese stayed behind. She started work as a secretary at an insurance company and took night shifts as a waitress (then manager) at Ev’s 11th Hour in Queens. She met her girlfriend Mary Ann Zielonko in a Greenwich Village nightclub a few years later, and they moved in together.
At around 2:30 a.m. one night in 1964, Genovese was walking home from work when a man approached her with a knife. She ran screaming for her apartment building but the man gave chase, caught up with her, and stabbed her outside her door. A neighbor called out his window and the attacker briefly ran away. Genovese crawled behind the building out of view. The attacker returned, stabbed her again, raped her, and stole her money. Genovese was discovered by Sophia Farrar, who screamed for the police. They arrived minutes later, but Genovese died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The police later questioned Mary Ann for six hours, devoting the vast majority of the interview to irrelevant questions about the couple’s sexual relationship.
What distinguishes Genovese’s gruesome death isn’t, sadly, its brutality. It’s the fact that according to a — since debunked — New York Times article, no one tried to stop it. On March 27, 1964, the paper ran a story with the headline “37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call The Police,” claiming that multiple neighbors heard or witnessed Genovese’s murder but did nothing to intervene. The bizarre investigation into her murder by no means set the record entirely straight. Still, the case shone a spotlight on a psychological phenomenon that became known as the “bystander effect,” which explains why onlookers might not help someone in trouble.
Nellie Bly, who faked insanity to expose a system
Working as a female journalist in any capacity would’ve been groundbreaking in Nellie Bly’s day, but she took her reporting to a whole other level. In 1887, at just 23 years old, Bly talked her way into the offices of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World newspaper and told the editor that she wanted to write a story covering the immigrant experience. He said no, but challenged her to an undercover assignment digging into reports of brutality and neglect at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island).
Bly went one further: she feigned insanity to gain admittance to the asylum. Her report on the horrifying conditions inside led to major internal reforms and illuminated the experience of marginalized women. It also made her famous, a cache she quickly capitalized on by pitching — then commencing — an around-the-world trip to attempt to turn Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days into fact. She completed it in 72 days.
Empress Theodora, the first feminist ruler
It’s tough to separate fact from fiction in Empress Theodora’s story — hardly surprising, given her birth date of roughly 500 AD. A contemporary historian Procopius offered several contradictory accounts of her character, which appear to have been heavily influenced by his feelings towards her husband, Emperor Justinian.
A particularly damning account of Theodora by Procopius upheld the sketchy claims put about by her enemies that before she became a ruler, she was a prostitute. Given how pious Byzantium was, not to mention the fact that her husband Emperor Justinian was the head of the church, this seems like a reach — but we do know that Theodora’s mother was a dancer and actress, and her father died when she was four years old. If Procopius’ Secret History is to be believed, Theodora moved to Constantinople at an early age and became an actress (which confusingly, was also Byzantine slang for prostitute).
Theodora became the concubine of a Syrian official named Hecebolus, who took her with him to North Africa, where he mistreated then abandoned her. Making her way back to the Byzantine Empire alone, she stopped off in Alexandria, Egypt, then continued to Antioch, where she met a dancer who may have been working for Justinian as an informer.
Justinian was dazzled by Theodora’s beauty and intelligence, but they were banned from marrying by a Roman law that barred anyone of senatorial rank from marrying actresses. In 524 however, the then-Byzantine Emperor Justin passed a new law, decreeing that reformed actresses could legally marry beyond their rank with the emperor’s approval.
After Justinian himself became Emperor, Theodora’s input was instrumental in his decision-making. He once called her his “partner in my deliberations,” and together they quashed riots and revolts, reigned in corrupt magistrates, and rebuilt Constantinople — complete with its most famous church, the Hagia Sophia. Theodora is remembered as one of history’s earliest rulers to promote women’s rights — making it illegal to traffic young girls and adapting divorce laws so that they became sympathetic to women.
